Thursday, August 19, 2021

home is ...?


Home is ... seeing the front door of the house I grew up in?  (it's sixty years old this year!)  Or the garden, for which I've felt true absence pangs - for me it's a green and flowery quintessence of Englishness, very unlike the crazed tumbleweeds and amaranth of Eldorado?  Or sitting on a bench overlooking Wimbledon Common?  (my first day back, I always take the same anti-clockwise circle - down the Ridgway, down the High Street - buy myself a coffee at Paul's - and walk down by the common and back down Murray or Lauriston Road.  Wimbledon Village seems to have sprouted an inordinate number of upmarket delicatessans during the pandemic.  Or is it seeing my father himself - person, not place?  (He looks strangely meditative here because he's figuring out a letter on his computer, and didn't know I was taking this).  It's been eighteen months and two weeks since I've seen any of the above - and my absences have never been longer than a couple of months, before.  I'm still taking it all in ...




 

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