After living for 20 years in Melbourne, ageing parents and a desire for fresh fruit drew me back to Adelaide.
I have good memories of growing up in the City of Churches in the 1960s. As a kid, I roamed with impunity around the streets of suburban Goodwood with its creeks and large Greek and Italian communities.
Adelaide has a large, country-town feel about it. Sputes (sports utes) abound and the word 'bogan' is a term of endearment.
The mullet hair cut, check shirt and ugg boots, so fashionable in the days of Sherbert and Skyhooks, have never really gone out of fashion here.
These are my people.
The 'six degrees of separation' theory is alive and well as strangers play 'who knows who' under a pale blue sky drinking dark Coopers Ale in a beer garden full of frangipani.
The Central Market is a sensual delight. When I was five I'd stand at the Charlesworth Nut Stand every week and a jolly woman would pinch my cheeks and give me a small bag of sugar-coated peanuts. Charlesworths are still there.
Nowhere on earth can one find nectarines and peaches in such chin-dripping quality and abundance as in Adelaide. The black alluvial soils of the Murray Valley are perfect for growing stone fruit.
I can trace Adelaide by its scents: the pink fairly floss of the Royal Show, Perrimans Pastry Shop in North Adelaide, the acrid electricity smell of the Glenelg tram and the crisp, clear air of Waterfall Gully, to name just a few.
Back then class ran through the city like a fault line down King William Street, with the blue blood Protestants to the east and the Catholic working class to the west.
Although I ended up going to an establishment school, I never really fitted in. One of the benefits of being born Catholic, poor and from a single mother was never having to worry about being invited to the Fotheringham-Smythes' pool parties. Such is life.
I mixed with a rat pack of young friends who cared more about surfing and music, than who was doing what to whom.
We used to write letters to the editor of the daily paper calling on pedestrians to walk on one side of the footpath in the morning and on the other after midday. We were idiots.
Yet shadows have fallen over the City of Churches. Some months ago the Victorian Premier John Brumby called Adelaide a 'backwater'. He's half right.
In some