Right, here goes...

I packed in my job as a primary school teacher at Christmas. It was too hard and it made me pretty miserable. You have probably heard that kind of stuff from teachers before. I stuck it out for seventeen years, so I must've been okay at it, and it made some other important things possible, but it was always going to come to an end before I turned fifty. I'm forty-four, so I'm doing something ahead of schedule for the first time ever.

This may or may not be my own selfish endeavour, but I think I have the rest of the family on side. We are going to sell our house in Peckham, South London, and find somewhere else to live, preferably a town or city that needs a second hand record shop. I'm going to stock the place with my own collection at first, which will save my kids having to flog it on eBay when I'm dead.

We have no idea whatsoever where this Somewhere Else is going to be. London is so ingrained in our hair and skin and souls that we have never been anywhere else (we rarely had the time or money anyway) and been able to say, "Yes. We could live here." So M (my partner, mother of E and H, our ten- and eight-year-old sons) had the idea of Going On Tour. When the house is sold, we are going to take the kids out of school and travel around the British Isles in a camper van. We are going to go to places we've always wanted to visit, and places we have never heard of, and we are going to explore and adventure for as long as we damn well feel like it.

And at some point, I expect, we are going to find a town and think, "Yes. We could live here."

I'm planning to record what happens in this blog. I hope people will want to read it, of course, so I shall try to make it useful and informative. I will try not to bang on about boring things, but I think some stuff about what my old job was like, what my children are learning while missing school, maybe even the good old house prices conversation might have to come into it once in a while. But mostly I will want to talk about the places in the UK and Ireland that we visit and what they are like. I can't wait to get started. It would be great if you came along for the ride.