Tag Archives: Sydney

Gluten-induced homesickness

Posted on April 13, 2014 | 1 comment

Fresh sourdough toast with jam and ricotta has made me ponder moving back to Sydney. A fig Danish pastry has triggered layers of crispy homesickness. A pork and fennel sausage roll has almost brought me to tears.

Fig danish

Love is a fig danish

I have been overloading on gluten and memories at Bourke Street Bakery. I am remembering the loss of these sights and smells and sounds, at the very same time that I am soaking them up. Equal parts happiness (I’m back!) and sadness (I have to leave.)

Daily London life is so solidly full and interesting that I rarely pine for Australia. So after nearly 3 years away, this visit has been surprisingly  interrupted by ‘in situ’ homesickness.

I am missing the thing as I experience it. That doesn’t make sense. But a dark chocolate and sour cherry cookie as big as my hand does. In gluten we trust.

Here’s one I wrote earlier

Where do you go when you press Home? Does your life have a ‘Home’ button? I’m back home (Sydney) after a brief visit to London (new home). My old house is empty and my new house is waiting for me.

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Where do you go when you press Home?

Posted on June 30, 2011 | 5 comments

Does your life have a ‘Home’ button? I’m back home (Sydney) after a brief visit to London (new home). My old house is empty and my new house is waiting for me. I’ve never been very attached to a particular location.  Home is wherever I am with my own little family.

Technology is helping to create a homesickness prevention barrier. I’ve made heartfelt promises to email, Skype, tweet and update many many people. And when I have time, I will even put pen to paper.

I am a busy body

The busier I am, the less time I have to tell people how busy I am. Twitter and Facebook are not part of my core communications strategy matrix. (Can you tell I used to work in an agency?)

Some of the things I might have mentioned if I’d been social online in the last weeks:

• Black cabs only take cash? WTF?
• I may have missed the wedding, but I do have a Catherine & William commemorative Oyster card.
• The estate agent looks young enough to be my son. His suit has too many nifty seams to be professional.
• Camden Market is horrible. Too many giant horse-themed sculptures.
• Kids would rather smash gravel with hammers than talk to me on phone.
• Want to take video of the local streets, but worried that I look creepy.
• I got little pile of crisps/ chips with my sandwich! One of the major reasons for moving to the UK…
• Have never asked to move seats on a plane because of another passenger’s smell. Until now. I was very discreet.
• First words from son upon my return: “My snot is the same colour as your top.” I did get a hug after that though.

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From here to over there

Posted on June 10, 2011 | 4 comments

Can you tell where I’m writing this blog from? I don’t know where you are and, mostly, it doesn’t matter where I am. But I’m moving house. To a galaxy far far away… Or rather, from Sydney to London. There may be a few more “Now that I am in London …” posts.

It’s all at once exciting, terrifying, sad and brilliant.

Happy face 🙂

  • All the years of Facebook stalking old London friends and colleagues have paid off. I’m already building a London network.
  • As I say goodbye to my friends and family, they inevitably mention Skype and email and Facebook. We’re never truly cut off from each other are we?
  • The process of filing and organising our possessions has left me lighter and more streamlined.
  • The great big Internet has been incredibly useful for researching London. I can’t quite remember how I used to prepare for trips, pre-WWW. Travel brochures? Old guidebooks from the library? Static-filled, echoing phone calls to distant relatives, worrying about how much the call cost per second?
  • I can stop obsessing about avoiding skin cancer.

Sad face 😦

  • I’m quite happy here. I sometimes wonder if what we are going to, will be worth what we are leaving. My dad always says: “One door shuts, another one opens”. I’m just poking my head around the London door and gently closing the Sydney one behind me.
  • Sydney is such an easy place to live. As Joni Mitchell sang in Big Yellow Taxi “Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone?” [I love the bit about the tree museum … and right at the end when she does crazy high and low singing.]
  • I will very quickly develop a BBC-style English accent. Probably within hours of landing. I’m not taking the piss*. My brain just switches over to Penelope Keith and when I try to speak Australian, I sound like Steve Irwin.
  • Skype and Facebook are just not the same as chatting over a mountain of dumplings (see above).
  • Gloves, hats, scarves, coats. Even more bits of clothing for the kids to lose.

*That’s Australian for mocking something…

 Anecdote: One of my older lady colleagues in the UK told me that she had never travelled abroad, and never planned to. She didn’t have any specific complaints, but just thought that she “might not like it over there”.

Brought to you by the InterWeb – Tiny tiny mail

I am hoping that my friends might keep in touch via the world’s smallest post office.

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