A sense of place...

Thank you so much for all the love for Bean yesterday. I see she is on the Popular page as a result: where of course I think she should be every day. (I may be a tiny bit biased.)

I have been pondering on my sense of place today. That undefinable beautiful feeling of being in the right place right now...

Mum and Dad were great fans of the comedy duo Flanders and Swann. Their A Song of our Times somehow captured me – despite its (now) somewhat dubious intent – and Tonga became a place of exotic childhood fantasy; and by extension the tropical Pacific was a place of fascination and impossibility for a girl growing up in England.

So when I had the opportunity to travel round the world in 1997 I decided to follow a different path to most trans-global wanderers, and made near-equatorial Pacific islands my first ports of call.

Accordingly I spent a few days in Hawaii (which disappointed me with its overwhelming Americanism) and then three weeks in Tonga, which was the stuff of dreams. And thence to three months in stunning New Zealand, before bumping into Australia (and my Pirate).

Incidentally these weren’t my first Pacific islands. In 1995 I spent six weeks much further north on Vancouver Island and Haida Gwaii. I think that trip sowed the seed for the return to more southern climes of the Pacific four years later. It made the apparently impossible distinctly possible.

The rest of the post-1997 trip is history now, but what a fortunate turn of events in my life to have had the opportunity to travel to my dream destination, and for subsequent events to lead me to my forever home just 30km from the Pacific Ocean.

I pinch myself every time I walk on Cape Wanbrow, or round Kakanui Point. This isn’t any old ocean. The sense of place, of its history and its prehistory still fill me with wonder, in a way that the Irish Sea and North Sea never did when I lived in Britain. Orkney felt - and feels - closest to 'my place' in Britain, although the wet, cold and dark count against it.


May we all find our place in the world, wherever it may be.