There’s no place like home

My homesickness for the UK has been steadily growing. It is now over 2 years since I stood on British soil but, in these COVID times, it is no longer as simple as getting on a plane to get back to Blighty.  The additional logistical and practical challenges mean that, while homesickness is not new to either of us, this time it feels different with a bigger sense of loss – loss of time with family and friends and passing by of events that we could not be part of.

Bryan and I have been expats from our home countries for over 20 years each. It is also the case that our home countries just happen to be on opposite sides of the globe.  During our time in Dubai, our ability to reach our respective home countries was relatively straightforward.  Cost and flight time meant that the UK tended to be visited more frequently than NZ, at least once a year, sometimes more.  The less frequent trips to NZ were offset by regular meetups in other destinations around the globe with Bryan’s family, and reasonably frequent visits by his mum to stay with us in Dubai. 

I should be pretty used to being away from home, after all, I left home for university at the age of 18 and only lived back in the family home for one more year before heading back to Northeast England, and then heading overseas just over a decade later.  When I was a student back in the late ’80s, at university 300 miles from home, pre-internet and pre-mobile phone and only just post-carrier pigeon, my only means of contact with home was a weekly phone call from a public phone box.  Today’s technology undoubtedly makes things easier, and cheaper, to stay in touch.

Once the kids left Dubai for University and their new lives in Europe, we made frequent trips back to the UK to see them but also established a new tradition of meeting up with them at a destination in Europe for Christmas where we could all be together as a family. Barcelona, Budapest, Warsaw, Hamburg were our Christmas holiday destinations over a number of years.  Each chosen to give us a real sense of Christmas, with a festive feel, well established Christmas markets but mainly as fun places for our family get-togethers!

When we set off from Dubai on our sailing trip in December 2019, we knew that it was going to be the first year to break the still new tradition of Christmas in Europe with the kids.  But part of our planning, and budget, factored in trips back to the UK later in the New Year, 2020.  We had hoped to make it back for at least a couple of events in 2020 – my brother and brother-in-law had weddings planned (not to each other!) and Erin was graduating.  While three trips to the UK would have been a challenge, the hope was to get to Erin’s graduation in July and then return in December for Brother-in-law’s wedding and have Christmas 2020 in the UK.  COVID meant that my brother’s wedding was the only one of these events that took place in 2020.

We recently watched the film Nomadland.  It tells the story of a middle-aged American woman, Fern, who begins a new life in a campervan living and travelling for work after the closure of her hometown’s main industry made it a ghost town.  The film depicts how she comes to terms with the loss of her former conventional life while she adapts to life on the road.   One line from the film really struck me when Fern is referred to by a relative as being homeless.  Her response was that there was no such thing as homeless, only houseless.  While there were many aspects of the film that we could relate to due to our current van-life existence, this statement made me pause and reflect on which one we were, if at all?

While we don’t have a house in the traditional sense when we left Dubai home became Aroha, our boat.  We lived aboard for nearly nine months before we had to leave her in India. When it came time to leave the boat in India to travel to the COVID-free safety of New Zealand, we had no choice but to leave with just a 23kg luggage allowance each.  Our “house” shifted from a sailing boat bobbing about on the murky waters of Kochi, to our new “house” in New Zealand, Cyril the Campervan.  We had transitioned from being yachties to being van-lifers plus added an over-wintering component by house and pet sitting.  Spending a portion of the winter in bricks and mortar (or in New Zealand terms timber-frame) was intended to make life more comfortable during the cold and wet weather. At the end of each house-stay though we would always look forward to getting back into Cyril. A tiny living space but a space that we could call our own.

• 

• 

• 

We’ve also spent time staying with family and friends in different parts of New Zealand. Bryan’s blog on Kiwi hospitality (https://ripeningnicely.com/2021/07/07/kiwi-hospitality/) summed up how incredibly welcoming old and new friends have been here. They have truly opened their homes and their hearts to us, for which we will be forever grateful.  I have also been fortunate to have my permanent residency for New Zealand confirmed at the start of the year, enabling me to truly be part of the “team of 5 million”, or is it now 5 million and one? 

