Homesickness

I've been back from Norway for less than twelve hours. I'm already over going into work and finding myself almost torn to shreds by my own stupidity and inability to pay attention to detail. I have improved in my writing - I usually read over these posts at least once now, before posting, and pick up the most glaring of the grammatical and spelling mistakes, anyway - but when it comes to drawings, I'm still able to miss the most obvious of errors. I'm sure the architect I'm working under is ready to tear his hair out about having me on his team right now, poor guy. He seems to score a lot of the dopey techs. It must be because he's so patient and able to find so many of the things we do wrong. That said, it's reassuring to know that he's not perfect either. I'm not pointing it out to him, but a load of the things he gave me to do first thing this morning were things that I'd just changed at his request. Oh well. I'm on leave again after next week.

And that's the thing that has me a little confused, I guess. Because I've been homesick in the worst way for the past couple of months. I think I'm past the point where I'm ready to go home, even though I haven't made it through my list of things that I have to get done. When you start planning your route home about a year out from the date you plan to leave and gradually drop things off the radar in order to throw more at the leaving, it's time. When you spend your nights camped out in your bedroom avoiding people in general and flatmate in particular, it's time to go. When you find yourself unable to handle the foibles of your oldest friend in the country, it's time to book the flight. When you get emotional just hearing someone say something good about your home, about helping someone plan a trip to your least favourite Australian city, you've been away for too long. And that's the point I find myself at. I constantly have a Peter Allan song running through my head telling me that I still call Australia home. I've been to cities that never close down, after all, New York for Christmas, London for almost three years, but not Rio. And I do love travelling and being free. But my - not my heart, really, but perhaps the closest I can come to a soul lies waiting there over the foam, and no matter how far I wander or roam, I do still call Australia home.

London is home too, but not in the same way. I don't get nostalgic for London when I'm not here. I can't imagine getting onto Google streetview to remind myself of how it feels to be on the streets. I miss the heat, the crisp feeling of a Melbourne morning, the sound of a crowd at the football, the excitement of the Spring Carnival, the roasted grass under feet, the sweltering days that drift into a night where you can't bear to close the window and lose the faint breeze that cools you enough to sleep. I miss being able to drive for hours on back roads without seeing another car. My friends, my family, my memories. I miss walking down a street and finding myself hit by a reminiscence. I'm so violently homesick that I'm wondering how I'm going to leave at the end of my trip.

Of course, I am staying with my parents, so I'll probably be glad to get back to my flat by then. But either way, whatever I say to express the longing for the wide brown land, Dorothea MacKellar's "core of my heart, my country", it's all been said before. Because for so many Australians, we may leave the shores, some forever, but for all except those like of Germaine Greer who appear to have fled the shame of coming from such a provincial backwater (well, it was the sixties when they left; spaghetti was exotic and foreign, pad thai unheard of), we always plan to return. It's always home. So, in a couple fo weeks I will be (cue the sea shanty pipes, sailors doing a jig and convicts in chains...) singing too-ral li-ooral li-ad-dity , singing too-ral li-ooral li-ay, singing too-ral li-ooral li-ad-dity, and we're bound for Botany Bay. Or something like that, anyway.