The best bit about travelling

…is the coming home.

I grew up overseas, which necessitated Boarding School and long-haul flights lugging my incompetent less capable brothers behind me. We flew to Cairo and Tirana, Larnaca and Brussels for every major holiday then back to Giggleswick, via Manchester or Heathrow or Leeds/Bradford.

When I went to University, the travel continued, to France and Germany, The USA and Caribbean, until I found myself travelling for a living, almost. I took ski holidays with families in Germany, Switzerland and France, vacations in Spain and Italy and the Caribbean, business trips to Los Angeles. I even went on honeymoon to Mauritius with one couple. My life travelled with me in a suitcase all around the UK and abroad and I was fine with it. Until one day I met a man that made me want to unpack.

Ironically enough, shortly after I met him, I went away for work, accompanying a family on a Christmas Ski holiday, which ended with me flying across the Atlantic to San Fransisco with two small children and a devastated employer.

When I was young, living in Cyprus, my parents always talked of the UK as home. I knew the National Anthem, craved sliced white bread and a milkman, and buses to take you into town, none of which we had on the base where we lived. And though I adored Kleftiko lamb, Sheftalia, and Squeaky Cheese, I celebrated a visitor from home who brought with them Red Leicester cheese, proper bacon, Marmite and Parsnips. I lived in a country where school finished early because it was too hot, where we had a veranda that we used all year round without feeling cold and exotic shrubs and wildlife, yet yearned for the small houses, wet weather and green grass that is so common in England. All these things meant home- the home which my parents talked about, so I assumed it must be my home too.

When we moved back home, the first few weeks were spent living out of suitcases as we visited relatives all over the country, some of whom we hadn’t seen for three years, some of whom I didn’t remember. Finally we’d unpack our shipped belongings into the home my parents actually owned, and come to terms with what life ‘at home’ was really like. Then a couple of years later, we’d move again and ‘home’ was once more the exotic place of which my parents talked in hushed tones with sparkling eyes.

The reality, with retrospect, is that we were always ‘travelling’, whether ‘home’ or abroad, not entirely fitting in in either place. Always thinking the grass was greener. It’s probably the reason for the peripatetic lifestyle I had until DH and I moved in together, and I discovered, for the first time, that I had a home. Four walls and a roof. With all my stuff inside. Stuff that didn’t need to be packed up and hauled around. Plants that could be planted and enjoyed, year after year. Furniture that could be built in, if we so chose. And I realised that, though going away was wonderful, though the amazing holidays to Sardinia and Chile, Vietnam and Mallorca have all been fabulous and memorable and enjoyable and relaxing, it’s the coming home I like the most.

There really is no place like home.

I had to travel a lot to realise that.

When we came back to England and drove North, my father (a Yorkshireman to the core) used to cheer as we crossed ‘the border’ into Sheffield, because he was home. I am always heartened by the triangular peak of Canary Wharf, the sight of which reminds me that I am within the reaches of London and home. I never imagined, when a Geography Field Trip brought me to study the regeneration of the Docklands, the fedgling DLR and the recently-constructed Canary Wharf, that it would play such a significant role in my life.

 

*with apologies for the photo, which was taken from a moving vehicle at speed, at the weekend. You may have to squint to see it!!