When we moved to Redhill, we intended to stay there. Indeed, when I set up Pip Drama over 2 years ago now, I had intended it to be a long-lasting and positive addition to the community, particularly for the schools I was lucky enough to work in. Our children were happy in their school and we felt established in the area.
But...there is always a but. There has to be or else I wouldn't be writing this post. Our families lived a long way away, a good 3-hour-drive most days, and our children only saw their grandparents a handful of times a year. This is not, in fact, unusual, however, as our parents age it feels more and more likely that they would one day find it too difficult to get to visit us, and we have not always been able to visit them due to, well, life.
Because of the way Covid changed our lives, my husband suddenly spent a lot of his time working from home, only attending his local-to-Redhill office about twice a month, and sometimes, not even that. Over the winter he went in even less. One day, while trying to figure out how to see everyone over Christmas without spending the whole winter break in the car, we realised that, with the ability to 'work from home', there might be another solution.
The idea took a long while to grow. It festered for a bit, becoming this looming thing that none of us wanted to tackle because it meant such a huge amount of change, but eventually we decided that the wrench of moving everyone and everything away might just be worth the pay off.
Lots of things happened in the following few months. So much personal change that we figured we might as well throw in a bit more while we were at it. During that time our house went on the market, we found a house we loved, we accepted that we would have to drag everyone away from everything they knew, and I had to face the enormity of closing down a business I loved, I had put so much into and was still growing.
I cannot underplay what a huge decision the whole thing felt.
What followed then was the rollercoaster of house buying. My wonderful student base were told that Pip Drama was relocating, which was the hardest moment in the history of Pip Drama to date. Dates were given, then came and went, important legal things were found that were needed, then lost again, people went on holiday and came back (& we still had not moved), people changed their minds, then changed them back, and so, it went....
...At one point I was fairly sure our children would be returning to their school in Redhill in September, our lives in boxes, our house echoey, but still lived-in. At the very last second, things changed and the move was back on again, and we dragged our heartbroken, South-London born children across the country to start new lives in the rural county of Norfolk. We arrived on the 31st August, with no schools for the children, no local contacts, and no idea what happens next.
And this is where you find us now. The children do have schools to attend, thank goodness, and appear happy there so far. My husband is working from home most of the time apart from the occasional trip out, we miss our friends and our communities terribly and Pip Drama does not yet have a home in Norfolk. Pip is starting from scratch again, and I hope desperately that I am able to bring our Pip brand of performance work to the children of Norwich and Norfolk, and that they will love it as much as our Redhill and Surrey children did. Because, after all, change like this is built on just that, hope. We hope this will be worth it, we hope everyone will settle in and we hope to bring our new community as much positivity as we hope we brought our last.
Hope.