"Home" Again.

I’ve been back from Auckland for a week and I’m still not entirely sure what to do with myself. The jet lag is mostly gone but something else is still settling, and I’m going to try to write about it before it does, because once it settles I suspect it will become harder to see clearly.

Three weeks in New Zealand. Our first time back since August 2013. Gemma’s first time back since she was thirteen.

I’m going to have to write this slowly.

Getting There: Bangkok

We routed via Bangkok — Richard had meetings there for a day and a half, and I had no objection whatsoever to spending thirty-six hours in Bangkok in February, which is extraordinary in a way that requires no editorialising. We stayed in the old town, ate everything in reach, walked until our feet registered their dissatisfaction, and I sat in a temple courtyard for about twenty minutes in the late afternoon doing absolutely nothing, which is a thing Bangkok makes very easy.

Gemma, who had not been to Southeast Asia before, handled the sensory intensity with the particular equanimity of a seventeen-year-old who has decided to be cool about things. By the end of day one she was navigating the night market with a confidence I’d spent forty-two years developing, negotiating prices with a vendor in the approximate location of where we’d agreed to meet and then simply expecting us to find her. We found her. She had found extremely good mango sticky rice and was not remotely apologetic about having started without us.

Then we boarded the overnight to Auckland and I did not sleep at all, which is my consistent approach to overnight flights regardless of how tired I am, and we landed at seven in the morning into an Auckland summer and the particular quality of New Zealand air that I had somehow managed to forget and remembered the moment it hit me.

The First Day

Uncle Geoffrey picked us up from the airport. Which was not the plan — the plan was a taxi — but Geoff had decided, with the cheerful unilateral confidence that characterises all of his logistical decisions, that he would simply come to the airport instead. He was standing at arrivals with a handwritten sign that said MEDFORTHS in large capital letters, which is not necessary when you know someone and is entirely something Geoffrey would do.

He looked exactly the same. Slightly more silver, possibly, but Geoff has been the same person since I met him in Khandallah in 1998 — large, warm, rugby-obsessed, with opinions about everything and genuine curiosity about all of it. He hugged me for a long time at the arrivals gate and then held me at arm’s length and said: “You look like London.” I chose to take this as a compliment. He laughed and I think it was.

He’d booked us into a hotel in Ponsonby for the first two nights while we found our feet, which was exactly right — arriving into someone else’s house when you’re jet-lagged and emotionally off-balance is too much, and Geoffrey apparently knew this without being told. We ate lunch on the hotel terrace in the sun, drank flat whites from a café around the corner that was so good it made me briefly furious with London, and then I slept for four hours in the afternoon while Richard and Geoffrey talked about rugby and Gemma walked to Ponsonby Road on her own and texted me a stream of photographs of things she recognised.

Gemma

I want to write about Gemma separately because her experience of this trip was its own thing, running alongside ours but not the same.

She was thirteen when we left. She is seventeen now. Auckland was her whole world for thirteen years and then it stopped, abruptly, the way things stop when you’re a teenager and decisions are made above your head. She’s built a life in England — she has proper friends now, a hockey club, a place at Millais she’s actually inhabiting rather than tolerating — and she’s done it without complaint, mostly. But Auckland has been the thing she’s been measuring England against for four years, and now she was back in it.

She was quiet on the drive from the airport. Not the headphones-in quiet of 2013 — different. Alert. Looking out the window at the motorway and the familiar-unfamiliar suburbs in the way you look at something you’ve been holding in your head and are checking against the original.

On the second day, four of her closest Dio friends came to meet her in Ponsonby. I watched them from across the road for a few minutes before she saw me — five seventeen-year-olds on a pavement, the noise of a reunion that’s been held at arm’s length for four years via texts and voice notes suddenly collapsing into the actual physical fact of being in the same place. One of them — Isla, who’d been Gemma’s closest friend at Dio — was crying before they’d let go of each other. Gemma was not crying. Gemma does not cry at airports or reunions, or at least not visibly, which I know does not mean she is not feeling it.

She disappeared with them for most of that day. She came back to the hotel in the evening slightly sunburned and quiet in a different way, a satisfied way, and said the food at their usual spot in Newmarket was exactly the same and she’d had three flat whites and she was going to sleep immediately.

I did not press her. She’d been back. She’d seen them. Whatever she’d needed from that, she’d gotten some of it.

Milton Road

We drove past the house on the third day. I hadn’t planned to — or rather, I’d planned not to — and then Richard turned down the street without either of us saying anything about it and we drove slowly past and it was simply a house on a street in Mt Eden, a villa with a garden that looked different because someone else had done different things with it, a veranda with different furniture on it, and I looked at it for as long as we were passing and then it was behind us.

I didn’t say anything for about a minute. Then I said: “The garden looks good.”

Richard said: “It does.”

That was the extent of the Milton Road conversation. I think we both understood that anything more would have needed more than either of us had in that moment.

We drove to the Village and got flat whites at Circus Circus, and afterwards I stood at the lights between Stokes and Mt Eden Road, looked up at Mt Eden, and thought: yes, this. This was it. This is what I’ve been trying to describe to people for four years and haven’t quite managed. Not the city, not the house, but this — the particular quality of a New Zealand Saturday morning when nobody is in a rush to be anywhere and the light is warm and the coffee is excellent.

Bayleys

I went in to see the team at Bayleys on the second Thursday. Not for any professional reason — just because they were my people for thirteen years and I wanted to see them. My old director, Steve, had sent me a message the moment I mentioned on Facebook that we were coming back, and I’d had fifteen messages from various people by the end of the week.

