John called me as I waded my way across the cricket pitch to Lula’s preschool in torrential rain. I was feeling proud of myself for having managed to get lula, her two coats, protective rain gear (ladybird umbrella, wellie boots and mac), lunch bag and homework bag there on time, in one piece and without forgetting anything. John was calling to tell me it was raining. You don’t say.

We agreed that the rain was a wonderful thing because in approximately 16 weeks we wouldn’t be dealing with rain again. Unless it’s tropical rain, and that kind of rain, the kind of rain you can run around naked in, the kind of rain you can dance in, that’s the only kind of rain I like.

In the car on the way home I started to wonder if perhaps I was focussing too much on the bad stuff about the UK. Like how as a nation we are getting humungously fat. When I see how fat the kids are in the playground these days, I just want to leave before I get eaten. Someone important and connected to scientists at the department of health, told me the other day that by 2050, 9 out of 10 people will be obese. I flinch in revulsion at what the world is coming to (half dying of obesity and half of starvation – my liberal sensibilities are mightily offended). Then Lula tells me at dinner that I have ‘a great, big, fat tummy’.

I put my fork down (the one laden with blackberry crumble) and tell her that I don’t have a great, big, fat tummy, that I’m still a size 10 and that if I have a little pot belly that’s from carrying her for nine months and lets not even talk about the little issue of a herniated disc that popped out the same time she did.

‘But nana has a great, big, fat tummy so you will too.’ she says. John congratulates her on her logic. I want Lula to take her logic one step forward and thirty years into the future.

I add ‘because everyone is fat or is  going to end up fat’ to my list of 999 reasons why I’m leaving the UK. John points out I’d be best off writing for the Daily Mail and not the Guardian. It is the hangover making me evil. The hangover and pmt. So from now I vow, I am only going to focus on all the things I am going to miss about the UK and in this way become the kind of wife John wants and not a vile, right wing, people hating, daily hate reading Tory (do they warrant capital letters?) wife.

I am going to make a list of the things I will miss the most and therefore must do, eat, see, touch and hear before we leave, as though I am a dying person with just 4 months to live.

I start my list with the following:

1. Percy pigs

2. Cadbury’s dairy milk

3. PG tips – because Lipton tea sucks.

I shall keep adding as things come to me.

Ok, I’ve thought of one more thing

4. Karine Jackson (best hairdresser in the world)

and here is something I won’t miss… ROYAL MAIL