Once upon a time...

...I had a nice respectable job, house in the home counties, all the gold I could eat (apologies to Monty Python). Then for various reasons which I will ramble on about at a later date, I decided to sell up, move north and become an academic. All great fun while it lasted.

When I headed up north I was single which colours your outlook on life slightly. You're willing to accept the hit in terms of salary, the long hours and the lack of separation between work and home life but situations change. I'm remarried now with two wonderfully children (henceforth known as trouble one and trouble two) so I'm more worried about good schools than getting papers published.

Don't get me wrong, the family stuck it out past the point of reason but in the end job security won out (thank-you bankers and Coalition government). Now this presented us with a bit of a problem: I'm an embedded software engineer which is a bit of a specialized profession so we'd probably have to relocate. Weighing things up we decided being near one set of grandparents would be a plus so back down to Cambridge we went (plus if you know anything about Cambridge you’ll know it’s full of high-tech boffins starting companies to do this and that).

Did I mention I grew up in Cambridge? I'm that rare phenomenon, a local comprehensive kid who works in the high-tech industry in Cambridge. I'm not saying Cambridgeshire doesn't have some very good schools, after all we've decided to put our kids into them, it's just you don't meet a lot of locals in my line of work.

So what’s this all about then? Well I’ve been back just over a year and I’m still adjusting. It’s an odd experience fitting back into a life that you basically haven’t lived for 15 years. I keep bumping into people who I worked with years ago (Cambridge is basically a very small place). Things have changed but not that much.

But mostly I suspect it’s going to be about kids and schools.

We’ll see.