You'll need to tell everyone and his wife. Tell those who do work for you and those who work in the shops you visit. Remember, that you need to communicate. Make sure that the important people know first. People like your family and the friends you see regularly should not get to hear on the grapevine.
Be prepared to add some people to a circular letter you send out once every few months. They may be the teacher of your children or the cleaner at your office, but they will all be interested to some degree about where you are and what you are doing. It is especially important to keep these relationships if you are renting out your property and plan to return to it some day when your tour of duty in foreign places is complete.
E-mail is a great invention for passing around circular letters and keeping people informed, but beware as you might get classed as spammer. It is far better to sign up with a company like Aweber that will host your newsletters and send them out. They will prevent any suggestion of spam by their double opt-in to your newsletter and making sure you stop sending to anyone who no longer wishes it. Yes it costs but the cost of becoming classed as a spammer is not worth it.
Your initial communication with people needs to be personal but as the numbers grow it is essential to automate your information sending and to make sure that everyone gets to hear the news. This is especially true if there is going to be an addition to the family or if you get another promotion that means another posting overseas to an even more exotic location.
Be ready for people to ask to come and stay with you. This will need to be very carefully controlled as people can tend to monopolize your time and resources. You need to make sure that your family and close friends get the invitations first and then anyone else. Anyone coming will need to have somewhere to park a hire car at your new home. You should note that a large number of apartments in the UK only have one parking place. It may be good to prepare a map of the journey from the airport or airports to your home.
Include with that any differences like the majority of cars in the UK being stick shift, driving on the left and overtaking on the right only.
Your newsletters may challenge some of the preconceptions of your friends back home. But this is one way you can keep in touch with everybody, and let them know what you news is, and what you are doing.
