At the end of January 1996 our little family arrived to set up home in New Zealand. For Camille it was a return to the city she’d left in the early 70s, for the children it was a step into the relative unknown, to relatives (relatively) unknown. A year later we were in the process of buying Limestone Hills, I’d ordered my first batch of truffle trees and the kids were settled into their schools. A new life was taking shape.
In those early years, I flew back to Europe and the UK fairly regularly. Clients who billed me out at a per diem equivalent to the cost of a return flight to London weren’t too worried about my actual location, and in those early days of the internet there was some novelty in having a consultant who was effectively working a night shift. Finish a London or Paris day by sending me an email, start the next with a considered response in your inbox.
For the first few years, getting off the plane in London and taking a minicab to the tolerant friends providing a bed was like coming home. I moved to London after university, my first home a squat in Stockwell in the hot summer of 1976. We drank Youngs Special in The Surprise and watched the newly-laid turf in Stockwell Park curl up and die. Later on we lived in Ted Lasso land - Richmond, St Margarets, Petersham, Twickenham, and Teddington were our universe; near, but never quite under the Heathrow flightpath. Home was narrow crowded streets packed with traffic, the creased and folded mental map that told me exactly where I was without reference to Apple Maps, the faces recognised in the street.
In 2001 we took the children back to the UK with us. A summer/winter holiday with some skiing and a lot of visiting of friends and relatives. Five years on there were clear signs of change. My mental map was beginning to be a little unreliable - not because I’d forgotten the layout, but because the world had shifted. Roads were altered, traffic systems fiddled with, new buildings appeared in odd places. Ten years further on, and the London skyline was clearly different. Skyscrapers with odd shapes and strange names were being raised on the bones of the old city underneath. London was shrugging us off, but at the same time winking knowingly. There are things it will never let you forget.
Our familial centre of gravity had shifted. Home was now rural North Canterbury. No more cityscapes and tiny back gardens. You can have a life, or you can have a big garden. In Waipara we have the garden. Friends from the UK and US came to visit, some more than once. Limestone Hills was producing truffles and pinot noir, occasionally olive oil. Trees we’d planted were big enough to need pruning, to provide shade in summer. My parents emigrated in their 70s to watch their grandchildren grow.
As my personal geography changed, so did the politics around me. When we left London, a dog-tired Tory government was on its last legs, about to be swept away by the “New” Labour cobbled together by my contemporaries. It was possible, in the early years of that Labour administration, to think that Britain was heading towards the best of all worlds. Our friends were watching their houses turn them into sterling millionaires, and there was Britpop: Blur, Oasis and The Spice Girls. Until Blair blew it with Bush in Afghanistan and Iraq it was possible to be a rational optimist.
My reaction to the New Zealand politics of the day was first astonishment, and then resignation. The reforms of the 80s and early 90s seemed to me to have swung that old cliché, the political pendulum, much further to the free-market right than anywhere else in the world. If you were an Economist reader (I was, at the time), this could be written up as a good thing. But the very smart writers at The Economist didn’t have to live here. The Clark Labour government was welcome, but seemed timid: like Blair, willing to adopt a market-based approach to running the country, but without the will to tip the pendulum back to what any European politician might regard as a reasonable middle, let alone to the left.
In the UK, the inevitable consequence of Blair and Brown’s overseas adventures, combined with the inequities of a first-past-the-post electoral system saw Tory David Cameron cobble together a government with the help of the Liberal Democrats. And so the UK started down the slow road to Brexit, Johnson and Truss (like Sue, Grabbit and Runne, not to be trusted with legal matters).
Our last trip to Britain was three years ago. We began with a few weeks in Spain, decompressing and recuperating at a friend’s home in Girona. From his patio, high in the hills to the east of the city, we could sip strong coffee and look down towards the cathedral while our iPads served up events in London. And what news it was: Brexit was being made to happen. Parliament was prorogued illegally, Johnson and his gang were steering the ship of state towards the hardest of hard exits from the European Union. The coffee was good, the food better, but I could not believe what I was reading. Given the amount of astonished head shaking, it’s a small miracle that my shoulders still have anything to carry.
The Tories were behaving like a troop of chimpanzees who’d found a few big sticks and were whooping their way through the woods of London laying to waste to all around them. With Jacob Rees-Mogg as Tarzan. And worse, they were then re-elected with a bigger majority.
This was not the country I had left. It wasn’t even the country I’d visited in 2012 or 2016. This was a polity that had been coerced into leaving Europe by lies and obfuscation, promised a golden tomorrow and sunlit uplands while the politicians selling the idea had no fucking clue what do when they got there. There was and is a disconnect between reality and Tory policies - policies that could only work on some other planet, where the laws of physics are different, and custard trees feed everyone for nothing.
The geography of ideas finds itself unpinned from the rocks beneath, become a thing mutable by the algorithms of social media and the purring of propagandists.
The logical consequence is Truss and Kwarteng, and tax cuts for the rich that aren’t going to happen because even the densest Tory politician (outside cabinet) understands that “let them eat cake” isn’t a great way to approach a cost of living crisis.
What’s left of the home I left 26 years ago? The bones are there, clad with friends and postcard views. London is still a great city, a wonderful place to spend time immersed in culture and consumption. My whakapapa is rooted where it’s always been, in the Celtic west of Wales and Cornwall. I can watch Morse and Lewis and Endeavour and feel nostalgia for dreaming spires, Ted Lasso is comforting for its portrayal of the streets and pubs of West London. But that’s all fiction, and reality is somewhere else entirely.
The pace of change is dizzying. When Britain was colonising Aotearoa, adventurers could spend a decade or two in New Zealand trying to make their fortune, and then return home in the expectation of being able to slot into society where they left off. A couple of centuries later, it seems you only need to turn your back for a few weeks and everything changes.
Britain has been through a political singularity, where no-one can keep up with changes as they happen, and it’s mathematically impossible to know what will be on the other side. Sunlit uplands, perhaps? I’m not holding my breath.
I may go back to Britain to mark my next big birthday, but I will be a stranger in a strange land. I will go for the people, the old friends I have so sadly neglected by being on the far side of the world. I will go for the bones of the land, to walk a coastal footpath or a Scottish beach. I will go for the bits of the country and its people that will outlast any government, for the equivalent of the stone circles my ancestors raised. It will not, and never can, be home again.
Home is where the truffles are1.
See header photo.
Wonderful personal narrative and incisive commentary Gareth, thank you!