Recently I travelled to three countries in the space of four weeks, for both work and pleasure. All that travel led me to realise something that now seems glaringly obvious: I have many homes.
Over the past 12 years, I have been thinking intensely about the concept of home. I started ruminating on this when my 62-year-old mum died of cancer on Christmas eve in 2014. That was the first time I lost my “home”. A subsequent family fall-out that led to estrangement was the second time. The third and final time was more literal: I moved away from my hometown of London to rural Wales.
Since moving to the Cambrian Mountains, the concept of “home” has been strictly tied to place: London is my home, because it is the place that I must constantly tell people that I moved from. But a recent casual conversation with a friend prompted me to think about the the idea of home in a less limited way.
At the end of my third trip—which was to Warsaw—I mentioned to my friend Damian that I was looking forward to being home. I had a need, irrespective of how lovely my hotel room was, to be surrounded by the whimsical artwork on my walls and my quirky furniture. Damian shared my sentiment. He said he was looking forward to being among his eight guitars. And in that very simple exchange, I discovered that the concept of home is far broader than I had previously thought. The objects that I have surrounded myself with carry more of me than I had ever realised.
In order not to be considered materialistic, we are not supposed to think that our possessions are worth much in the grand scheme of things: what’s a guitar or a picture compared with our friendships and family relationships? It is family that carries our DNA and our friends who shape our lives. These are the connections that truly house us. London may be a city, rather than a family or friend, but it is the memories of people that are woven into its well-trodden streets that make it home. London is my walk to school, or Sunday visits to my grandparents.
But perhaps we should be more willing to acknowledge the part our possessions also play in shaping us. Damian is a musician: his guitars carry his soul. And I have my own items that deeply reflect my inner world.
When I first started dating the man who would become my husband, I took a box of possessions to leave at his house. In the box I had put, among other things, a painting that made me happy; a gold mirror with a wooden frame embossed with a Grecian woman holding a flower; a candlestick; and three books, a children’s popup monster book, a book of quotations and Existentialism and Humanism by Jean-Paul Sartre. If this relationship was going to work, he had to understand me. To do this, he needed to see my personal artefacts. I gave him this box before he had even met my friends and family; when he found its seemingly random contents as charming as I did, I knew he was the one for me.
When things feel senseless to me, I can sit in my house surrounded by objects that I relate to; objects that speak to me, objects that I understand. I have found solace in my new definition of home, which now includes not just the people I love, but a bunch of random things. Inanimate objects aren’t always just decorative; when we’re lost they can lead us back to ourselves. The house that I live in is a museum dedicated to me.
