Home Sweet Home?

"Home is where the heart is", so they say. I agree, or rather, I have to agree. A long time has passed since I last contributed to this site and it is not necessarily from lack of trying (although, maybe a little more than I'd like to admit). Over the last year, a lot has happened and in the movement of it all this website sort of just fell into the background. It was also a little to do with the awkwardness in creating the blogs, which required me to move so much of the site around for something as simple as a paragraph. This has been fixed now, thanks to the addition of a blog tool Wix so kindly revealed recently, and so now I am back.

So where do I start? There is far too much for me to fill you all in on in one sitting, so I guess you'll have to keep watching this space. A good spot for me to begin, I reckon, is the obvious topic of how I have returned home from being abroad. Yes, I am now back in Australia and that has amounted to a new topic being added to the Blog page (if you haven't already noticed). To tie in with the title of this post, however, I need to point out that I have returned home without actually returning "home". Before arriving back in the Land of Aus, I was shocked to find that half my family had moved to Melbourne and the other half were moving to Hallett, on the edge of the South Australian outback. As a result, I arrived back to what was once one of my family homes under a lease agreement my mother and stepfather had managed to procure for me and two of my stepbrothers. In a way, the place was still home, it just no longer felt much like it.

What was I supposed to expect though? You can't disappear for nearly three years and expect everything to stay the same while you're away. Various friends of mine had also moved, one was getting married and I got thrown into a work life that left me little time enjoy the place I grew up in. On the plus side, my partner has joined me here from her native France.

So this is why I have to believe that home is where the heart is. I can no longer call a house a home, as I have since moved from the house I returned to in Tanunda, and the Barossa Valley and Adelaide no longer feel like the places I came to know growing up. They will forever be places that instill a strange sense of nostalgia in me, somewhere familiar, yet now different. I have done a lot of growing up, I feel, in the UK and it is now time for me to accept that adulthood is a stage of life full of constant change. At least now I can be grateful that I have family and friends all over the world whom I love and make me feel welcome.

Keep an eye on this website over the next few weeks and I will fill you in on the adventures that have taken place since I last posted.

Until next time! (and hopefully it's not another year)

AdzPapa