Nottingham, England | When I first lived in Britain, as a still-teenage uni student, I was often tormented by acute homesickness. One bitterly cold and bleakly grey midwinter’s day, I was walking in a north London park and came across a little animal enclosure. Sitting in the corner of a cage, hunched, shivering and miserable, was a red-necked wallaby.

My aching young heart went out to this small and wretched fellow Antipodean, trapped and suffering, so far from his sun-kissed home.