What are they doing now?

Since we arrived back in the UK clip has been working as a Dog Instructor for Hearing Dogs for Deaf People. She trains the dogs, most of which are rescue animals, to alert their future deaf recipients to sounds like smoke alarms and oven timers. Unfortunately she is based in the south of England, near Princes Risborough in Buckinghamshire, which means that we see each other only at weekends. She loves her job but doesn't like living in the south and being so far away from her family and friends and me.

Since we arrived back in the UK I have been working as a Technical Support Specialist for Abbott Diagnostics. I am doing a similar job to that which I had before we went travelling, though I am now responsible for a much smaller geographical area and I have been trained to service a few more types of analyser.

Memories of our trip are still very vivid for both of us. We often sit and look at the photographs and reminisce about the things that happened. We haven't really settled back in to life at home. Time seems to be passing very quickly now because each day is essentially the same as the last. There are no real time markers and there are no novelties. There's a nagging feeling that we ought still to be away travelling somewhere.

And, in fact, this may soon be the case! I've signed a four-year contract with Abbott Australasia to work as a Customer Support Executive based in Sydney, covering New South Wales and some of the Pacific islands. Abbott are sponsoring my application for a Long-stay Temporary Business Visa (subclass 457) and clip can be included in it as my "de facto" partner. To prove the necessary long-term and permanent status of our relationship we have had to swear oaths on a bible in front of a solicitor and have our Statutory Declarations notarised by a Notary Public. We have been for chest x-rays and a medical examination, and we've had to provide official documents and photographs of us together in various social situations over the last few years. If all goes well we should fly to Australia around the middle of September 2004. We are hoping to find clip a job training dogs in Sydney, or working at a Koala Sanctuary, or we may enrol her to study for a degree at Sydney University or similar. There are a lot of opportunities open to her.