Oceans Apart

Here I am in rainy Wellington (New Zealand) feeling homesick for Budapest. It's good to be in touch with everyone this way. After spending three years or so in Budapest and Prague in the early 1990s I dragged husband Tom Pullar-Strecker off to my homeland, New Zealand, which seems a long way away, and in fact, is a long way away from Europe and the UK! We now have a three-year-old boy Zac who has just started kindergarten up the road and who when he is not at kindergarten is bouncing off the walls at home. Tom works four days a week editing the IT section of the DominionPost newspaper and spends Mondays looking after Zac while I write for specialist offshore pharmaceutical, science and biotechnology publications. We've not long been back from our summer holidays in the south island of New Zealand where we spent most of our time in cafes, at the beach, or following along behind while Zac rode his trike at full speed down the village footpaths of Akaroa. I found I preferred building sandcastles and hanging out in cafes to freelance journalism, but now that it's February, I guess it is time to get back to real life.