Sunday Blog 247 – 23 August 2026
For a while, a week at least, my body still imagines how I’ll walk through my sixth-floor Paris apartment for my nightly toilet stop; return to my low-slung bed with its blackout screen on the dormer window in the attic roof. How in the morning, I’ll slip a coffee pod into the machine, walk across the main room while it gurgles and brews. To the left is the dining table, the right is the lounge. A large space punctuated by three turkish rugs. I’ll open one of the full length windows and step right out on the tiny balcony, above the roar of the street, and look right towards Mont Martre.
Instead, I’m in Perth. My bed is king size and is easy to get in and out of. The toilet has just one door, not the weird two door arrangement of the Paris place. The morning is a chorus of birds which excavate memories of Perth laid decade upon decade from my childhood to now. I’m back at home with my deluxe yoga altar instead of my cut-down travel version. My life is fortunate, privileged and rich with family and friends.
And yet. And yet.
I continue to wrestle with the mystery of travel and its immense hold on me.
As a fourteen-year-old, making the long haul flight back from London to Perth, sobbing the entire time in the wake of the excruciating parting with my brother, I declared travel to be destructive. It cleaved kith and kin apart. But as I wandered the empty suburban streets after landing back in Perth. They were such a contrast from the bustle and rush of European cities, and I wondered if there’d been a nuclear holocaust to clear the streets so completely.
By the time I was a young adult, I was counting down the years and milestones (degree, early career) before I could move to Europe, and was contemptuous of my peers who’d never left Perth.
Once I’d settled in London as my home in 1990, I focused not on travelling, but living somewhere else, trying on that life as my permanent future. I visited Perth twice in six years, ricocheting from one joyous hello to a tearful goodbye with friends and family before returning to my London life.
Fast forward four years to me as young mother, back in Perth while I worked out my next steps, grasping my half-Greek baby to my breast and hearing each plane overhead as another siren call of her Greek father’s abandonment.
Or not even another year when I was a jaded single mother, returning for good to Australia, having having failed at building a Greek-Australian family. Once I re-settled back in Perth, the sound of planes overhead no longer conjured abandonment; they were a neutral hum in my once again free and enjoyable life. I turned my face away from Europe and focused on building a life in Australia.
By the time my daughter was seven she’d become an excellent long haul traveller, and we made two Greek summer holiday visits to her father, until financial circumstances put a stop to that. My daughter and I both missed Europe, but what to do? By 2016, I’d rallied to be able to afford to travel independently to Greece with my daughter. I could enjoy the wonders of Greece’s beaches and islands without having to teach English, or parent a toddler.
And since 2016, it’s become necessary to get myself to Europe once a year.
“It’s home,” my daughter and I agree. A second home. Not a home we’d like to live in permanently, with its endless winters and poorer lifestyle. But it’s a place we need to visit to feel whole.
I travel and try on daily life, for weeks at a time, pushing back against the reality of my home, my life here. Like a I’m pushing against a leg press machine that will never want to return to its resting position.
And then, I come home. And am grateful. And plan the next trip.