They’d moved from Maritime Square into Halsey Street last year.  This was change enough, until you realise you’ve also been away long enough for two generations of staff to have turned over. Some faces I knew immediately. Some I didn’t recognise at all. Steve took me out for lunch at Ebisu in Britomart, an old favourite of mine with the most amazing Japanese cuisine, and we talked for three hours about the market and the people and what I was doing in London, and at some point he said: “We always thought you’d come back, you know. We kept the light on for you in a theoretical sense.”

I said: “Is that still an option?”

He looked at me for a moment and then laughed. “If you ever want it to be,” he said, “ring me.”

I have been thinking about that conversation more than I expected to since I got home.

Geoff

We spent a whole day with Geoffrey in the second week — he drove us north to Matakana for the weekend farmers’ market and wine tasting (he knows everyone; he has been living this particular Saturday for fifteen years and is deeply committed to it, despite the ever increasing traffic queues) and then out to Tawharanui in the afternoon.

Tawharanui. If you haven’t been: it’s a regional park on a peninsula north of Auckland, predator-fenced, with beaches on both sides and forest in the middle and the kind of wild, salt-and-bird-call quiet that takes you a few minutes to adjust to after the motorway. Geoffrey has been going there for years. We had gone, in the Auckland years, with Gemma — she was small enough that I carried her at some points on the coastal walk, which is not something I have the back for now.

We sat on the beach at Anchor Bay in the late afternoon with cold drinks from the chilly bin Geoff had, naturally, packed without telling anyone, and he talked about his life here — the rugby clubs, the friends who’d become family, the view from his house above the Waitemata that he’d stopped taking for granted approximately one week after he arrived and had not taken for granted since. He’d retired from ASB two years ago. He played golf badly and loved it. He was, he said, exactly where he’d meant to end up when he got on that plane from Heathrow in 1995 and hadn’t quite known it yet.

Richard asked him if he ever missed London.

Geoffrey thought about it seriously. Then he said: “I miss being close to good theatre. And I miss a proper winter occasionally. But I don’t miss wanting to be somewhere else, and I haven’t wanted to be somewhere else in twenty-two years. That’s a reasonable trade.”

We drove back into Auckland as the sun went down over the Kaipara, and I sat in the back seat next to Gemma and looked out at the harbour and thought about trade-offs.

Otama

In the third week we drove down to the Coromandel Peninsula for a few days — Otama, specifically, which is the kind of place that people from Auckland treat as a well-kept secret and then tell everyone about, resulting in it being not especially secret while somehow retaining the feeling of one. A long white beach, very calm water, pohutukawa trees growing down to the sand, almost nobody there in the late-summer week we chose. We rented a small house up on the hill with a veranda facing the water and did essentially nothing for four days, which after three weeks of emotional intensity was exactly right.

I finished Caitlin Moran’s How to Be a Woman on the second afternoon, lying in a hammock with the Firth of Thames visible between the trees. I’d been saving it for the trip and I’m glad I did — it’s absurdly funny and precise in the way that books occasionally are when the person writing them is simply telling the truth and trusting that other people’s truth is similar enough to recognise. Several passages required me to put the book down and stare at the view for a moment, partly from laughter and partly from the particular feeling of encountering something accurate about your own life written down by someone else. She goes immediately onto the list of authors I will read everything by and then recommend to everyone whether they asked or not.

On the third day we drove to Kūaotunu, which is about fifteen minutes up the coast and is home to a dairy with what I can only describe as a criminal attitude toward ice cream portion sizes. The scoops are architectural. They should require planning permission. Richard had rum and raisin, which is his holiday ice cream and has been for as long as I can remember. I had gold rush — a honey flavour with chocolate-coated honeycomb through it, which sounds like too much and is in fact exactly enough. Gemma had goody goody gum drops, which was her ice cream of choice from age approximately four through to every subsequent age, and which she ordered with the calm confidence of someone who has never needed to consider alternatives. We ate them sitting on a bench in the sun and then drove back to Otama and the hammock and the view, and nobody said very much, and it was one of the best afternoons of the trip.

The Airport

We flew home on a Friday morning. I’d been dreading the airport in the way I’d been dreading it for three weeks without fully admitting it.

It was fine, and it was hard, and both of those things were true at the same time. Richard was efficient and calm in the way he always is at airports. Gemma was quiet. I cried in the security queue, which is not ideal aesthetically, and then I stopped, and then I cried again at the gate when Gemma put her head on my shoulder and said nothing.

The flight back was long and I watched things on the screen without taking them in and thought about Geoffrey’s line about not wanting to be somewhere else. About what it would mean to not want to be somewhere else. About whether I want to be somewhere else.

I don’t have an answer to that yet. I think that’s honest.

London, Coming Back

It was grey and cold and raining when we landed at Heathrow, because it is always grey and cold and raining when you land at Heathrow from somewhere warm, and I had been gone twenty-three days, and the house felt small and correct and mine.

Gemma went to her room. I heard her on the phone to Isla for about an hour. I made tea. Richard had emails to deal with.

I start a new project next week — a large residential development in Chelmsford (of all places – I refuse to comment on the commute), the kind of work I came back from recruitment to do, the kind I’ve been building toward. The job is going well. London is going well. None of that has changed.

But I’ve been back a week and I’m still working out what the trip meant. I think it meant that New Zealand is real in my memory and not just a feeling, which matters. I think it meant Gemma got something she needed that I couldn’t have given her any other way. I think it meant that Geoff is one of my favourite people and I don’t see him nearly enough. And I think it meant something about home being a more complicated word than I’d previously allowed.

The flat whites in London are still not as good. I am making my peace with this.