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When I was four years old, the centre my universe was on the corner of Bradford Street and Centre road, where anything could happen. For instance, brushing my teeth was a true source of achievement and I took it very seriously, perhaps because according to my parents, I was the girl with the whitest teeth on Centre road (which runs about 15km!). Saturdays’ until dusk were spent riding my bike up and down Bradford street with little Billy and Emma from next door and Phillip and his brother from down the end of the street, they were the older kids that also had a pool in their yard and Tammy and her older sister from across road. The day was full of stopping to inspect the front yards of the neighbors we didn’t know, playing hopscotch, street cricket and even jacks. Does anyone remember jacks? The end of the street turned into another and had a large green fence with barbed wire that was the boundary of the golf course. The end of that street also represented the boundary of our world on bikes according to our parents. We never knew why exactly, and we took it seriously. Until one day when I didn’t and trundled down the street alongside that large fence and around the next corner and then next one. The houses down there sort of looked the same, just a bit darker and a bit more mysterious.. and one had a jungle garden that totally needed to be explored. I got off my bike and strode on in. There were cool flowers I hadn’t seen before. A giant ceramic frog. A pond. With fish in it! I heard a sound behind me and a man was there. I think he had white hair but I can’t be sure because while he was probably only wondering what I was doing there, I was running for my life. All of 8 steps out of the front yard and on to my bike. By now of course it was pretty much dark and by the time I rode home, and of course I got lost as I had gone so far, I was in big trouble. No bike for Maryanne for quite a while after that.

A few years later, we moved. Our new back yard was adventure itself. There were grape vines hanging overhead on trellises near the back door, beyond that strawberry plants overflowed their beds. A bungalow right at the back of the yard was filled with someone else’s bric-a-brac; the most interesting kind. Oddly, an old blacked out incinerator filled the other back corner that led to a lane and the veggie patch.

The centerpiece of the yard was the lemon tree. It had alter like status in the middle of the yard, on a raised square of plush green grass, hand rolled out in green velvety rolls when we first moved in. I hadn’t been allowed to walk on it, because otherwise the grass wouldn’t take if it were stepped on. So the lemon tree had been off limits, but now, the grass was thriving and the tree was mine to conquer. I gazed up at the tree and debated internally how I would approach it. Its trunk was pale and mottled, but it was smooth. A shoulder height solid branch jutted out, and lemons dangled way above my head, with a clear blue sky as their canvas. I hoisted myself up to the first branch and sat on it triumphantly. From there, going up from branch to branch was easy-peasy japanesey. There was no sound, no sign of anyone in my family to tell me no. Again. I stood up on the branch and climbed up to the next one, then one more… I was three quarters of the way up the tree. I could see the neighbor’s neighbor’s yards.   I put a foot out to move to another branch. But I missed it. In slow motion I fell down the tree, my left cheek scraped against one of those conquered branches, my foot hit another. I was on the grass.   “Maaaaaaammmmmmmm”. She couldn’t hear me. I hobbled through the yard into the kitchen, my tears stinging my burning face. There was a lot of blood for a kid. My mum screamed when she saw me. Now we were both screaming….. Dettol and band aids followed. And I still have a cool scar on my ankle to show for it.

Many, many years later after finishing school and spending 10 or so years in working in banking I set off on another adventure. I was ready to leave it all behind, to have a completely different kind of life. I rented my flat out, I sold my car, my superfluous stuff, clothes, CD’s and the like …. And I bought a one-way ticket to Dusseldorf (it was the cheapest) and left. I lasted 3 days before flying to Milan….. I saw the Duomo and all of the shoe shops before spending the day in picturesque Genoa. From there my travels took me to Nice, Grasse & Monaco for what could have been Maryanne’s church tour of Europe in partial sun. But no! I redirected my travels to be guided by mouth and went on to Bouillabaisse in Marseille, Pintxos in San Sebastian, roast Pig Madrid, two weeks of tapas and sangria in Barcelona where I considered starting my new life undeterred by my lack of Spanish. But the real summer hadn’t started yet, so I decided to pass the time by heading north. Amsterdam for Jazz and Febo, Prague for late night dancing and dumplings then Vienna… for an uneventful pork schnitzel. … and finally driven by an odd desire to work and a grasp of the greek language, Santorini.. where I began my new and exciting life.. as a waitress. While Santorini is beautiful and every corner is a real life postcard, 42 days in a row of work on my feet reduced my fun ratio to about 30:70 and I thought a 60:40 ratio was a minimum. So I hopped over to Naxos and put my feet up by the sea for a week and then a friend I met in Nice got in touch and invited me to London…. 6 months earlier I had sat on my back doorstep and said to myself ‘no matter what happens, I’m not moving to London’…..