You couldn’t call this a sudden decision, because I’ve been thinking about moving to Australia for the past 30 years! I have relatives in Adelaide, and my brother moved to Melbourne about 25 years ago. He’s been telling me for years that Australia is a great place to live, and that once I visited I’d never want to go home again.

Sally and I have become parents rather late in life – I also have three daughters from a previous marriage – and we’re very aware that we need to stay fit and healthy for the sake of our little boy. We’ve been looking for a change of lifestyle for a while, and about a year ago we started thinking about moving to Australia, although at that stage neither of us had been there. To be honest, I wasn’t optimistic about our chances of getting a visa at our age, but we decided to go to OE and talk to somebody. We met with Richard Gregan, OE’s director, and were immediately impressed with him. He’s a really direct bloke, and I sensed straight away that he would give us an honest opinion – he’s not the sort to string you along. He told us that he’d be able to tell us within ten minutes whether we qualified. He fired dozens of questions at us about our personal circumstances and our financial situation. When he said that we had a good chance of getting our visas, we were absolutely thrilled. We stayed on for over an hour, chatting with Richard, and when we left we felt as if we were walking on air.