(It might be helpful to read the entry previous to this and the one immediately before that, to understand what I'm talking about.)

I'm continuing to discuss why I don't write things set in Portugal -- or at least not long works and not with any true degree of involvement in it.  This post covers points  2, 3 &4 -- all of which try to explain some degree of alienation from my native land.  For those readers inclined to be offended or upset by it, I want to make clear I'm not making broad inferences, here.  This is my life, it is how I perceived/perceive things and it is my relationship with the place where I was born and raised.  Some of it I have no explanation for.  Other parts I can make broad guesses at what caused them.  Most of al, though, this is my life and this is my relationship with two countries.  I'm telling you right now you have no right to be offended by anything I feel or felt.  If you do, take it up with yourself and your relationship with your own country.

Let's start by establishing that I've always been a stranger in a strange land and, to some extent, I'll always be one.  However, as far as I'm concerned, I'm home now, having not so much immigrated as returned to the place where my soul always belonged.  I have pinned to my corkboard the following quote, which says how I feel far more eloquently than I ever could:

"I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place.  Accident has cast them amid strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage.  they may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever known.  Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves.  Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history.  Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs.  Here is the home he sought, and he will settle amid scenes that he has never seen before, among men he has never known, as though they were familiar to him from his birth.  Here at last he finds rest." -- from The Moon and Sixpence by W. Somerset Maugham 1919