Almost 30 years after leaving her city of birth, Janet Groat has discovered that Auckland really does feel like ‘home,’ writes Kate Waite.

Leaving Auckland at the tender age of just three months, it would be a full 30 years before Janet Groat returned to the city – only to fall in love with it for herself Janet and her husband Kane quickly made the decision to swap their predominantly indoor life in a small Edinburgh flat for a far more active outdoors one in New Zealand, leading Janet full circle back to the city where she was born.

Life in the UK was “depressing” to use Janet’s word. Living in a small flat in central Edinburgh, Janet and Kane’s days were spent at work and their evenings in front of the TV. “Our lifestyle was like this mostly because we were uncomfortable being outside when it got dark,” Janet explains. Living in central Edinburgh meant that weekends were all about crowds of drunk people. “Once, when I was with my husband walking down the street, someone head-butted him for no reason. My car also got vandalised a few times, but the worst time was when someone put a traffic cone through the windscreen.”

However, it wasn’t just life in the city that concerned them. Janet recalls an incident where her nephew got jumped by a gang of young adults when he and his friend were walking home – purely for the reason that he didn’t look like he was from that particular small town. “These little things wear away at you over time and you find yourself in a bit of a rut. We thought there must be more to life than this and started to seriously think about moving abroad.” The decision to leave having been made, there was one destination that immediately called to them.

Back in the 1970s Janet’s parents had themselves decided to pursue the dream of a new life abroad, emigrating to Auckland. It wasn’t to work out for them, though, and they returned to the UK with one additional member of the family, their three-month-old

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