There is a lingering sense that we are in limbo though.  We have begun to reflect more on our choice of lifestyle and the impact of not having a permanent base that we can call home.  We’ve been trying to use our time usefully while in New Zealand but with the freedom of travelling the country in a van, there are downsides. One is that we are not able to spend long enough in one place to establish ourselves as part of a community. I’ve been to a couple of Ukulele meetups, we’ve attended a few community sustainability meetings, we’ve become part of the local tree planting and predator-free NZ initiatives in Taupo. Being part of initiatives like these is great and has helped us to feel we are doing something with our time and giving something back to NZ but, unfortunately, it is not something we are able to do on a regular basis.

• 

• 

• 

• 

When we first came back to NZ, our assumption was that it would be 9-12 months before we were able to consider options for travel again.  COVID, however, is the gift that keeps giving and is seemingly relentless in the disruption that it creates.  When we made the decision to leave Aroha in India, we had the choice of travelling to lockdown-UK or covid free-NZ.   NZ was our safe haven.  Then, last week, a new cluster of community cases saw the whole country go into level 4 lockdown almost one year to the day since we arrived in COVID free New Zealand. 

As we pass our one-year anniversary as COVID refugees, it also means the clock keeps ticking on other significant milestones; it’s been over two years since I last saw the kids, my mum, my brother – and in fact any family and friends in the UK.  As the UK has started to return to some level of normality, we have had to be absent from family and missed family events and milestones that we would have loved to be part of. We have spent our 2nd Christmas away from the kids, Erin’s graduation ceremony didn’t end up happening and neither did Alex’s but, for the first time, I wasn’t the one helping Erin move house to start her new Uni course, Liam bought and moved into a new house that I have only seen on video, and the weddings of both my brother and brother on law have come and gone with us only being able to raise a glass to celebrate from afar. It’s been getting tougher and tougher to be away so long.

And so, the longer I have been away from the UK, this sense of missing home has been steadily growing.  Until now it has been impractical for a whole range of reasons to return but now, we’ve started to explore the how and when of heading to the UK for an extended stay. Beyond that will be the potentially more challenging part of getting back into India to pick up Aroha. The UK coming out of lockdown really helps, but there are still a number of logistical hurdles that we need to overcome. Heading to the UK also means that Bryan will be moving away from his family in NZ, with far more limited opportunities than pre-COVID to easily return. While permanent residency for me in NZ was a relatively straightforward process, the same cannot be said of the UK for Bryan. I did chuckle at one of the requirements for the UK spouse visa however which states, “You must have met each other…”!

We know we are far from unique in the way COVID has impacted us but, without a doubt, COVID has made being away from family way more challenging to deal with both practically and emotionally than at any time during our expat lives. We have to accept that our choice of a nomadic lifestyle, and choices of alternative accommodation, means that we have no permanent house and our temporary home is not so much where, in the words of Paul Young, we lay our hat, but where we park up.  Our thinking has also been challenged about what and where “home” is. Without question, our ability to travel easily between different countries will be impacted long into the future as will our ability to be physically close to the people we care about.

While I have been wrestling with thoughts of home, another film has frequently come to mind.  My favourite film is the Wizard of OZ.  Dorothy is on a desperate quest to return home, not just to Kansas but to Aunty Em and all that is familiar to her.  From the start of her experience in Oz, she just wants to get home, but soon discovers new friendships and experiences that make it hard for her to leave. Ultimately she discovers that she always had the power to get home, she just had to want it enough.  With a click of the heels of her Ruby slippers and repeating the mantra “there is no place like home”, Dorothy is teleported back to Kansas in the blink of an eye. Dorothy was right, there is no place like home but in the absence of teleporting Ruby slippers, and the question of whether we would even get them in Bryan’s size, maybe just one more quote will sum up home from our current perspective and this is it…

“Where we love is home – home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts”.

Sir Oliver Wendell Holmes

Follow and like us to be notified of future blogs!

www.facebook.com/ripeningnicely