This year we moved to my old home town, so it's been almost 12 months of rampant nostalgia. I can't walk past shops that closed down decades ago without remembering how I got Scream! comics from there in the mid 1980s, and this is is the town where I grew up, so literally every single street corner has some kind of memory stapled to it.
Look, there's the corner where my dad gave me my first driving lesson in the dark, in the rain. There's the beach where I used to drink scrumpy and read The Invisibles over and over again. There's where I was crowned Tiny Tots champion at the 1980-81 Caroline Bay Carnival. I've still got the sash.
It's not the same. I know that. Old insititutons that I was aboslutely gutted to see die faded away this year, and the only proper news story I wrote this year was about the cinema where I saw the first Superman film in 1979.
But the main difference is that I have two pre-schoolers, running around the place like absolute maniacs, playing with my old toys, falling over on my old playgrounds, and it makes me feel so fucking alive to see them at play.
Of course I'll miss beloved family and friends the most when we go. I'm also going to miss the long, stony beaches when we leave here, because there is nobody else around, and the kids know to stay away from the roaring waves, and there are all sorts of stones and sticks and crabs and clay and critters to play with.
But we are leaving. We are still going back to Auckland in a month, because we follow the Tao of Brain Boitano. The years move so fast the older you get, but this will also be the one where I took my kids back home, and we had the best time.
Goodbye Timaru.
(The usual summer slowdown at the Tearoom of Despair might be a bit longer, while I take care of basics like finding a fucking place to live, but I should be back with more inane and truly heartfelt ramblings sometime in February. See you then.)
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