There are certain moments in life that don’t look dramatic at the time. No trumpets. No grand announcements. Just a quiet shift — the instant when something moves from imagining a life to choosing it.

In the final months of my university education, I was standing on one of those thresholds that so many people recognise: about to graduate, already working full time, and facing the unspoken question, What happens now? It would have been very easy to slide into the next sensible step. A job. A routine. A life that made perfect sense on paper.

Before I go any further, this is my final shout out for my course on working responsibly with children’s charts starts tomorrow (21 February) at 6pm GMT

The Dream in 1989

With my university roommate Christine back in 1989

But alongside all of that practicality, I had carried a fascination — really, an enchantment — with London.

Not a vague idea of England. London specifically.

The red double-decker buses.

The sense of history layered into ordinary streets.

The feeling — difficult to explain — that life there might be larger, somehow, than the one I already knew.

It was the sort of dream people indulge without expecting to act on. The kind you mention in conversation and then immediately dismiss as unrealistic.

And then something very small happened that changed everything.

I met someone who had just come back from a trip to London.

That was it. No grand speech. No life-changing advice. He had simply gone there and returned, as people do every day. But for me, that ordinary fact shattered the illusion that London was unreachable. Until that moment, it had lived in my mind as something distant and improbable — a place other people might experience, but not me.

And I remember thinking, very clearly:

Well, if he can do it, I can bloody well do it.

That thought was the beginning of the plan.

Not a fully formed strategy. Not a careful, five-year outline. Just the sudden realisation that the barrier I had imagined wasn’t real. It was only a decision waiting to be made.

Making the Dream Reality

Timing mattered enormously. I knew I would graduate at the end of June. I knew that once I settled into post-university life, responsibilities would accumulate. Jobs become permanent. Routines become comfortable. People begin to say things like, “Maybe someday.”

And I understood, instinctively, that if I didn’t go to London then, I might never go at all.

This was not, it must be said, widely regarded as a sensible idea.

I didn’t meet a single person who encouraged me. Some were puzzled. Some were cautious. One person told me quite bluntly, “Not everybody gets to live out their dreams.”

But by that point the decision had already taken root. The passport was obtained — despite my mother’s determined efforts to hide it while I was away at university — and step by step, what had once felt impossible became logistical.

A ticket.

A departure date.

A plane.

I remember feeling, even then, that I wasn’t simply travelling. I was crossing into the life I was meant to attempt, whether it worked or not. There was no guarantee of success. Only the certainty that not trying would have been worse.

And so I came to London.

What I could not have known at the time was that this single decision would shape the next three and a half decades of my life: my teaching career, my research, my writing, the founding of the Rohini Academy of Astrology, the countless students and colleagues who would become part of my world.

Looking back, the move seems inevitable. At the time, it felt anything but.

It felt like risk.

It felt like stubbornness.

It felt like doing something no one thought was practical.

But often the most defining choices are not the ones that make immediate sense. They are the ones that insist, quietly but persistently, that you act before life closes around you.

That moment — meeting someone who had simply gone to London and come back — may have seemed trivial from the outside.

For me, it was the instant the dream became a decision.

And decisions, unlike dreams, have a way of building entire lives.

Coming Home Again