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.