As I started to write this, I was sat halfway through the
seemingly never-ending train journey down from Scotland to the south of
England. If ever you wanted, as the song says, a thousand memories of heading home for Christmas,
I could regale you with stories of the many eventful incidents, tedious delays
and colourful characters that I’ve met over the past few years on this journey
back and forth between north and south. For this trip, National Rail, in
their infinite wisdom, had assigned me a seat usually reserved for a disabled
person, in amongst the old ladies of the quiet carriage. When I politely asked
the elderly lady adjacent to me if she wouldn’t mind if I moved her things from
my seat in order for me to sit there, she became quite cross and wouldn’t let
me take my reservation as I was ‘not an invalid’ and she might need the space
to stretch her foot. I offered to sit elsewhere if it was going to upset her
but unfortunately the train was so full I had to return to my original seat
with a promise to her that she could keep her suitcase in my foot space in case
she needed to stretch. She then proceeded to have several very loud
conversations on her mobile phone, despite being reminded by the conductor that
it was the quiet carriage. Her
phone calls were, however, very important, as she repeatedly reassured me.
Personally I felt that the regular updates on the weather that she was giving
her son could possibly have waited – especially as it seems to me that anyone
who is so keen on observing the rules of the rails should also probably respect the quiet carriage.
It later turned out that she wasn’t even booked into the
seat next to me and so, when the rightful owner of F9 got on at Derby, I had to
help move her, her suitcase and her foot into several different seats until she
finally settled. The journey rumbled on in this farcical manner with another
old lady nearby forgetting which suitcase belonged to her, prompting a long
delay at Birmingham whilst she instructed different National Rail employees to
look for it. Unfortunately she told each one to look out for a suitcase of a
different colour meaning it took rather a while – and one failed attempt by her
to make off with someone else’s grey case – before the correct, navy blue case,
was found. Usually I adore the elderly and their whimsical ways but in this
instance I wanted to get my schoolmarm on and order them in my fiercest voice
to pick a seat, pick a suitcase and stick with it! All in a long journey home…
Over the past few weeks I’ve been thinking a lot about home.
Naturally in this season, people ask where you will be for Christmas and, without
thinking, I reply, ‘Oh, I’m going home’. It’s true; I am heading home for
Christmas, just as I have done every year since I was eleven. It’s what most
people do towards the end of December. But what has puzzled me is what I really
mean when I say this. Home, as a physical entity, isn’t so clear in my mind. This
is partly because my Mother and Step-Father recently upped sticks and moved to
the other side of England making this my first Christmas in our new house. Yet,
if I’m honest, it probably hasn’t been clear where home is since my parents
separated when I was about ten. ‘Home’, as I had always known it, broke in two
and every year, regardless of which parent I was spending Christmas with, part
of home was always missing. What’s more, since their separation, I’ve spent
most of my life away from home; at boarding school, living in France,
university, and now Edinburgh. I love these places which have often been the
most stable constants in my life and so it seems odd to describe a place where
I spend little more than a few weeks a year as home.
Every winter, as Christmas approaches, I'm aware of a mixture of guilt
and sadness about this. Sadness as it feels like a certain set of co-ordinates
are missing which I would otherwise use to locate myself and guilt in my knowledge that, despite all of this, I have far more of a home than many
others. It is, as G.K. Chesterton wrote, as if I feel ‘homesick in {my} home’.
Yet a couple of conversations with an older – and probably wiser, although he
often hides it well – friend lifted me out of this. Firstly we reached a mutual
agreement that Christmas, as a child of divorced parents, is rubbish. No more
needed to be said on that subject. Then as we talked more about a real home and what that might
look like, especially to those of us in our transitory twenties where
residences shift like sand and there are few constant anchoring points, I came
to three conclusions. The first is simple: that in order to feel at home I must
practice gratitude for what I do have, being aware that it is only a shadow of
things to come, a tent for me to live in whilst my real and lasting home is
built. The second, paradoxically, is that I should not berate myself when the
home I do have feels inadequate. Like a homing pigeon on the wing, I have an
innate sense that I’ve not reached my destination yet and that there truly will
be no place like home until I get there. If this is true, then the third thing that it leads me to remember is that home is not so much a physical building but something that I carry with me. Just
like a snail, my home travels wherever I go: it is part of me. People
talk of being a homemaker, but this feeling of at-home-ness is not one I have made myself. It is one
that I have been generously given so that I might extend it to other strangers,
pilgrims and any travellers lost upon their way.
Especially at Christmas, when I think about the reason why I am
travelling home, enduring the tedium of the train journey, I am reminded of
this hope which allows me to sing, somewhat tunelessly, with the illustrious
Bono,
“Home...I don’t know where it is, but I know I’m going home”.
Photo credit: Sasha - in whose lovely presence I feel at home.
