A Fat Freddy’s gig, an hour in the company of Radio NZ‘s best and brightest, and a well-timed care package from a member of my whanau (by choice rather than by birth) and I’m right back in a cafe on Ponsonby Road sipping a long black and humming an SJD tune. You can take the boy out of New Zealand…

First of all, I know this may be soooo last year of me (apologies to the Kiwi readers) but Fat Freddy’s Drop were just mindblowing. They came on stage to a full Barfly, introduced by Mark ‘Slave’ Williams, and were greeted by an impromptu and hearty rendition of Tutira mai by the handful of Brummie kiwis in the crowd.

A two and a half hour gig followed that bordered on a spiritual experience. A crowd of Brits with a few kiwis thrown into the mix were nodding and swaying and beaming with joy all as one. Glenn (or was it Clint? – it was loud in there) from the ‘Tron was distributing hugs – and Irish Gabe, who hadn’t known at all what to expect, was pretty much completely blown away by it all.

The album’s great. We’ve all heard it a million times, and it’s still great. But the live experience is where Fat Freddy’s really live. And what a dancer that Ho Pepa is…

Friends of ours who had never set foot in the country came away feeling homesick for New Zealand. The Moseley crowd are still buzzing from that – and the superbly successful Roots de Ville event that shook Digbeth to its foundations that same day.

A change of gears, and I spent Sunday evening in a tie (second time in 15 years – the first being my job interview two weeks ago) giving a keynote address via Skype video to a conference of radio programme producers and engineers at Radio New Zealand.

My assigned topic was, broadly, the digital future of radio. I spoke for about 20 minutes, then spent the next hour addressing questions of copyright, blogging, podcasting, tagging, user-generated content and the responsibilities of a public broadcaster in a digital age.

And you know what? Radio New Zealand programme-makers are smart, insightful and curious people. Exactly as you’d hope.

They made reference to the fact that I’d been highly critical of the RNZ website in the past – but instead of requiring an apology and a back-pedal in the face of the incredible advances they’ve made on that front, they said they’d be keeping an eye on the blog to see what I got cross about next so they’d know what to work on – so that was nice.

I won’t bore you with the notes from my presentation here. If you’re interested, you can email me and I’ll send you a copy. It’s not a transcript, but it’ll give you an idea.

And finally, I arrived at work this morning – a Jet Jaguar remix of Trinity Roots playing on the iPod – to find a care package from home: proper roasted coffee beans from Cafe L’Affare, Gravity and Atlas (the smell in my office right now is to die for) – and DVD copies of the new series of Give It A Whirl. Thanks, Joe!!!

I don’t often get homesick – but the more I have to do with New Zealand and New Zealanders, the more I feel that although I’m clearly exactly where I’m meant to be, I’m not where I really belong.