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There have been many places I've lived and worked in which at the time I was only too happy to leave again and yet which in old age I look back on and wished I had stayed a little longer.
Thursday Island in the Torres Strait was such a place which I hurriedly left when the big fish in a small pond I was working for became a tin-pot dictator who wanted to keep the pond small so he could remain big.
Another thing was that I was far too young and ambitious to join a community that languidly killed time like characters in a Graham Greene novel. Some of them liked to imagine that they're just hanging out for a while, just running the engine on idle at the traffic light, waiting for the signal to change. But after several years of having avoided life's struggle they began to wonder ... would they ever leave?
I did leave which at the time seemed the right thing to do before I too, like some Dorothy in the poppy fields of Oz, would succumb and doze away the rest of my life on this soporific island in a tropical sea.
So I'm not crying because it's over; I smile because it happened.
