The end of the affair?

The great big Australian adventure came to an end some time ago. There was a welcome reprise earlier this year, however, when we returned to Victoria for a family celebration in Torquay (Rocky Point Lookout viewed from Surf Beach, above). We made the most of an almost two-month stay to plan a couple of mini-trips to places we hadn’t reached in 14 years of living in Aus.

The title casts doubt on the veracity of the claim that the Australian chapter of our lives is indeed over. Maybe the writer is kidding herself! The course of one’s immediate future can be changed in minutes by a call to an airline, or a search online for that increasingly rare animal, a cheap last-minute deal. Sadly, there’s no longer any such thing if you take into account a lifetime’s carbon footprint: for years I’ve made regular long-haul flights. A cynic on a doomed planet might not give a toss about such things, arguing that we may as well enjoy what we’ve got ‘til it’s gone.

In the beginning – 2010 – the move to Australia might only have lasted a few months: nothing was certain. As it was, we spent 12 years there: lived in two state capitals; took numerous opportunities to travel further afield; and ventured several times into my favourite landscape – desert.

Years ago, I entered a competition; to write the final paragraph of a non-existent book. I wrote it as if the writer were taking off from Brisbane International Airport; peering down over endlessly blue Moreton Bay, climbing above the clouds, vision increasingly impaired by tears of yearning for an irrecoverable situation. Of course I wrote as if it were me, which it eventually was, but from Melbourne. Needless to say, you would have already heard had I won the competition.

I knew leaving Australia on a one-way ticket ‘home’ was never going to be easy. I had totally embraced life down under, becoming an Australian citizen; leaping at the chance to change my ‘job’ so I could travel-write on my own terms and become an environmental protector.

I think I may have already mentioned somewhere a South African lady I met soon after my arrival in Brisbane all those years ago. She was well travelled, had four grown-up children – each one living on a different continent – and appeared to take moving around the globe in the wake of husband and sons completely in her stride. She was a great welcomer to my new world.

But I digress again. The idea of drawing a line under a project you weren’t minded to abandon –– because for the most part you were having a great experience and you didn’t want it to end; because life in the old country might have changed immeasurably –– seemed a troubling step to take. I had begun blogging in the first place after we made a momentous decision to uproot and move to the diametrically opposite corner of the planet. Now we’re back ‘home’, feeling a bit out of place still, because everyone’s life here had moved on at least a decade, for better or for worse, and… well, as I say, it was at times disorientating.

A few weeks ago I went up to Manchester to stay with my sister-in-law for a few days. On one of them we nipped into the Peak District National Park and walked by the Macclesfield Canal (below). It was inarguably beautiful, along a flat meandering tow path by calm water, with many views to a gently Peaky backdrop. The country I grew up in looked green and verdant and lovely.

And then there was this: an imposing relic from an era not that long ago that figured large in my childhood. The mill struck me as sad in its silence, with its broken panes and massive emptiness. Are there plans for a conversion to many ‘units’ with ‘stunning views’ but also the ghosts of industrious times gone by? The mill is sadly a significant monument now doomed to a what-can-we-do-with-this? fate, which made me feel rather sad.

The Vernon Mill in Stockport, not far from where I was born in Woodbank, and the Goyt Mill in Marple were outliers of the Lancashire cotton-spinning towns. The Goyt was built relatively late, in 1905. Both were built because of their close proximity to the River Goyt, a tributary of the Mersey.

Much later after our walk, I had a thought: if you’ve been captivated when living in other, faraway places, does that affect how you feel about your original, childhood surroundings if and when you return to them? Do the long-ago ones appear overcrowded maybe, a bit twee, or dull or summat else? They may look interesting on a bright sunny day, but they’re on a different scale perhaps, or dramatically different in other respects.

It’s funny what you miss. And I wonder now, not living in Aus, or the North of England, where do I say I’m from? Maybe it depends on where I am when I’m asked. Maybe I’m overthinking this!