You can take the boy out

A good column in the Wellington Dominion-Post today by Chris Trotter (I never expected to write those words in that order), which offered more food for thought as I continue to wrestle with the idea of returning to New Zealand to live.

When you’re so far away from home and, after 10 years, still trying to work out whether or not you should go back, it’s things like this that help you to remember where you’re from and what it is about place that is important.

In day-to-day conversation it’s difficult to pinpoint the intangible characteristics of ‘home’ or what it is to be a New Zealander that really matter. Then you see or hear something and all of a sudden you’re sitting at you desk stricken by homesickness, wishing you were walking along a beach covered in ink-black iron sand, waves crashing in beside you, staring again at the conical mountain that moves you every time you see it thinking: where the bloody hell did that come from?

You can take the boy out of New Zealand but can you take New Zealand out of the boy?