Well, this blog has gotten horribly out of date recently as we’ve been run off our feet. So here’s the nutshell update of the last four months.

There! That was a heck of a lot to cover in five little bullet points. So I’m going to pretend that the first four didn’t happen yet and concentrate on the last. I will circle round to the others in the next few weeks once I get all my photos sorted!

The long and the short of it is that Claudia has managed to secure a transfer to Shanghai with her current company Morgan Stanley, so we’re going. Just what I’m going to do there we’ve yet to establish with certainty. I was very keen on the idea of being a kept man, but the likelihood of that appears sadly to be shrinking. The odds-on bet at the moment is that I will get a job with Morgan Stanley also working in their IT department. I’m in final negotiations at the moment so I won’t say more in case I jinx anything!

Claudia is leaving on Friday for three months training in Sydney while I stay on in London to see out my current contract and tidy up the loose ends like renting out my house. The plan is that she will fly direct to Shanghai from Sydney in mid-July and I will meet her there.

We both pretty excited to say the least. It promises to be a great chance to make some real progress on improving my Mandarin - something I’ve been studying for some years now - and getting to know a side of my heritage I’ve always felt a bit cut off from. China is definitely on the move and it will be really exciting to be able to see the changes from a ringside seat.

We don’t know how long we will stay - the transfer is technically indefinite - but we expect to stay for at least two years except in the unlikely event that we decide we really really can’t stand the place. If all goes well, I’m also seriously considering starting an MBA in June next year. There is a a really top-notch EMBA program run in conjunction with Tsinghua in Beijing and Insead in Paris which would be fantastic for me as it would give me links to both China and France. The program runs over 18 months, so if that goes ahead we would be committed to Shanghai until at least the end of 2010!