The sounds of home always had flattened vowels

I didn't really leave New Zealand and go overseas until I was 32. I'd been to Australia a couple of times, but that doesn't count. That just felt like a weird suburb over the hill somewhere, full of excellent beaches, sisters that won't come home and many, many creatures that would like to kill you.

But when we did finally go overseas properly, we went all the way - Australia, Japan, the UK, all the way through 18 countries around Europe, and across the Atlantic to the States. It was almost six months. It was a lot. 

By the time we got to Washington DC, we were bushed on a molecular level. We still saw the rockets in the Smithsonian and took photos around all the monuments, like you're supposed to, but we were back in the hotel by 7pm, pigging out on Wendy's from across the road.

And that night, beaten down and weary, the sounds of home came calling again over the TV set in loudly broad tones, and I'd never heard us like that before.

There had been New Zealanders everywhere during the six months - the entire tour company crew for the Europe leg were from Wellington and Hamilton; and the one time we had to stay in a hostel and share a room with some other people, it turned out to be a lovely couple from Oamaru, a town about 40 minutes' drive from where I was born.

But I hadn't been utterly surrounded by it, while going around the world. I hadn't been totally immersed in all those flattened vowels and clipped syllables that just sound like regular folk to my ears. 

And then, there it was on the fucking TV, on primetime American television. We arrived in the States just as Flight of the Conchords was coming, and it just happened to be the night they first screened the Bowie episode, and it was fucking excellent.

Of course I knew who they were. They had been on all sorts of comedy shows, and had done some radio plays that were actually fairly mediocre. They went to uni at the same time as some of my pals, and were broadly familiar, but there they were, killing it on screen in the goddamn United States.

And when that was over, one of the pay movies on the TV was the then brand-new Death Proof. I'm a Tarantino bore to the core, and Death Proof is literally the only film of his I haven't seen at the movies. If it had gotten any kind of theatre release in the past few months, we'd missed it on our travels

But there it was, so I hooked it straight into my cinematic veins, and suddenly there was Zoe Bell with that bloody accent again, even screaming in Kiwi when she was riding that hot bonnet.

You never think you've got an accent until you hear it like that, far from home. And it's a big, big world, until you hear people who sound like your best mates on the other side of the planet.

The New Zealand accent, for that one night, felt global. 

But it didn't help poor Pedro, the manager at the Harlem hotel we stayed in the next night. He still couldn't understand a fucking word we said. Maybe he wasn't a Tarantino geek.