Far from the nomadic crowd
I have moved house 17 times. I am 34, so that averages out at a move every two years. This doesn’t count the houses I visited my dad in (add another 8). A lot of these moves have been ones I’ve made as an adult, but I did flit around a fair bit as a kid. Enough to instill something in me.
When I was younger, I would lay on my bed and dream of growing up; I hated being a kid. I would imagine my husband, a gardener, and my ten children; Jocasta, Imogen, Adam and Phoebe to name a few ( I may have lived in a council house but I was destined for the middle class). I would visit my friends’ houses and cut and paste the bits of their houses that I liked, creating my own home. I still do that now.
I’ve never really enjoyed going on holiday all that much. Probably because a holiday for me was a visit with my dad. Mum would take me to Glastonbury and palm me off with some older kids while she juggled and smoked dope. My first gig was watching Erasure, on my own, aged 4. Side note: it is a great disappointment to me that, despite all the time I spent at juggling conventions, I am unable to juggle or ride a uni cycle). Whenever I did go away, I would love to come back, to glimpse the familiar landmarks that represented home.
I used to think home to me was a house. I used to think that one day, when I got my own house, I would be settled. Each move brought excitement ( except the ones when I moved back in with my mum; they brought another swift move). That first morning waking up in a new house, sun shining in through the curtain-less window, would fill me with hope; new beginnings. But, it never took long for that feeling to fade, only to be replaced with an old yearning…where to next?
I am a hoarder; a messy, grubby hoarder. I accumulate crap at an astonishing rate. When I left one house, I cleared 4 lawn mowers out of the garage and my grass was always waist high. I buy things but I don’t really take care of things; ‘stuff’ doesn’t really matter to me. There’s an idea in my head of the kind of person I think I want to be: organised and efficient; but these qualities escape me ( at home; at work I am both of these things). I also move my furniture around a lot, like i imagine my life will feel so much better if that bookcase is on this other wall.
Because I hoard and dislike holidays, I believed I wasn’t a traveller; that I much preferred home. But actually, I’m always travelling home, trying to find home, trying to find me. Some days I am consumed by my house, it goads me, torments me. I feel suffocated by it. I leave the house feeling like there is something inherently wrong with me, something incurable; only to find I feel better, until the journey home.
I have a friend, a best friend, who lives abroad because she cannot settle at home. She constantly worries about whether she should come back because she doesn’t feel particularly like she belongs there either. She has travelled the world in search of a permanent base. I have realised I have a similar affliction, except I like to stay within a 20 mile radius. Where she seeks comfort in different cultures and diversity, I find it in rolling hills and chips and gravy. I am a Yorkshire nomad.
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