I now live on top of a bakery, where Old and New Roads meet, next to the oldest lighthouse on the island.

In the mornings, there is sourdough in the air above my bed and The Harbour from the kitchen window. In the evenings, there is a moment just before dusk, when it should already be dark, but the cracks around the doors glow gold, the shadows soften and the walls of my entire, tiny flat are alight.

It lasts eleven minutes.

The first day of Ramadan was a day after storms, where the rain blew in horizontal streams, and rich people’s beachside infinity pools fell into the sea. Through the clouds, someone had found the new moon.

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My kitchen is on the sea, sailing to me in boxes.

I have Japanese knives in my suitcase, in newspaper and masking tape. My cocktail shaker is in a wardrobe in Kuala Lumpur. I’ve lost track of the location of my only reliable potato peeler.

There is an Airbnb in a converted nurses’ residence with a bookshelf arranged by colour; charming ferns in the sunroom, but no hot water in the shower after I’ve washed my hair.

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You know the feeling: those afternoons, after an enormous lunch, when the sunshine is delicious, so you curl up for a nap with the sheets twisted around your ankles.

You dream in high contrast - saturated meat dreams - spinning images filled with bad decisions. Then you wake, hours after you thought you set your alarm, and it’s dark. You can’t sleep because you just woke, you don’t know what day it is anymore and there’s a pervasive sense of annoyance; annoyance because even the surreality is vague and restless.

There is familiarity in this new city; a disconcerting sense of stepping backwards into a long-lost Australian childhood, in a place I’ve never lived.

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I didn’t tell people I was going, because I hadn’t told myself.

Sydney was a place where other people moved; after which, we’d agree to meet in other, more interesting places, because Australia was the place you went when you were tired, had had enough, had given up.

I hadn’t given up at all. There was no decision made; in its stead, a sort of tacit acceptance, a vague sense of okay.

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Over the week of New Year’s Eve, a transplanted community establishes itself, Nairobi relocated to the seaside: addresses and invitations given in the language of rented-holiday-homes. Come for lunch at New Moon, drinks tonight at Bembea.

We know each other from other places: Juba, Mogadishu, Goma, riotous Kenyan dinner parties that end with muddy dancing on the parquet.

Ours is Italian-owned, glazed butterscotch terraces, with a floating scent of almost-jasmine, rising and pervasive, its source a mystery, and a cook named James wearing a chef’s jacket, sweat and earnestness.

What do you like to cook, I ask him.

Fish-chicken-meat-pasta-rice-lobster-thermidor-anything-all, James says.

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The theme for Nairobi’s Polo Club ball is Arabian Nights. My attempt at flying carpet is a semi-hemmed flying dishrag.

It is the Muthaiga Club, so I have visions of men in tailored tuxedoes and women draped in jewel-toned silks; Karen Blixen, pink gin, on white tablecloths.

I walk into a crowd of faux Indian maharajas who went lunchtime shopping at Diamond Plaza, deciding that the unintended racial slur was worth the convenience of a mass-produced kaftan. There are bellyfuls of jangly belts and a human rights researcher dressed as Aladdin’s monkey, Abu.

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I’ve brought negroni ingredients, because that’s what we’re supposed to drink on a night that’s nearly the last.

The last remaining orange is dusted in flour and black sesame seeds. I wash it in the bathroom sink with a bit of hand soap, and slice it into our glasses.

We stand and sip at the kitchen island where we’ve drunk countless cups of Earl Grey, poured wine through unending renovations, eaten Sunday afternoon madeleines, planned adventures, toasted a marriage, commiserated break ups and break ins, and sipped negronis; so many negronis.

Now it is covered with keys which open unknown doors. The ghost of where her pasta maker used to sit is pale and clamped to the granite.

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When I think of Greece, it is of the happiest day I can remember: dripping salt from a foraging dive next to a crooked peninsula, legs dangling in glassy water from a boat named for the moon; fresh urchins perched on my lap, delicate ahinos roe to be gently lifted from shells, licked from fingers.

When relationships end, you must unknot lives that have become intertwined.

I once dated an actuary, who created an excel spreadsheet of our joint possessions, electrical items depreciated for time. But how do you divide the spoils of experience, places, tastes?

I didn’t want the Greek man who broke my heart to flavour my memories with bitterness, so I vowed to return, for a reclamation.

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When I turned 21, we went to the seaside.

It was spring, so we drank champagne on the pebbles in folds of viscous mist with disembodied hands and plastic glasses, picked at clams in paper cups.

We lay on Brighton Pier and stretched bare legs in pocketfuls of sunshine blown by the seabreeze. We went to a restaurant with enormous windows and ate panfried sole with beurre noisette. It was an escape from London that involved running for the train. Later, the escapes spanned continents.

Returning is a peculiar thing. It lacks the profundity of epiphany, yet buries itself in your skin, your hair; woodsmoke the week after a fire. There is fleeting familiarity on every London corner; uneasiness, gentle self-judgement.

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