If anyone had told me when I arrived in Australia 32 years ago that one day I would return to the UK with six new family members and my mother’s ashes, I would have said don’t talk nonsense.
But it all came true, and despite the cost, the leg-crushing flight and sleep disorientation, we did it anyway.
Migrants live with a nagging ghost that grows louder during every year of absence from the homeland.
It’s a fear of missing out combined with postcard nostalgia and finger-wagging guilt that keeps the migrant thinking — next year when the house is paid off, or the year after that when the kids have gone or the year after that when the garden is looking invincible, or in my case when the dog has died — we can finally go back to the old country and lay those nagging ghosts to rest.
When the nag became a scream in 2016, I returned to the country of my birth after a 20-year absence.
I returned again in 2018. I then vowed that would be my last visit.
The clogged roads, the bad coffee, the queues, the cold and the old ghosts came as a rude shock.
I’d been spoiled in Australia.
But when my 30-something son and his three young children for the first time showed an interest in his British roots, that was enough to think of returning to silence those nagging ghosts once again.
It wasn’t going to be a whirlwind dash.
We were going for four weeks and three days.
I’ve never been interested much in military invasion tactics, but I did have a flick through Sun Tzu’s The Art of War.
Someone had to come up with a plan for eight people aged from six to 72 to visit three different countries and stay in four locations and remain cheerful.
Accommodation, car hire, plane and train tickets, taxis, meals and interesting places to visit are just the tip of the travelling iceberg.
When there’s extended family like nephews and cousins to visit, a diplomatic balancing act has to be performed to ensure everyone gets the same amount of smile-time and handshakes.
By the third week I was dreaming of endless blue days on my verandah with no decisions to make, just simple conversations with Bert the magpie, or Walker the Maremma sheepdog.
But tomorrow was going to be another set of tickets for another train ride, another bowl of warm flavoured milk called coffee, and another strange bed all under another grey sky.
Nevertheless, there were some big highlights: joining the circle of six family generations on a crisp and sunny autumn day in a lonely Scottish graveyard; climbing Glastonbury Tor for a view over Avalon with my grandchildren, who were immersed in the tales of King Arthur and his knights; crab and fossil hunting under a blue sky on the geological wonderland of Kilve Beach in Somerset; exploring Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, bustling with people from across the world who claim Scottish descent; joining the rush to be Scottish and buying a Clan Fraser tartan scarf; soaking up the haunting history of Wales among abandoned slate mines in the foothills of Snowdonia; and finally, walking to the little wooden lighthouse on Burnham-on-Sea’s beach with my grandchildren.
It was from here that so many of my teenage dreams set sail.
Some of them found safe harbour.
Some became ghosts, which are now, hopefully, laid to rest.
John Lewis is a former journalist at The News.