Brockley Expats

Last week, Brockley Central was on holiday in a remote corner of Portugal, with only a small patch of wifi emanating from the ping pong room to connect us to the motherland.

We were being our usual antisocial selves, making only cursory nods towards getting to know the other hotel guests - what need have we for new friends, when Anonymous BCers provide all the warmth, kindness and intelligent comment we could ever want? However, our kids made friends with someone else's kids, so there was nothing for it but to make conversation.

Five years of doing this means we struggle to talk about anything other than SE4, but it turned out that despite living in Amsterdam, they were from Brockley (and therefore lovely) and kept up to date with the home country via this site.

Having been away for a couple of years, the thing they were really interested in was Brockley Market and they were looking forward to coming back to check it out. For them it seemed to symbolise a wider change and the promise that there would be a bit more fun to be had locally to help them transition back from Amsterdam.

We know we have a few other expats who still use the site from time to time - BCers now based in Australia, San Francisco, Singapore and Brazil - all ruing their decisions to leave every day, we're sure. So our question to them - and other Brockley expats is: What is the biggest change you've seen happen to Brockley since you left, most likely to tempt you back for nose around?