I couldn’t come to Australia without seeing my family, who have been here for 27 and 46 years respectively!  We see each other every few years but not often for as long as the five weeks I spent there with them.  Staying with my youngest sister (I’m the ‘baby’…) mainly, it was luxury to have so long in one place on one hand – but I got stir crazy too and feeling the pull of family choices versus my own I’ve had for so many months now! 

They also worried about me, regardless of knowing I had travelled safely alone for months!  Then the tensions that arise with sisters perhaps, and other good times like meeting my great nephew, Remmy, for the first time at 11 years old.  His mother had come to the UK at 18 for a couple of years and I haven’t seen her since as she doesn’t travel with her parents when they come over.  Nor my nephew who was here at 18 too, for a year or so, and not seen him in so long! 

Adelaide was different than I remembered, when I’d lived and worked there in my 20s (22 to be precise!) and catching up with people from then!   It wasn’t the place I used to yearn to live in which had been denied me when I married and then divorced – now I no longer want to go.   It’s pretty, very hot and dry, and very westernised but not for me now.   Perhaps I prefer Melbourne after all, when I didn’t want to visit but was persuaded by someone I met in Hue, an English guy from the north of England living there for the last nine years or so!