In Bluey, the closing chord of three seasons of a fairly interesting and varied life is the thirty-minute special, "The Sign." The whole third season builds towards it gradually; it's merely the trigger for everything that came before. In the small details the show is still episodic and it doesn't matter where you jump in, but if you know the context the picture comes together far better and it hits harder.
I don't know how many of you haven't seen it, so: spoiler alert.
Broadly it's an episode about selling a house and about a father wanting a better life for his children. They decide to sell the house in Brisbane and move, because he's been offered a better job somewhere. Obviously decisions like that don't happen without turmoil and difficulty; the children don't entirely grasp what's going on, and the younger daughter only understands what "selling the house" means in the final minutes, when they carry her table away.
An Australian, American — and British — feature: when a house is for sale, a sign goes up outside with the agent's contacts.
At the last moment the sale falls through by accident and, since this is a series about a happy world, the father decides to hell with the whole idea and pulls the sign out of the ground.
It seems to me this is a fairly widespread desire in our generation: to have your own home. Not in the sense of square metres or any specifics, but rather a general feeling. I've rented a lot of flats, lived in different countries, seen more of the world than the average person did a hundred years ago — but the heart demands a den of its own, and that's where the question arises.
Within the framework of immigrant misanthropy I take my bearings from Dovlatov, except that I drink considerably less. Of all the countries I've lived in there's only one where I felt like one of the locals — Australia, built by immigrants, obviously. And if there it's a pleasant little hammock of understanding, albeit at a distance, then in the UK you land on a thousand-year-old stone and take a kidney punch on the way down.
I'm aware that I'll never be "one of them" here, even with a passport — first and foremost in my own head. This place will never become "my" home, for all its brilliance, and there really is a great deal of brilliance here. Like a party you sort of invited yourself to, where you sip your drink quietly off to the side, expecting to be thrown out.
I haven't really found a way out. Another move in the next few years, before the new passport, is simply unthinkable. After that, the roots will be too deep in terms of the primary priority — my daughter's education. My forecasting horizon always slides down to months rather than years, and planning anything is simply laughable.
Our generation was handed an amazing time. A pity that biology takes its toll with the years, and the urge to be grounded and to find a home somewhere starts gnawing at the brain harder and harder.
