At 5 months into my pregnancy, I decided it was time to go. Leave the country. The nesting instinct was kicking in, and I knew what I had to do. Having moved out of our squat in South London, I was living with my parents on the other side (North London) taking my Celta course, while Nero was residing at a hospital in Croyden in the name of medical trials. Sounds positively grand really. Previous to that he had been working on a film set with Helen Mirren. He is an actor.
We already had flights booked leaving England in 3 weeks time. The idea was to come back, but, as I was begining to realise, to what ? We had no place to live, not a sustainable job between us, which made the price of rent in London a frightening prospect.
I had been here many times before, (about 11) had visited more of it in relation to that of England, and already had a grasp of the language. It's post communist state appealed to me, I was always ready to hear the stories about the milk shortages or study old yellowed Lenin posters. It's dark Nordic climate and deep fur tree forests were an eerie back drop to the nation's close ties with folklore and medieval ways. Although only the other side of Europe, many people I told in London were not sure of it's place on the map.
The last day of my grueling Celta course at last arrived, and to honour it, a visit by the school principle to our little classroom at the bottom of the garden. He asked us where we each intended to teach.
'How wonderfully exotic' was his response to my answer. Alongside my course mates' destinations (Cambodia, Japan, Chili, to name a few) I hardly felt that somewhere so close by to England as Estonia could be considered exotic.
