DUNEDIN

“So Matt,” he said in his thick Kiwi accent, “How does the sun go down in your country then?”

“Well it just sort of slowly... sets...” I said, sounding more incredulous and more British than ever, “It doesn’t just switch off like a light bulb!”

My driver laughed at me. The street lamps of Dunedin flicked on, strange and white, one by one, illuminating the rain-washed concrete and lamplit bungalows that flew by. It was all so familiar, yet somehow far away, all at once, together. The telegraph wires, the postboxes, the wide pavements and the damp night air. And moments before it had been broad, overcast, daylight.

“Slowly?” he carried on, chuckling. Who doesn’t understand the sun set? I wondered. He just gripped the steering wheel. “That’s hilarious,” he said, still grinning.

Apparently, my brain is better at conjuring a New Zealand accent than I am. For some reason, I also seem to have the subconscious idea that when you’re that close to the South Pole, there’s no twilight; the sun just drops out of the sky and it’s night before you have chance to flick on your headlamps. Day, click, night. That can’t be right, can it? And why Dunedin? Why am I dreaming about Dunedin? I’ve never even been to New Zealand!

I looked it up later, hours after I’d swept the bleary night out of my eyes and had gone to work. It’s a real place, Dunedin, a city on the South Island! It was founded by Scots and is named poetically enough, after Edinburgh. But it’s obviously nowhere near Scotland.

In fact, Dunedin is just about as far away from here as it’s possible to get. It’s statistically the farthest city from London, and, according to the antipodesmap.com, Dunedin is the closest city to the point that is exactly on the other side of the world to me, where I am... right now. I’m literally dreaming of being on the other side of the world.

I had no idea.

It does have ordinary sunsets though, so my dream-driver was quite wrong to laugh at me whoever he was, just as my brain was wrong to paint it. However, with its proximity to the International Date Line... it does turn out that Dunedin is one of the first places anywhere on the planet that you can see the sunrise on a particular day.

I have no idea what any of this means. Sunset, sunrise, the end of one thing far away, the start of another? Why the car journey? Where was that driver taking me? And how has my brain imagined a place I have no memory of?

How does the sun go down in my country, I wonder? I could spend a long time guessing what that means, what hidden things are there in the subtext.

Tonight, it went down behind the dark December clouds as the lights across the lake rippled over the water. The grey afternoon faded into a deep blue and a rich purple. Then the night went starry black, and I followed the trail of brake lights home. That’s how, here.

Maybe I need to start living out of this world then, and let go of a few things here. Maybe so that just as quickly, somewhere crisp and alive and beautiful, the sun, the real Sun... can rise up, and show me the morning. And then maybe everything will be okay.