Not Long Till I'm Home

Kim and I drove up to London on Monday and we're due to return home on Friday after classes finish at about 4.30 p.m. It has felt like a very long week and for the first time that I can remember, I have felt homesick.

I went into boarding school at age nine and though I can't honestly recall how I felt, I don't remember feeling pangs of homesickness and it's certainly not an emotion I have experienced since my teens, and the ability to remember how I felt at will. It's such a very odd feeling. I suppose that I had never really put down roots before, and though I lived in north Cambridgeshire for over 17 years, it never felt like home at any time. A childhood of moving from place to place gave me the heart of a vagrant and immense wanderlust. We would live in a country for a few years and then just pick up sticks and move to a completely different part of the world, so I would start a new school, make new friends and start over again - that became my normality.

It is only since moving to Somerset in 2003 that I have felt that I have found my home. It's quite inexplicable, as I have no connections to Somerset that I know of, apart from some distant great aunt marrying a Somerset man, and that hardly counts! For about eight years before I moved to this county, I visited several times a year, as often as I could afford and whenever my time and commitments allowed. I would drive south west and as I crossed the border into Somerset on the M5, would feel the stress and tension ooze out of my body and mind. The return journey to north Cambridgeshire was less pleasurable, with the scenery becoming greyer and increasingly depressing as each mile passed. Eventually, the opportunity arose and I seized it with both hands and moved, lock, stock and barrel - and it was the best thing I have ever done.

Sadly though, now that I have finally put down roots, fallen in love with this lush, gentle county, I rue each day that I am away from it. And now I have started to experience homesickness - not great, I can tell you!

Whenever I think of Somerset, my little corner of south Somerset, where the fields are lush green and the hills gently rolling, there's a softness about the countryside, and even the people, that makes me feel that if I jumped from an aeroplane, I would just gently bounce, rather than end up in a nasty, marmalised mess on the ground. It's a silly thing, but it is the best expression of how wonderfully generous and fecund this part of the world is... This lovely part of the world that I'm not in at the moment. Still, I shall be home late on Friday and that thought fills me with joy.