January has a strange way of telling the truth.
Not the big truths — the small ones.

Who we miss. Who we rely on. Who we joke with.
Who really knows us.

They’re not things you think about when you’re packing up your life, selling cars and couches, and trying to fit twenty years of living into a container. They only surface once the adrenaline wears off and the flat gets quiet.

Back home, we were comfortable in our own skins. We knew how things worked. We knew our rights, our roads, our labels, our shortcuts. We owned our cars and homes. We had a rhythm and a circle and a sense of place. Confidence lived in the background — not loud, just steady.

When we arrived in the UK, that steadiness dipped. We felt a bit odd, slightly smaller, and if we’re honest: a profound sense of loss. Not just for faces or accents, but for the scaffolding of a life that made sense.

It’s easy to assume you’re “just homesick.”
But missing the tribe isn’t only about longing for familiar people.

It’s about losing the social fabric that held life steady without us noticing — neighbours, colleagues, family, the auntie who knew how you take your tea, and the dozen tiny roles we each played back home without thinking.

When you immigrate, those roles reset. You go from being woven into a community to being unrecognised in a new one. It’s not failure. It’s not weakness. It’s not even loneliness, really. It’s the quiet work of rebuilding identity in a place that didn’t watch you grow.

We made a free report about that moment — the one no one warns you about — and how to slowly regain your footing and your circle again. Not with hacks or hustle, just with understanding and small, steady moves.

If you’ve been feeling a little adrift, or just quietly wondering when life here will start to feel like your life again, this might help.

We’ve been thinking a lot about home lately — and how small stories from South Africa can tug on something in us that hasn’t quite finished the migration.

Not the big headlines, just proof that the place we came from still grows miracles, second chances, and quiet kindness.

We promised we’d bring these ones this week, and we’re glad to. They made us smile, and miss, and feel a little more connected.

Jemu was never meant to make it out of the first chapter of her life.

Her mother was killed when she was still tiny, and she arrived at Care for Wild with more odds against her than years behind her.

The sanctuary fed her, guarded her, and did that long, boring, unglamorous work that looks like waiting until it suddenly looks like progress.

Rewilding a rhino isn’t dramatic.
It’s spreadsheets, night watches, and mud.
It’s learning to trust again, and hoping you’ll still be alive to see what becomes of the little creature that is learning how to be a rhino without a mother to show her.

Years passed.
Then there was a calf.
A real one — healthy, curious, standing next to a mother who was once a probability rounding down to zero.

Jemu’s baby is the twenty-ninth born to rewilded orphans at that sanctuary.
Someone’s spreadsheet is smiling, but the bush doesn’t care about spreadsheets.
It only cares that the wild still has room for second chances, even when the headlines don’t.

For a moment, the world felt kinder.

Tortoises don’t rush.
They don’t make speeches.
They don’t care about news cycles or algorithm-friendly happiness.
They just keep going, which is perhaps the most rebellious thing a creature can do lately.

Somewhere in South Africa, a tortoise old enough to qualify for opinions about the younger generation found itself in trouble.
A thin nylon string had looped around its shell and begun to cut in — slowly, in that way plastics have of turning into traps.

It would have been easy to miss.
A gardener could have stepped over it.
A child could have assumed the tortoise knew what it was doing.
But someone noticed, and someone cared enough to intervene.

A small mercy, performed with hands and patience, and suddenly a very old reptile had decades of life back in its ledger.

If you’ve ever been homesick for the sound of cicadas or the way grass smells after heat, you’ll understand why a rescued tortoise can feel like good news.
Not big news — just the kind that reminds you the world hasn’t given up on gentleness.

Every SPCA has a heart, and in the Free State, that heart had four legs and a job title no one bothered to formalise.

His name was Teddy, and for fifteen years he greeted visitors, supervised paperwork, comforted nervous animals, and generally made himself indispensable to the humans who thought they were in charge.

He wasn’t a mascot.
He was staff.
The kind of colleague who never clocks out and somehow knows who needs cheering up, who needs space, and who needs to be walked out to the gate with a tail wag and a bit of dignity.

This month, Teddy reached the end of his story.
His people were with him.
There were tissues, and memories, and that South African way of mixing humour and heartbreak without pretending one cancels out the other.

No headlines. No fuss. Just a community saying thank you to a dog who understood belonging better than most of us.

The UK is full of perks — they just don’t advertise them. Over 43 editions we’ve been collecting the little wins that save money, skip queues, unlock benefits, and generally make you feel like you’ve outsmarted British bureaucracy. Here’s the playbook.

When we first arrived in the UK, we hung onto everything. Every cable, every device, every pair of headphones — just in case. Starting over makes you feel like you’ve lost half your life overnight, and familiar objects feel like stability. The only catch is that UK homes are smaller, so our little stash of “just in case” gadgets quickly became clutter.

CEX quietly solves the expensive end of that problem. They buy, price, refurbish, and resell phones, laptops, consoles, Kindles, headphones — all the high-cost little items that end up in drawers when you switch countries. No haggling, no strangers, no “still available?”. Cash if you want out, store credit if you’re upgrading.

We turned a drawer of tech into space and options, and suddenly our setup felt a little more like it belonged to this life, not the old one.

Vinted is where people sell clothes that deserve a second round — jackets, boots, jumpers, kids’ stuff, and the occasional impulse buy. When we arrived in the UK, we discovered that wardrobes don’t immigrate as smoothly as passports. A denim jacket in South Africa has one weight; a denim jacket in the UK has another. Twice the fabric, a nylon liner, and suddenly our summer-in-Cape-Town wardrobe felt like a prank.

