Noelle McCarthy: The homeward-bound blues

Everyone who has ever travelled anywhere knows the pain of returning - that bittersweet pang of familiarity that colours the first flush of home.

It's a vivid sort of pain, composed of the relief of being met with familiar sights mingled with an irritation born of the fact that nothing has even bothered to change while you were gone.

How else to explain the fit of petulance that came over me today, settled in the back of a taxi listening to Mike Hosking dissect the death of a chain of CD shops as I finished the last leg of a 36-hour journey home to Auckland.

To be fair, I'm interested in where music retail will go in the next two years; I download just like everybody else, but having spent the last two weeks in deepest mystical Peru, I admit to succumbing to a fit of travel-worn pique at the stories that led the news this morning on Newstalk ZB.

Petrol's expensive and a jockey got in a fight. Stop the press. Excuse my flippancy. In an increasingly irrelevant news environment everything is copy, but sometimes you have to laugh.

And that's what's so lovely about coming home, isn't it? The notion that however far you travel, whatever it is that you do, there will always be one place in the world that's still familiar.

Sitting in the back of an Auckland Co-op cab, soothed by the familiar staccato of Holmes' heir-apparent (who knew CHOGM was so interesting?), I succumbed to a rush of nostalgia for the country I left.

We mock En Zed for being little, parochial, gauche, but there is something hugely heartening about being a small country at large. I may affect that same demeanour of jaundice at our national concerns; I was the first to sneer at our World Cup Bereaved.

The size of the world outside of here makes me itch and wriggle but all the same, I'm glad Mike Hosking had nothing shocking to tell me this morning; I'm glad New Zealand is OK.

There is nothing wrong with nothing changing, nothing wrong with a safe pair of hands. And nothing wrong with freshening up the furniture either, as proven by Kate Hawkesby's crisp delivery of the news.

Between her bulletins and his wordy broadcast, their rendering of the mini-drama that was this morning in New Zealand was fluent and smart and funny and made me glad to be home.

Forgive my enthusiasm; I never saw them together on the telly. That's probably a good thing though, from what I hear about the rampant sexual chemistry between them - not to mention his hair.

They say travel broadens the mind. It's not the destination, it's the journey, in the words of my most patronising aunt. I'll try to defy that particular genetic imperative and not tell all and sundry how great it's been to get away these last two weeks. It has been though - it's been fun and wonderful and super-fantastic and any other superlative you care to insert right here that usually applies to shoes.

And yet, Away can't exist without Home, which for me today meant Hosking and Hawkesby, the demise of Sounds and a $70 cab ride. And the irritation and relief of being back on Ponsonby Rd. Which, as you know, hasn't changed a bit.

For someone who's had a ball on expenses, I'm feeling quite downbeat today. I realise that the things I've seen in the last two weeks, the beauty and the grandeur and the sheer difference of it all, is repeated the world over.

And maybe there isn't enough time to see everything.

For every Peru there's a Jordan and a Namibia and a Slovakia and a Madagascar still unseen, and the fact remains there's not enough time. Not enough time to see it all and marvel and gape and feel like a silly tourist but not care. So go. Go now. Cash it in, pick your one place and pack up and leave. Even if it's only for two weeks.

We'll all still be here when you get back. Mike and Kate will never sound better, I promise.