When I was first thinking about going to Australia I decided to make a to do list. Everything seems so much more manageable when you have a list. At first, my list was short and sweet – tell my mother, tell friends, get visa, get tickets, fly. This was going to be easy I thought. Drop some news, spend some cash. Easy. Decided that it wasn’t worth telling my mother anything until I knew if I could get a visa. No point in upsetting her without a reason.

Applying for a year long working holiday visa in Australia is frighteningly easy as long as you’re not a criminal, under 30 and have about £150 to hand. Go to the Australian Immigration website, select the Subclass 417 – Working Holiday (Temporary) visa, answer about 30 questions and you’re done. Then about two days later you’ll receive a rather unspectacular email saying that your application has been successful.

Next I thought that until I had a definite leaving date it wasn’t worth telling my mother. Otherwise she would be left in some kind of worrying limbo – not sure how much longer I would be in the country and so on. Originally I was going to leave mid July, a few weeks after The Girl. There were a couple of birthday parties to attend and it would mean a few more weeks to save money. But ticket prices really start to skyrocket after June, so the extra money earned would have been nullified by the increased ticket price. So this meant that The Girl and I would be flying together, slap bang between to two cheapest times to fly [ February and November ]. We ended up paying £708.33 each for our flights with Qantas.

So I had my visa and I had my leaving date. Time to tell my mother, right? Well… no. And for one very good reason. I was a coward. I mean how do you tell your mother that you’re going to relocate to the opposite side of the planet for a year? This was when I began convincing myself that she already suspected, nay, knew that I was going to go to Australia. I mean, she’s a very wise, savvy woman.

The next time I went home was for Christmas and her birthday – the perfect time to tell her and my family. Well… again no. This time for two reasons. Didn’t want to ruin Christmas and, more importantly, I was still a coward. January comes and goes and I still haven’t said anything. But by now the guilt has begun to manifest itself. Some well intentioned friends start to give me disappointed looks. Others start yelling. The trouble was I was still a coward and I had also left it too long to tell her. Like a hit and run drive, I continued to live with the guilt.

Then on 15 February I reached breaking point. I was tired. I was stressed. My stomach was more tangled than a toddler’s shoelace. So I reasoned to myself that at the very least I had to tell her for the sake of my own health. Went out for a walk at lunchtime and nervously gave her a call. She was a little surprised, but supportive of my decision. After I finished the call I realised what an idiot I had been. What should have been the easiest thing to tick off my list ended up being the hardest and most stressful. Just should have just been honest with her from the start. I spent the rest of the day waiting for the physical manifestation of stress to ebb away. Later on I discovered that it was actually the beginning of a very long week of gastroenteritis. Karma, some would say.