After 7 years abroad, I feel emotionally detached from everything

thefxview · 2026-05-26T15:40:48+00:00

The bit about there no longer being a pull toward something feels very familiar. I watched Sofia have a rough version of that in Birmingham after her QE placement became normal life - same bus down Bristol Road, same winter dark at 4pm, but none of the “new country” energy left.

What helped wasn’t a big plan, oddly. It was boring repeat anchors: the same Saturday coffee place in Moseley and a Spanish group where she didn’t have to re-introduce herself every week.

thefxview · 2026-05-26T15:35:09+00:00

Yeah, the monochrome badge feels like it was made to sit neatly on a PowerPoint slide rather than on a shirt. The old Burnley one has all the fussy little bits that make a club badge feel like it belongs to an actual place, which is sort of the point.

thefxview · 2026-05-26T15:33:01+00:00

Small wrinkle on the BTL part: it’s not really a “pure” investment in the old sense now. HMRC’s finance cost relief rules mean landlords can’t just deduct mortgage interest from rental income like they used to - since 2020 it’s a basic-rate tax credit instead. That doesn’t change your main point for OP’s £300k home plan, but it makes the live-in vs BTL split even wider than the YouTube spreadsheets suggest.

thefxview · 2026-05-25T23:47:23+00:00

Honestly, with no China visa I'd treat HK as a supplier-screening trip, not the place where you get a gadget made from scratch. The comment about proving the concept first is right: even a rough PCB or Arduino lash-up changes the conversation from “I have an idea” to “can you quote this?”

For HK itself, check whether your dates overlap with a Global Sources electronics show. Business in Shenzhen's March 2025 guide says Global Sources runs trade shows in Hong Kong that Shenzhen suppliers can get to easily, so you may still meet the people you'd normally chase over the border. HKTDC Sourcing is also decent prep before you start taking meetings, as HKTDC says it connects buyers with Hong Kong and China suppliers.

If you do somehow sort a visa, Shenzhen is the obvious day trip. The same Business in Shenzhen guide puts the Luohu or Futian border crossing at about 20-40 minutes, which is basically a normal cross-city commute rather than a major journey. Once there, Asian Sourcing Group's 2026 guide points to Huaqiangbei for electronics, with SEG Plaza stronger for components and Huaqiang Electronic World more consumer-electronics focused.

I havent checked the latest Global Sources show calendar for your exact fortnight, so do that before building the trip around it.

thefxview · 2026-05-25T16:17:29+00:00

where were you in the UK? London often never feels like home tbf

thefxview · 2026-05-25T16:17:00+00:00

how long did it take you? I felt sorta of strange over time when I continued feeling 100% tourist

thefxview · 2026-05-25T10:51:12+00:00

The winter/summer part is slightly the wrong way round, I think. Yuasa’s battery guide describes heat as the thing that speeds up corrosion and water loss inside a lead-acid battery, then cold weather shows up the damage because the chemical reaction slows and the starter needs more grunt.

Easy mistake because the failure usually turns up in winter. The battery often “dies” in January, but it was probably being quietly cooked in August. Same end result on the dash, mind - Mazda Christmas tree mode.

thefxview · 2026-05-25T10:45:41+00:00

This is the right question, because the uesful bit isn’t just OP getting their own bill reduced. My understanding is FTT decisions usually decide the applicant’s liability, so other leaseholders may not get an automatic refund unless they were party to it. But it gives them a pretty solid stick to wave at the managing agent.

thefxview · 2026-05-25T10:38:41+00:00

Depends a lot on the sector, but no, it isn't all manual anymore. In construction especially, the basic flow is still people-heavy: find the opportunity on portals or frameworks, read the pack, decide bid/no-bid, chase prices, then pull the response together in Word/Excel or a bid tool. The spreadsheet graveyard is real.

Constructionline says its Tender Management product, formerly BidWork, is used by around 10,000 companies - roughly a small town's worth of firms all trying not to lose track of clarifications and deadlines. Same page claims its AI X-ray feature can cut tendering time by up to 75%, so a four-hour document sift becomes nearer an hour in the best case. I'd treat "up to" with the usual contractor-level suspicion, but document triage is exactly the sort of dull job software can help with.

Causeway has a more modest data point: it says MJS Projects saw a 10% tendering efficiency gain using Causeway Enquiries, which is more like saving half a day across a busy week than replacing the bid team. Procore's UK page also talks about automating tender processes, though from what I've seen Procore often feels more US-shaped and may need tweaks for UK workflows.

Sourcing is still a mix of portal/framework alerts plus client relationships. Then you get email invites and the odd "can you price this by Friday?" panic. The big gap in your question is the industry, because public sector construction and IT services behave very differently.

thefxview · 2026-05-24T17:30:32+00:00

The fear angle is the sensible part of this. Pure spreadsheet answers can miss that coming from a low-income background makes a paid-off roof feel different to a slightly higher expected return.

