As many will know, after 9 years of running and self-funding SAReunited, from 4th March the reuniting element of the service will no longer be available online. As global giants (with millions of dollars in funding) like Facebook and LinkedIn grow, we hope you’ll have other ways of finding friends, both old and new.

We thank all our members for their loyal support over the years – and we truly enjoyed being the pioneers in social networking pre-Facebook days. However, being a free site, in the long term, we would have needed to sell so much advertising to make it work. We know that is not  what you signed up for on www.sareunited.com and not what we want to do all day.  All good things must come to an end (apparently!) and I hope that you’ll keep coming back to see how we reinvent ourselves. My partner on sapeople is Jenni Baxter, a fabulous friend, but also respected journalist. Jen is great company both at the desk and the dinner table, recounting stories of when she met Hugh Grant and interviewed Keanu Reaves, not to mention more hospital trips to A&E with her three kids than I could ever imagine!  I know our next chapter with sapeople will be interesting and fun – and that is important to us.   We look  forward to pouring our energy into giving sapeople a voice. Nothing pretentious, just good old fashioned insights for South Africans, by South Africans.

Remember Dating Sites will remain active on www.sareunited.com and there are over 70 000 singles registered . Our sites were positively buzzing in February. Ask me, I registered to test it out, and I have at least 20 new messages waiting for me each day (just testing…!) . We have the bespoke sites for the over 50’s (our busiest site by far believe it or not!), Single Parents, Overseas Singles and much more. Make sure you check in to see who is new (and yes, it is free to browse).

So now I turn to my next chapter.  Having lived in London for the last 17 years, its now time to pack up and travel around the world (more on that later).   We’ve rented out our house, sold our car and got a quote  for shipping the entire contents of our lives to Sydney via South Africa, packing up at the end of this month (yikes!). One more ski in France and then we’re off to Karala (India) where we start our journey.  I get that I am doing this all a bit back to front, as one should, in theory, be footloose and fancyfree to do trek around the world, but that is just how the boerewors bends for me I am afraid. Not only do I have my backpack, I take with me 3 children age 6 to 10 (and their backpacks), one serious first aid kit,  and a husband with a sore back (so his backpack too) – not to mention my laptop!  Jenni has asked me to blog about it, rather than entertain just her with my sometimes funny, often ranting, frequently rambling, but very real encounters.

To finish my first post, I thought it too uncanny to have this come my way today.  Apple’s Steve Jobs says of being fired , it was the best thing that could have happened, although he did not know it at the time. “The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again….  you can’t join the dots going forwards, only backwards…” .  What an appropriate clip to come my way today.

Watched by nearly 4m people, I pass this on,  a truly inspirational speaker and inventor.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc