Sissy Boy Homeland 9 Mar 2010
Mary Fenwick
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One weekend in Amsterdam and thirty years of accumulated, grown-up responsibilities fall away.
I sleep on a stranger’s couch, giggle at shop signs (“hier kunt” and Sissy-Boy Homeland), and think a lot about special relationships.
The couch belongs to a friend of a friend. The signs say “hier kunt u pinnen” for chip and pin payments. And the falling in love? That’s with the city. And the Dutch.
What other city feels so foreign and so familiar at the same time? It looks European, with the cobbles and canals. But absolutely everyone speaks faultless, colloquial, unaccented English. And they have the friendly, straight-forward attitude of Kiwis.
The couch-owner, Kerry, has lived in Amsterdam for five years, and like me has been away from New Zealand for most of his adult life.
He says “I couldn’t go back to London now, it’s so hectic. Here, it doesn’t matter what you wear, but in England they are putting you in a box from the moment they see you, and certainly the moment you open your mouth”.
We talk about the stages of your love for your country. To start with it’s the best, nothing else exists, it’s The One.
Then you go your separate ways and for a couple of years it’s easier just to forget, to put it completely out of your mind.
Sometimes a song, a smell, an unexpected laugh gives you a pang. For me, it’s a phrase from Don McGlashan in his Front Lawn incarnation: “we are the people who eat toast and butter and jam; people in other places just do not understand”.
At times, the siren song gets louder. Maybe you go back to give it another try. But it’s changed; you’ve both changed. While you’ve been living your life, New Zealand has too.
Years and years later, something big – birth or death or children starting school - brings you back together. You realise that what you share can’t be taken away: it’s part of who you are, wherever you are.
Walking back to the Amsterdam Central train station, we pass the East India Company building. That’s where it all began, when the company sent Abel Tasman off to find the fabled rich southern continent in 1642.
And two blocks further on, a shop window for kiwiseeds.com – marijuana plants with names like Mt Cook and South Star. The slogan says “the grass is always greener on the other side”.
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