This is a guest post from Israelinurse

I’ve spent the last two months or so putting our plans to move back to Israel into operation. Sorting out status and the appropriate paperwork, selecting a removal company, packing our furniture and belongings into cardboard boxes in spare moments during the day and by night dreaming that they wouldn’t all fit in the 20’x8’x8’ container, or if they did, that the ship sank in a stormy Bay of Biscay. In mid-March my daughter flew back to commence her search for a flat in the Gush Dan area, so I was left  to deal with the bulk of the packing up and the dispersal of anything designated ‘not going’ to charity shops or recycling. The removal men finally came on Erev Pessach; not the typical choice of slot for a Jewish mum, but the only one I could get. One of them cheerfully informed me that moving, especially abroad, is as stressful as divorce; he didn’t know the half of it.

We’re putting our house here in the UK up for sale, and I had decided that it would be considerably easier to give it the much needed ‘Changing Rooms’-style makeover after the furniture had gone, so the minute the movers had driven off, I began a top to bottom redecorating campaign of our ‘delightful Victorian terraced cottage with quirky original features’ (that’s Estate Agent speak for stairs of differing heights and those oak beams I always hit my head on). With a lot of help from family, that took just over two weeks and I finished painting the last bit of skirting board the evening before my 10 a.m. flight. In among the decorating I’ve also been cancelling direct debits, paying final bills, dealing with Estate Agents, closing bank accounts and cutting off the phone and broadband: in short, everything one does when one is leaving a place for good, including giving away the fridge and freezer and the most complex of all: trying to convince the TV Licensing body that they cannot continue taking money from me if I’m not going to be in the UK and trying to persuade HMRC to take money from me even though the tax year has only just ended.

Three days before my flying date, my partner in Israel got a call from the shipping company’s representatives to say that my container is arriving earlier than expected on this coming Sunday, and that I then have four days in which to complete customs clearance and transport it out of the port. Within those four days falls Independence Day, when everything will be closed, but still, with a bit of luck, it seemed possible. Little did I know that fate had other plans.

On Thursday morning my sister and brother-in-law arrived at 6:30 a.m. to accompany me to Manchester airport telling tales of some Icelandic volcano which had erupted in the night. At that time in the morning, this sounded just too surreal to be true. “Maybe we should phone the airport” my sister suggested. (Note to self: next time you cancel a telephone line, make the cut-off time after your flight leaves.) We set off anyway, listening all the way to the updates on the radio and hoping that my flight would manage to take off before the cloud of ash moved any further south. Upon arrival at check in, things immediately looked suspicious; an uncommonly large number of Jet 2 staff trying to look unusually helpful were milling around in the check-in area. The flight had been cancelled ten minutes previously. All they had to offer was a phone number which was probably constantly engaged, a refund or to stand in a queue with all the other two hundred or so hopefuls in an attempt to secure a spare seat on next week’s flight.

As I was trying to get my head round the implications of all this upon my shipment, the fact that due to the time difference my partner would soon be setting off on the three hour drive to the airport to collect me, that the next flight out of Manchester to Tel Aviv would be at best a week away and that for all intents and purposes I actually no longer exist in the UK, I felt a hand on my arm. “I’m a reporter with GMTV…” No time for that: at this stage not all flights had been cancelled nor the airport officially closed. I rushed to the information desk to try to get a flight out of Manchester to ….well, basically anywhere that would advance me on my journey, but no luck and within minutes it became clear that I wasn’t going to have the pleasure of looking silly in my British winter coat in balmy Tel Aviv anytime soon.

‘Operation Find Another Flight’ commenced as soon as we got to my sister’s house, which fortunately still does have a phone line and an internet connection, but of course thousands of other people were engaged in the same activity, so flights were disappearing at a truly incredible rate. Volcano willing, I’ll fly on Monday night from Heathrow, so if you happen to be at Ben Gurion airport very early on Tuesday morning and notice an exhausted and dishevelled woman who looks as though she’s been wearing the same clothes for the past 24 hours, she will have been. And that ridiculous smile on my face as I pass the Tnuva advert – ‘the cheese with the home’ – on the left going down the marble-paved walkway before passport control will be because it will never have felt so good to finally get home.

Now, if anyone has any suggestions as to how to make my explanation to the Haifa Port customs man – which is going to have to be ‘I was late because of a volcano’ – sound a little less like ‘the dog ate my homework’, I’d be very glad to hear them!