Dinner at the Bad Man's

Had dinner at the Bad Man's house last night. While the kids drew manga and watched the Futurama movie projected onto the office wall, we grown ups argued about Bill Henson's recently shut down photographic exhibition, discussed the subjective experience of art, and held spouse-versus-spouse arm-wrestling competitions.

We also talked about England, as we always do with the Bad Man.

Like me, the Bad Man is living in exile, but he's never coped with being dragged away from central London and dropped into suburban NSW. In a sense I was lucky. I left in 1985, which is not a million years ago but was long enough ago to make communication awkward. No mobiles, no faxes, no Internet, no blogs. I went from the Furness peninsula to the Northern Territory, where radio-telephone conversations were barely a step up from the telegraph line. ("I'll be in Alice on Tuesday. See you at Swingers. Over!")

When the Internet arrived I logged on to BBC Radio Cumbria and listened to the three-minute bulletins that were posted on the hour. I listened to them with a sense of awe and excitement, but what I enjoyed most were the bits on either side that hadn't been edited out: the bits of the weather, reports of traffic backed up on the M6, clumsy handovers between announcers. Now I can stream the radio 24/7 and the thrill is gone, but this is the world that the Bad Man's inherited. It's as though it's harder to say goodbye when the world you left behind still feels within touching distance.

It's nearly winter in New South Wales ...

... and once again I find myself wondering however it was that I got to here.

This afternoon, during a period of intensive 'research' on the internet, I stumbled across some Cumbrian's blog and he described a walk home through the dusk past 'herds of somnolent cows'. For whatever reason it struck a chord; evocations of a childhood that I'd either forgotten about, or maybe hadn't actually experienced but had read about once. A half-remembered black and white film seen on telly one afternoon when skiving off school.

It's late-autumn/early-winter here in postcode 2292, and even here in the southern hemisphere autumn evenings make for feelings of melancholy. The light changes, the air thickens and sounds are muffled. The flying foxes no longer swarm across the sky towards their roosts near Throsby Creek. People live less publicly. Diets change.

I like here, but I'm never quite sure why I am here, and I'm equally unsure where I'd go to if I wasn't here. It's not where I was born, not where I spent my youth or even my first 35 years. I'm here now, but I can't see myself being here in 10 years' time (which is what I say every five years: you'd think I'd learn).

I know I'm not the only one to get to here like this. Like me, you might have got to wherever you are by a similar route: forks in the road presented themselves, doors opened unexpectedly just as others slammed shut.

This is where I'll write about it.