Home. The very word smells of clichéd biscuits, still warm from the oven, of comforting food, goose down pillows, scented hugs, even the harsh, boundary setting tones of a parental dress down. The reality is invariably somewhat less rose tinted but, for me, it is still the place where I used to pull my shoes off, drop my coat on the floor and eat with elbows on the table, where people accepted me even when I was obnoxious enough to paint every wall in my room black in a moment of misguided homage to Nietzsche.

But home, full of acceptance, also represents the ordinary. And perhaps because of that it is the place from which I yearned to flee. It took years to see that, despite settling in other places entirely I have only gone on to recreate much of my original home in another little corner of the world. For home is not so much a place, but a memory, a set of ideas that travel with us, as mine did, while my family moved from the lush humidity of Kerala to the plains of Africa and the deserts of Arabia. And those memories, with their rituals and habits, ease us into whatever present we find ourselves in.

And it is our memories that play the greatest trick of all, pulling the poles together, so that we are able to exist in both the past and the present at once, always far away in our memories of old homes and perfectly at home in the grand, exotic away.

Copyright © 2007 Jo Tatchell. All rights reserved.

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