Business, Exile and Finding Home
Business, exile and finding home were the focus of Leslie Tate’s weekly radio show, Dacorum Live, recently, with guests, Living Magazines publisher, Lyn Drummond (left), and Sandra Keys (right), founder of the executive coaching company, Caretta Associates.
The programme, which runs every Wednesday from 7-8pm on Radio Dacorum, Hemel Hempstead, airs interviews with creative local people and plays their musical choices.
Radio Dacorum, as an internet station, can be heard anywhere in the world. It is owned by the local charity, Community Action Dacorum, which, as Leslie says, ‘encourages us to cover local people, events and organisations who ‘give back’ to the community’.
Leslie, Sandra and Lyn all live in Berkhamsted. Leslie is also an author and poet. Sandra is an international leadership consultant, coach and psychotherapist with over 25 years’ experience working with multi-national companies around the Asia-Pacific region and in the UK. She has a practice in Berkhamsted. Lyn followed long careers in media, teaching and foreign service as an Australian diplomat before buying Living Magazines in February 2025.
Both women spoke about their lives as expats.
Lyn told listeners, ‘When I go to foreign countries where the language is very hard to learn, like Hungary where I was based before coming here, I join expat groups, like internations.org and Hash House Harriers, a global walking and running group. The UK one is www.ukh3.org.uk.
‘Solo travelling has often taken me around the world. When you travel with others or one other, sometimes little effort is made to meet new people,’ she said.
For Sandra, creating home where we are living is so intermingled with our identity, our sense of focus and is often quite hard to grasp and quite hard to realise.
‘So I think as an expat you often feel a sense of not belonging, or it’s difficult to belong,’ she says. ‘I had a good friend from a military background who said that he used to live out of a suitcase, ready to move every two years. So, for me, that experience of where is home inside ourselves, how do we take that sense of home with us and how do we shape it externally, is an important theme.’
Find out more about Radio Dacorum.