When you're stuck in a provincial town in the middle of nowhere, all you want to do is escape. And when you're flung thousands of miles away at last, each muscle in your body aches to be back home. Back home, we clogged the narrow streets like rats in a sewer, and yet there was so much individuality, richness, nuance. Here it is all wide open spaces, clean and green, sanitised of confusion, sanitised of life, bloodless, bare. But there are moments, oh yes. A ray of sunlight shining on someone's tender blonde hair, sitting on a bench marvelling at the moss on a tree trunk, being accosted on the street with the plaintive rendering of Faure's Pie Jesu on a violin...Life, in its infinite mercy, affords us respite if not absolution.