Venusberg | That's not your heart, it's a piece of helicopter casing

Friday, March 28, 2003

So, anyway, I went home last weekend.

That's actually a misnomer. "Home", the five-bedroomed house where I grew up, is no longer owned by any member of my family. Instead, the seeds of the postnuclear family have twisted into new buds. I rent a flat in London. My father lives in a house on the Blackwater (God, I love that name), but spends a surprising amount of time in Ravenna. Like Odoacer. My sister rents a flat in Paris, and is currently helping her boyfriend to train for an endurance event in Morocco. Sister and father are collaborating on the purchase and rebuilding fo a cottage in Wales. And my mother, whose "home" we are talking about here, has a 19th-century folly in a hunting village in the Midlands.

Or, as The Consultants sang:

I own a Saab.
I've joined a gym.
Jerusalem
Is my favourite hymn.

and I've got a timeshare in Tuscany,
A pedigree dog, and a wheel of brie.

The answer is becoming clear,
Can you guess just why we're here?

We're middle class.
We're middle class.

Annnnyway. The closest thing to "home", i.e. place I spend most of my time, is my flat in London, probably followed by a house in Brighton, probably followed by Garlic and Shots. Although in many ways home is, as it has always been, the written word, even if it's on a screen rather than in a book as often as not these days. But this is not the home of which I speak. The home of which I speak, and by the time I finsih up with these digressions you will probably be of a mind to conclude that I am either doing some kind of weird David Foster Wallace homage, or that I am attempting to hypnotise you, is in fact home only through a comparative geographical proximity to where I grew up. To put it another way, you have to walk through home to get there, which isn't quite the same thing.

But it was worth doing. Staying up late talking is somethign we don't do much of en famille, and maybe to a greater or lesser extent it makes sense not to, but every so often it seems equally sensible at least to remind yourself not so much of where you come from but of what you have had to walk through to get to it.

that's a homespun metaphor in the style of Robert Frost, by the way, but not actually a very good one. Although in this case walking through is at least appropriate qua metaphor, since we spent plenty of time swinging arms healthily, wandering through bits of the national forest and looking for bluebells.

Far too early. We were tricked by the thaw. This entire post is turning into a tribute to Shock-Headed Peter.

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