What to Bring

I’ve been speaking this week to someone who has just been offered a job on the Island. She got in touch with me through this Blog – Fantastic as that is exactly the purpose of me wittering on giving an ex-pats honest overview of life on St Helena.
It made me review the ‘Country Notes’ which are sent to new recruits to see if anything had changed. In fact, it had been a year since I last reviewed them and changes had happened – some of them quite significant and worthy of a mention for people thinking about employment here.
There are now 15 TV channels. Please don’t get too excited, unless you love sport as half the channels are sport channels. Others are National Geographic, BBC Lifestyle, Discovery Channel, MNet (South African rebroadcast) MNet Movies – Premiere, Drama and Romance, Action. Cartoon network and Disney also feature. You can download a TV guide here http://www.sure.co.sh/page16.html
The first thing you will notice is that programmes are on at bizarre times of day and night. For example if you wanted to watch X-Factor UK (just being screened here for the first time) you would have to watch it at 8am on Saturday morning, EastEnders (3 or so weeks behind) is on at 3am and 3 pm, so you start to appreciate the importance of bringing a VCR or DVD recorder to the Island - we also brought a Media Streamer (ACRyan) on which we pre-loaded all our DVD movies before leaving the UK – we now have around 2 TB worth. The TV programmes are mercilessly repeated and are generally quite dated, with a few more up-to-date programmes interspersed. It is quite expensive too in comparison to what you can get for your pound elsewhere. As at November 2014 we pay £36.30 per month. This amount is beyond the reach of many locals who hire DVD’s cheaply from shops in town as an alternative to the TV package.
This brings us nicely on to Communications in general. Telephone line rental is cheap at £5 a month. Local calls are reasonable too. Calls to the UK are expensive, currently £0.86 per minute (£0.99 Rest of the World) Skype and FaceTime etc are possible, but do eat into your data allowance, as does the use of anything wireless.
So to internet. If you think you ever had a slow/bad connection in the UK/Rest of the World – think again! St Helena Island is reliant on one tiny satellite link for her bandwidth and at peak times it can be dire, almost resembling dial-up! You pay through the nose here too. Most ex-pats struggle to stay within the download limit of the Gold package (£97 per month for 6.5Gb max download at a maximum connection speed of 1.5Mb) and opt for Gold Plus (£190 per month for 13.25Gb max download at 1.5Mb connection) Beware of going over though. Someone recently went over their allowance on Gold by 5GB and it cost £450. Even on the top package, we have sometimes gone over a little. We tend to save our data for talking to friends and relatives, but if you have teenage children (as we have) using wireless applications on mobile phones can kill your allowance – we also turned off all automatic updates so we can control when they happen. More recently SURE has introduced unlimited downloads between 12 midnight and 6am, which helps.
Things we brought that we wouldn’t be without : Goes without saying – our dogs, but materially – I am very pleased we brought our super-king sized bed – not because I don’t like sleeping close to Andy, but because we are used to the comfort of it. And at £3,000 new it was an investment that needed to travel. We didn’t bring white goods, but I have since bought on Island a chest freezer and have shipped a tall fridge out too. Depending on the size of your household, you will refrigerate and freeze so much more than in the UK, particularly fruit and vegetables. We bought dog food with us (Bakers Complete type large sacks) You can get dog food on the Island, but it’s probably not what your dog is used to! We brought out Advocate (which ran out fast!) and is not available here although a lesser version (Fiprotec) is. We also brought things like rugs - framed pictures and things that make your home comfy too!

Other things go without saying but:
Crockery,Cutlery,Knife Block,Kitchen utensils,Saucepans,Frying pan,Baking tins and trays, microwave, slow cooker, toaster, kettle, mixer,deep fat fryer, steamer, duvet, bedding, pillows, throws, vacuum, dustpan and brush, DIY tools, etc
Other than that, I ‘Tesco shop’ on line once a quarter approximately for the things I really need (to be honest there’s not much that I can’t live without and in fact have done so quite admirably so far)
So what have I ordered? Nothing earth shattering – my favourite fabric softener, Tesco own yeast extract which I find much nicer than Marmite! Quavers, Xmas chocolates, Xmas pudding, a few bottles of wine (expensive to import, BUT you get what you like to drink.) Dog treats and a couple of breakfast cereals that we don’t see here often. It was delivered for shipping on 9th October. I am expecting it to arrive on or around 8th December with any luck. Hopefully most will still be within its sell by date! If it missed that ship, it won’t get here until sometime in January so fingers crossed.