I’m writing this in two places. One at 10,000 metres and the other, in the near future, six hours from now, in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius.
I could have waited and written this upon arrival, but I need to kill a couple of hours on the plane somehow and it’s a vicarious thrill to picture myself as the Spirit of Christmas Yet to Come and project how I’m going to feel upon touchdown in the land of sparkling bays and coffee so thick it makes your blood itch.
Looking past the immediate passengers - that baby, thickly eyelashed and swaddled in a comically restricting bodysuit that squeezes its jowls like an overspill of toothpaste - I visualise the bed I slept in for five and a half years. It’ll be like coming home, except I don’t live there any longer. But neither do I consider where I currently live my ‘home’ either. I’m between lives, perhaps. We’re all here, of course, on a temporary basis. Domestically itinerant.
You’re a lucky mammalian biped to have ever ‘belonged’ somewhere. I’m not sure I’ve ever felt that. My hometown was simply ‘town’. London, admittedly, was kind to me, and I still miss the place, though that’s less to do with location than the time of life. I’m not homesick, I’m timesick. I enjoyed being in my twenties and unencumbered, but that ship sailed long ago, along with a robust liver and affordable house prices.
Turbulence. The belt light pings in jolly solemnity. This air conditioning’s a killer, above an iced white dawn. The trolley cart is still, by my estimation, half an hour away from charging me six euros for two bottles of warm water. We won the Cold War for this? One hundred and eighty eight passengers farting the hostile scents of hastily-imbibed medicinal Guinness from the South Terminal Wetherspoons. My kids are playing games on their devices next to me and nudge me occasionally to inform me they’re hungry. Yes, I’m taking ‘home’ with me.
I wonder if ancient civilisations felt born out of time, in the wrong bodies, against their will, or whether it’s a curiously modern malaise. The luxury of downtime and education and science renders us outsiders to ourselves. Maybe that’s why we blunt our thoughts with TikTok and Sunday TV sports. Have we always, on winter walks, peered through the melted sand at other peoples’ lives, their lights burning attractively in unseen bowers of their dwellings, and deemed them so very easily liveable? It’s nothing to judge and direct and make decisions for others. I know exactly how I’d live your life, but mine is one of insufferable indecision. Will we feel at home in the next place we arrive at? Or is it the uncertainty of the journey that fuels our sobering unrest? When I look down on your country from my seat (that’s not condescending, by the way; I’ve always been embarrassed and reassured in equal measure by my own place of birth), I know in my heart and soul I could be your poet laureate or your prime minister, but, upon landing, that powerful potentiality is sluiced away like snow after rainfall and I’m just regular me again, with all the fleeting effect upon your lives of this plane’s sharking shadow across sugarlump hay fields.
I know, in a few hours, that alien place ahead of me will feel like home and the one I left behind will emerge as a fraudulent reality. The moment is all that counts, for good or ill. But if I stop to think about it… We uncover too much by searching, through travel. These aren’t even original thoughts, I’m sure. Maybe one day I’ll have one.
We’re approaching Naples - a home twenty degrees warmer than the home I’ve just left - and would you just look at the calf muscles on that stewardess. Jesus Christ. They’d turn a fundamentalist vegan to cannibalism.
Where was I?
I’ve no idea. We’re all in a holding pattern, heading to places that used to be home but never quite felt like it from places that, from a taxman’s viewpoint, now are. And still these new places contain so much of a previous occupier’s workmanship - borrowed bathroom suites and on-loan coving; tiles from another era’s fashion; eccentric plumbing and wiring that we inherit like blue skies from a stranger's dog days - they’ve never truly felt like ours. But maybe one day they might.
Buon Natale.
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