Waiting at a bus stop in South African clothes was its own kind of initiation — we nearly froze. Every Saffa has a first UK winter bus stop story; ours involved denim, denial, and a nylon liner that wasn’t fooling anyone. It took us a while to buy proper coats, proper boots, proper “UK grade” layers, and once we did, half our old wardrobe made no sense anymore.

Like with tech, we hung onto it at first. Immigrating makes you hold on — you’re starting from scratch and familiar things feel like ballast. But Vinted makes it easy to let go. They handle the resale, the labels, the messaging, and someone else gives your clothes a new life.

You clear a cupboard, get a bit of cash back, and January feels lighter.

Waitrose and M&S have been expanding their South African wine shelves — Stellenbosch, Franschhoek, Hemel-en-Aarde. Pulling a familiar bottle off a British supermarket shelf doesn’t solve homesickness, but it softens the edges for an evening. A small luxury, tucked between frozen peas and dishwasher tablets.

There’s a rumour going around that we enjoy a glass of wine. We can neither confirm nor deny, but we can say that Waitrose is making it harder to behave ourselves. And holy cow, January is long.

Museums, farms, play centres, theatre, trains — and a hundred small ways to keep kids entertained without taking out a small mortgage. If you’re new to the UK, half-term sneaks up fast; a bit of thinking now saves panic later. Families, grandparents, and godparents — this one’s for us.

When we first arrived in the UK, we didn’t realise how different family life would feel. Back home, kids had gardens, cousins, swimming pools, and the McDonald’s playground was the size of a small airport. Here, houses are cosy, gardens are shared, and play often happens via tickets, timetables, and layers. It’s not worse — it’s just smaller, colder, and a lot more organised.

Half-term in the UK is its own little logistics puzzle — coats, prams, buses, museums, snacks, parking, and weather that changes its mind every ten minutes. So we started planning ahead, and life got easier. Here are a few places that punch above their weight (and are free), for anyone trying to keep children happy and adults sane:

Natural History Museum — London
Dinosaurs, whales, and that great hall that makes adults feel ten again.

National Railway Museum — York
Beautiful old trains, secret engineering, and a sense of wonder without screens shouting at you.

Kelvingrove Art Gallery & Museum — Glasgow
A glorious jumble of art, animals, armour, and oddities; the kind of museum that feels like a treasure chest.

National Museum of Scotland — Edinburgh
Great for kids who like to touch, press, climb, and ask questions faster than you can answer them.

Museum of Liverpool — Liverpool
Full of rhythm, humour, and maritime mischief; closer to a story than a syllabus.

If you’re in a smaller town, libraries often run half-term crafts and story hours quietly and for free — they don’t advertise loudly, but they save days.

Between Pretoria and Witbank there’s a spot called Bronkhorstspruit with a massive Chinese temple. Every New Year, we’d take the kids to watch the dragons, the kung fu, the fireworks, and the food. We can still smell it now — gunpowder and noodles. Those nights were loud, colourful, and full of joy.

London’s Chinese New Year parade doesn’t replace that, but it has its own kind of magic — dragons, drums, food stalls, and a river of red lanterns threading through cold streets. Adopting new rituals doesn’t replace the old ones. It just gives the year a few more places to stand.

Has anyone been to the London parade? We’re curious.

We don’t really know Pierre Novellie — we’re more Barry Hilton types (and yes, we’ve heard the rumour he’s coming this year, and we’re watching closely). But Pierre has been popping up everywhere, so we did a bit of digging.

He was born in South Africa, raised partly on the Isle of Man, and has that strange mix of Saffa bluntness and British dryness that makes for unusually precise comedy. You’ve probably heard him on Radio 4 or seen him on Mock the Week, or maybe just caught one of those clips where he dismantles etiquette with a surgeon’s calm.

We’ve heard that he’s great because he lands jokes in the original dialect without a footnote, and this tour runs right across the UK.

If anyone goes to see him, please let us know if he’s worth it — we’d genuinely love to know.

February school holidays are miniature chaos in the UK — trains, museums, aquariums, day trips, and anything involving food.

If you book now, things are calm and fairly priced; if you wait until the week before, the country remembers it has 67 million people and only so many slots.

It’s not dramatic, just a quiet reminder that planning early buys you peace later — and peace is expensive at the last minute.

We’re learning that winter in the UK isn’t something you survive by sulking under blankets — you get through it with strategy, humour, and a bit of South African stubbornness.

We may have traded sunshine for safety and rain for routine, but Saffas are not world rugby champions for nothing. We’re tough as nails, we don’t quit, and we can find the fun in almost anything — even January.

Next week is “Bloody Weather” — our guide to conquering the cold, outsmarting the dark, and getting through the grey with dignity intact and your sense of humour still working.

We’ve tried these tricks ourselves, we’ve researched the science behind them, and they’ve changed our lives here more than we ever expected. We think they’ll help you too.

Separate from the newsletter — with SA recipes (chakalaka, bobotie), Memory Lane map, practical resources, mobile data tips, and more.

This is a work in progress. Tell us what you need.

Some weeks it looks like sorting bills and paperwork. Some weeks it looks like buying wine from home or booking a comedy ticket with someone who gets the joke before it finishes.

If life here feels quiet or unfinished, that isn’t failure — it’s the middle of the making. Most good things arrive that way: unhurried, unadvertised, and a little out of order.

If you haven’t read the FREE SPECIAL REPORT yet, please do. It’s solid, scientific, and drawn from lived experience. It won’t fix everything at once, but it will make life here feel easier and more meaningful a little sooner. Belonging takes time, and every small win helps.

Keep the kettle close. Reach out when you can. Next Saturday deserves a chance.