A Homecoming... to Where?

So I’ve come home, finally. A year after the whole thing began in earnest. But what is home? where is it? It’s not even a question for most, but for me, for many years, it existed as a concept and not as a place. To this day, it’s not a house, a singular place in the world, that’s for sure. There are no family gathered at the door to wave me back in, having first waved me off. That’s no appeal for sympathy, just the reality. I’ve largely been ‘elsewhere’ to everyone else, which has often been a variant of nowhere to me.

The truth is that home is many places; a whole county, a region, a route, a circuit of roads and all the fields alongside it. It’s a group of farms I’ve worked on, a factory here or there, and all the places I’ve dug or built. It’s the massive chunk of the South West of England that I’ve surveyed by foot, and the Scottish hills I’ve led students through year on year. It's all the places I've slept and all the places I’ve parked or moored. Home to me is a story that meanders through all these spaces, and includes bar stools and bales of straw by stages, fields of vans and emptied cans. Home is a familiar face in an unfamiliar place, it’s a football stadium that no longer stands in a London borough. It’s this and all the other trails and beds in all the other countries in which I’ve laid my head. Most of all, home is whatever is over there. For someone who grew up so far from the coast, I seem to suffer from perpetual sea legs.

Truth is, I've always been an outsider; what Billy Connolly calls a Rambling Man. I’m not from Romany stock, and I was too young to be a New Age Traveller, but I’ve always been nomadic, a bit restless. Not an outsider in the romanticised way of pop culture today (you know, the “they don't want me here" stuff, whoever this “they” are), but an “I can’t stay here" thought in many places I have been. It’s not a problem, I’ve had some great times in places I’ve lived, but I’ve always been toward the edge of friend groups, overlooked for permanent contracts at companies, one step removed from the inner circle. Perhaps it’s an air I give off, perhaps it’s mutual. I stay, but not always for that long, and not often with any sense of permanence.

Surprisingly, for most of my life I’ve done this without realising the reality of it. I’ve settled down with a purpose, thinking ‘this’ll do for me’, but then a couple of years later am already looking into the distance, squinting at the detail of as yet unresolved destinations, unadopted roads.

I felt this difference from a young age, and as a child it was a limiting factor, my involvement with group activities like Scouts or school sports teams curtailed. When I did join in, I could never move quite right, sing quite right, tell the right joke, or really ever feel at ease in the group dynamic. I was fundamentally awkward out of my own context, and this awkwardness endured until I found the panaceas of drugs and drink. Truthfully, it never went away, and latterly without either as a crutch it has come back with a vengeance, and is now tackled with conscious avoidance and the trusting of my gut and experience. In this however the limiting factor has become a freeing thing; my absence from the team sheet has left me able to explore more widely.

I managed a decade in one place not all that long ago, a kind of record; but it was facilitated partly by work and a DPhil that took me all over instead, keeping my wanderlust in check. I doubt I’ll manage that sort of time again, though that’s not to say I’m against having a square metre of ground somewhere to call my own; somewhere to come back to when the wandering day is done.

It began early, this desire to move on, I think is the point I am labouring. I’ve very rarely encountered true connection with people in the communal sense, and have certainly only ever experienced a sense of belonging to place in the abstract, importantly in the context of absence from it. Sure, I've had places to live, occasionally for years (though I’ve also not had them for years), but they function more as a place to store a sense of safety alongside socks, than as somewhere to remain for extended periods.

So this is the life for me, I conclude, always gathering to leave. Murphy's Game is now well within a past ‘home territory’, wherever the extent of it really lies. Pragmatically that means it is close to my current yard and all my tools, facilitating the build of the forge. The very next jaunt will drop me down the Hatton flight (of 21 locks) into Warwick and Leamington. This will no doubt touch a few nerves of mine on the way, leaving me free to indulge in some nostalgia. Not only have many of the big landmarks of my early life now been cleared however, many more of the faces have gone; and those that remain have -like mine- changed with time. No doubt I’ll pass by for a pint as I go (Jenny May: be on alert for a message), and then I’ll climb back up onto a stretch of canal I used to adore. The distance will also now reduce twofold with each day, as I bring my other boat, Solsbury Hill, out of the wharf at Aynho where it has laid idle for 18 months. Both boats need to be out as a pair, at least in the summer; so I can build the two up ready for next winter, have them on hand each day as I rise. It’s already May and there are only five months of opportunity for on-line boat-building (as in on the canal not the internet), and I’m working away for at least two of them. Best crack on, there’s a lot to do.

My therapist recently asked me what my motto might be, were I to have one. “I’ll be off then” I replied, laughing; and so…

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The next posts, the run into Warwick aside, will switch from travelogue to build diary. Expect missives typed with oily or paint-stained fingers, as I make the plan a reality. I recently sold my prized Land Rover to put some funds in the pot, and it’s likely to take this and a whole lot more to get the project over the line. All told this next chapter will be an adventure all of it’s own, with all the usual problems found on a journey, just condensed geographically. Chapter one is closing, chapter two just over the next page.