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.

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.

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 ?