27/04/2008 - 7:16 p.m.

Reading Micheal King's "Being Paheka Now". The points of commonality and divergence. The shared Irish Catholic childhood, similar despite mine being post Vatican II. The descriptions of landscape. The sense of cities. While he actively engaged with Maori, not as issues per se but as part of his work as historian and journalist, my life stayed much more within European confines.

The strange place of my own life, due to circumstances of birth being in some sense both an immigrant in my own right and in others part of the established New Zealand community. Though white skinned having no other place to call home. Or perhaps again, arriving at 3, having no place to call home at all, roots half planted torn up but never quite replanted. Even now the accent gives me away as "not from here" in both New Zealand and England.

Feeling my lost soul
Bels