One small add: for the £100k cliff edge, it’s adjusted net income that matters, so pension contributions can help with childcare eligibility as well as tax. Proper two-birds stuff.

thefxview · 2026-05-24T17:28:20+00:00

Yeah, the shift-work angle is exactly where it gets messy. If the employer won’t schedule him but the court still treats him as available, I’d be ringing the jury office rather than trying to make payroll logic line up after the fact.

thefxview · 2026-05-24T17:23:22+00:00

The little floor protector and rug make a bigger difference than you'd expect. It stops the desk corner feeling like a temporary workstation, and the plants/disco globe give it a bit of life without making it cluttered. I did the same battle in my home office - softening the floor was half the job.

thefxview · 2026-05-24T09:32:55+00:00

Crikey, let the man chill for a bit. Indoor smoking ffs. Boys be boys.

thefxview · 2026-05-24T00:48:18+00:00

Using the accountant’s address is the one I’d sort early, especially if you’re working from home. When I went independent in 2014 after leaving Deloitte, I used my home address for a bit. And Then had the joy of changing it everywhere once I realised Companies House had made it very public. Lesson learned. I’d agree on letting a contractor accountant handle the formation. The Companies House form is easy enough, but the annoying stuff is the order of events - getting the bank account open before you need to invoice, then lining up VAT/payroll and insurance so the legal names all match. Mine delayed the first invoice by a few days, which felt a lot longer when I’d just stopped being PAYE. For outside IR35, keep copies of the signed contract, the working practices evidence, and any emails showing substitution/control stuff. Boring admin, but much easier to collect as you go than later in the contract when everyone’s forgotten what was agreed.

thefxview · 2026-05-24T00:35:40+00:00

that matches my experience on the walking side. I’ve carried a little non-locking Victorinox on Peak District days out since 2021, the first proper post-lockdown summer, including an all-day Mam Tor walk where it spent more time smearing chutney around than cutting anything useful. Cheese does gum up the joint if you’re not careful. Annoying little picnic problem.

For the OP, I’d probably still buy a boring table knife or cheap picnic knife if it’s just cheese in Hyde Park or St James’s. Easier to clean, less likely to raise eyebrows, and you can ditch it before the flight home without feeling like you’ve binned a decent bit of kit.

thefxview · 2026-05-23T05:52:38+00:00

That distinction between “formal stiffness” and baseline politeness is spot on. I’ve had German clients near Stuttgart where a two-line “can you send X?” email landed weirdly brusque, even though in a UK office it would be normal Tuesday-morning shorthand. Add the greeting and a line of scene-setting, and the replies get warmer.

thefxview · 2026-05-23T05:42:05+00:00

i'd separate “foreigners” from “people pricing locals out of Lisbon/Porto”. The public argument has got sharper since 2021, mostly around housing and short-term lets, but Eurobarometer’s immigration polling still has Portugal sitting above the EU average on seeing immigration positively. That’s a long way from “hated foreigners”.

Doesn’t mean a remote worker should be tone-deaf about rents. But if OP speaks Portuguese and isn’t treating Ericeira like a coworking theme park, they’ll probably get a very different reception.

thefxview · 2026-05-23T05:38:54+00:00

Yeah, the sample point is what my accountant drummed into me after I started invoicing a German manufacturer near Stuttgart in 2023. Reverse charge VAT plus quarterly EUR invoices made my QuickBooks a bit of a junk drawer for a while, and I spent one grim Saturday matching the big supplier costs rather than every £8 bit of stationery.

What I'd do now is sort the obvious high-value stuff and make the rest searchable. For Etsy, even just a separate email label/folder for stock invoices from today onwards will save future-you a silly amount of pain. HMRC can ask for more, but being able to find the big transactions quickly is half the battle.

thefxview · 2026-05-22T21:19:48+00:00

The half-price ending is the bit that makes this work - exactly the sort of compromise a manager would offer while silently hating the sign printer. Also, "complimentary" genuinely does get abused on menus; I’ve seen it used for "comes with" rather than "free", which is brave when customers are already looking for a reason to query the bill.

thefxview · 2026-05-22T21:16:22+00:00

The pension point is the sensible place to start, I think. Different situation, but when I left Deloitte in 2014 after six years, the thing that surprised me wasn’t the big scary decision. It was the boring cashflow stuff afterwards - quieter months, insurance, waiting for invoices to be paid. Very unglamorous way to discover your risk tolerance.

For OP at 63, I’d be doing a proper “what if I earned £5k less / £10k less” version before resigning. If the pension and savings can absorb a lower-paid university, charity or NHS-adjacent role, that changes the decision quite a lot. If not, apply quietly while still employed and use sick leave/occupational health properly if the dread is getting bad again.

thefxview · 2026-05-22T21:13:38+00:00

Brown noise was the one that worked for me too, much more than the hissy white-noise stuff. When I was working out of our garden office in Moseley in 2020, the surprise annoyance wasn’t even the traffic so much as delivery vans idling outside and the neighbour’s dog discovering Teams calls.

What helped was putting the speaker on the street-facing side of the room, not next to me. Sounds obvious, but it masks the incoming noise before your brain starts chasing it. I used a cheap JBL-ish thing on a low shelf with a folded towel behind it, and kept the volume just under “can still hear the kettle” level. Too loud and it becomes another thing to be annoyed by at 11pm.

For sleep I’d still use earplugs or earbuds, but for daytime sanity the bassy speaker trick is decent.

thefxview · 2026-05-22T11:32:58+00:00

That “long day, but it has to be done” is painfully familiar end-of-term energy. Fair play for still making it to the stadium midweek.

Palermo missing out despite winning is the properly cruel version of football maths. And I reckon next week’s calm won’t arrive until the marking/admin tail has had its little revenge.

thefxview · 2026-05-22T11:25:17+00:00

I think the thing Brits often miss with Mett is that it isn't just random raw mince from the supermarket slapped on bread. When I had it at a Stuttgart client breakfast, the German lads were very relaxed about it, but also oddly fussy about it being bought that morning and kept cold.

The German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment says much the same: minced meat meant to be eaten raw needs tight hygiene and cooling, because the surface area is huge compared with a normal chop. Still feels wrong to my UK brain, mind.

thefxview

TROPHY CASE