There is no time more miserable than 4pm on a gloomy Sunday afternoon in January. It is the devil’s own hour, a witching hour, when one’s life appears at its worst, and even the smallest stresses and most minor inconveniences feel like personal tragedies.
On this particular Sunday, I tried to cheer myself up by going for a swim in my local pool, but regretted my decision instantly when I stepped out of the leisure centre and into the rain. Oh, fuck this, I muttered to myself, as water trickled down my forehead and into my eyes. I ducked through the open door of Caffè Nero and ordered a hot chocolate with cream, which undoubtedly contained far more calories than I had burned during my swim.
As I sat down in this rather soulless south London coffee shop—my hair wet and bedraggled—I was assaulted with memories of my favourite café in Athens, the city I lived in last year. I would visit that café almost daily and often sat next to an elderly gentleman who read the Kathimerini newspaper from cover to cover, while wearing a full suit.
In London, as I stared glumly at the hot chocolate on the grubby table in front of me, I missed that Athenian café like it was a person. I missed the glorious sun that streamed in through its huge glass windows, and the hum of motorbikes outside.
In recent weeks, I had been a woman possessed, flooded with visceral memories of places I loved. These visions were not only from Athens, but from almost every place I have felt attached to—from a traditional Bavarian kiosk next to the river Isar in Munich, where I purchased bratwurst criminally regularly, to a picturesque junction of the canal near my Midlands hometown, where concrete opens up to rolling fields.
What the hell is going on? I thought. I’ve always had a tendency towards nostalgia and have even written about it in this column. My mind regularly transports me to the cottage in Devon where I go on holiday with my family every year, or the hills in the Peak District near my sister’s house. But this sense of yearning was on a new level—I was pining like a lovestruck teenager with a crush.
After more than a year of traveling and adventure, including stints in Greece, Germany and France, I suspect my brain is scrambling to recalibrate my “emotional geography”: the landscape of deep attachments we make to material places. First developed in 1974 by geographers including Yi-Fu Tuan, “emotional geography”is the study of the how our environment shapes our feelings—and how we can become as attached to places as we are people.
After so many uprootings, my frazzled brain is searching for meaning in every street corner. “Is this home?” I ask myself in front of every South London shopfront, in the leisure centre where I take my Zumba class, as I walk through the park. The question feels urgent, like I need to find a way to tether myself where I am, to forget all the other places, where—during my year of travel—I felt like I belonged.
This process is uncomfortable: London feels both familiar and strange—and I veer between being comforted and alienated by those places I recognise. I loathe the ambiguity that comes with feeling like I don’t know where home is, and thus, I don’t know who I am.
But perhaps, instead of fighting this state of flux, I should embrace it. These memories are not just nostalgia trips, but tiny signals of place that are now coded into an emotional map: the low hum of chatter in a cafe, the rustle of a newspaper, a glimmer of sunlight hitting the water. Perhaps it is a map that I will be forever updating, finding pockets of home wherever I am.
