This was the question asked by Anelia Varela. She put the question to the group of a dozen people who’d been on the Dark Angels course at Merton College, Oxford. www.dark-angels.org.uk
At the end of the Merton days, a year ago, we’d all agreed to set each other a monthly writing brief. Twelve months have passed, twelve briefs, and it was Anelia’s turn to get us writing. This is her brief: “…and I got talking about home and what that means. Is it the place you were born, the town you grew up in, your parents’ house? Or the person or people you go home to now? Is there a moment when you think, ‘Ahhh, I’m home’? A smell that reminds you of it? A memory of what it once was? And that’s my brief to you: write something, anything – any length, any form – about home.”
Here’s my response:
Home is where the art is. Sorry to start with a terrible pun but, when I thought about it, it revealed a truth to me. I have a grand plan, that is just a dream, to add a room to the top of my house.
Why? I don’t really need the space. Since the kids moved out we’ve used their old rooms as ours. I’ve got my own study where I write, and a room that’s an office. But still – still I hanker after the room on top of the house, the home from home.
There are two things I collect. Books and art. The books I’ve gathered over the years - and I’m never able to throw away a book. I need to sort them and gather those I really love into one place. The ‘art’ isn’t Picasso originals. But I do love original artworks, as well as prints, posters and sculptures that reflect my life. I need a place to put more of them.
So the space at the top of my house is where I’d put the books and the art. It would be a gallery space, a quiet, reflective place, particularly for reading. A place at home on top of my home.
I was thinking about this just now as I emerged from the Tube, having read the final pages of a book. I love that feeling you get at the book’s end – when you’ve been absorbed in a fictional world and you don’t want to leave it. It’s good to have a place – a physical space, a space in my mind – where I can have more of that experience.
And those thoughts of home come just as I’m leaving it for a week to go on holiday. We’re off to Turkey and I’m excited at the prospect of Istanbul, but even more the chance of seeing what was once Troy. When Homer wrote about the Trojan war in The Iliad thousands of years ago, he was one of the first writers to create a fictional world that his readers can inhabit in their imaginations.
Troy might now be nothing more than stones and rubble in reality but it still lives vividly in Homer’s writing. It’s peopled there with men, women and gods who show every human emotion. I’ll do my best, as I stand in Troy, to imagine Achilles, Helen and Apollo.
Before long, I’ll be home.
How about you?
another country where they did things differently, and where one could hear the horns of Elfland faintly blowing.
a bit like this:
Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
will that do ?
home is a stone’s throw from where you grow
.no.
Home is a no-go – a home you leave
When low
Or maybe Home is a foe you love
Or a so-and-so you don’t know
and don’t know you don’t love
Lo!
A home can’t go Home
to leave life alone
A home is alone the more you grow
Leave home at 21
Go home
Focus on why you love the idea
of Home
And live there
Not alone
But in love with whatever it is that makes your home a Home.
Jeremy Sampson emails from South Africa
Home, now where exactly is that?
My memories are of a childhood growing up in the west country.
And feeling very at home on most of the championship cross country courses and running tracks, some little more than a grass covered field. The weather incidental, unless it was fog.
Then studying in Canterbury, and feeling very at home in Kent, running through the hop fields. About now the bluebells may still be in bloom. And then running the cliffs of Dover like some giant roller coaster or pumping the sand dunes of Dungeness. Feeling very at home.
But then came London, The Observer and Harold Wilson. I didn’t like my home. I didn’t like a pay freeze, feeling like a caged bird, so I upped and went to South Africa, and made a home.
A home that was good to me and gave me opportunities I could not have had staying in London. And an opportunity to make a difference
Head hunted back to London, and creating our ‘snug’ at the end of the ‘MetLine’. John Betjamin would have approved.
Amersham, the walks, the Thames at Marlow, what a delightful place to live.
But Africa was calling again. It has that effect. So back we came and made yet another home.
Again Africa has been good to me and my family. The heat, the space, the smells, thunderstorms, different cultures, the animals, the chance to travel, the freedom to get on with it.
When the FT headlines a piece ‘Would you take your child to Africa’ – I think ‘what nonsense’, how could they? Africa is home to me, now.
And for an hour tonight, with Classic Radio Business, I will be at home in the studio, reviewing the week from a reputation/branding perspective, and spending the last 15 minutes as part of a wine tasting panel. Something I’ve done for nearly three years. Have you ever tasted wine wearing ear phones?
Home is with my wife, my five children, my grand daughter, my business, my books, my art and wherever my iphone takes me.
But then I’m not a true writer, whatever that may be.