Home Sweet Home

It’s nearly the holidays. Time to dust off the suitcase, locate the passport and turn my attention to just how much time I’m going to be spending in bed during my ten days at home. As with the prospect of going home over Christmas, knowing that the Land of Hope and Glory is waiting for me just around the corner, it is very easy to slip into countdown mode; wishing everyday would go faster and romanticising everything British. Do I do this? And some. Even now I find myself positively salivating at the mere idea of roast dinners, Yorkshire puddings, and chocolate digestives. I’ll have to stop there – thinking about all the home cooked grub that is still a few days away is torture. I casually overlook the fact that it is 95% likely to start pouring down with rain the minute I step off the plane, or that I will have to walk past a large proportion of the teenagers that populate the street corners of ‘norf Laandan,’ every time I want to walk into town, and that the echo of their “oh my God yeah’s,” their “man dat woz well sick’s,” and their “innit bruv’s” will follow me down the street, completely contradicting what I have been telling my students for the past seven months, namely that English is a beautiful language.  Instead I choose to concentrate on the fact that Cadbury’s chocolate will be available in every shop I walk into, ‘Call the Midwife’ will be waiting for me on the sky+ box and that I will at last be back in a country where cars drive on the correct side of the road! I like to think that living abroad has made me far more partial when it comes to cultural differences. In actuality, however, I must admit that I am possibly more biased than ever. Not because I don’t like German culture. Indeed, I have embraced it wholeheartedly this year and have thoroughly enjoyed it. The reason is merely because the feeling of going home is second to none, and I think everyone has a little soft spot where home is concerned. 

 My family and I have a little rhyme. I have no idea where it comes from, but it has existed between us for as long as I can remember, and goes a little something like this:

“It’s nice a-going roamin’, but it’s a-nicer coming home-ing.”

What can I say, we’re a weird bunch!

It’s possibly a slightly edited version of Frank Sinatra’s ‘Travelling song.’ I don’t know. Either way, its meaning has never been as clear to me as it is now, especially when a flight bound for London with me on it is only a matter of days away. Living abroad teaches you an enormous amount about being self-reliant. The hours whiled away on my own in my flat of an evening have shown me a lot about myself, of which the main two are listed below. 

1.  I love to travel. For anyone who reads this regularly (and for that I thank you very much indeed,) I think that’s become fairly obvious. I love the thrill of journeying to a place you have never visited before; of the promise of all the new things you will see and experiences you will gain. Whether it be to huge cities like Berlin, smaller ones like Heidelberg, or merely nearby towns like Worms [pronounced Vorms], visiting as many new places as possible and broadening my cultural horizons in the process is something I hope I continue to do in my future career.

2.       The second major thing I have learnt is how much I love going home. Those two things sound fairly paradoxical in their nature, yes? I mean, a homebird who loves to travel, what’s all that about? But I think you’ll find on closer inspection that in actual fact the two are not mutually exclusive. It is ok to want to see the world and all that jazz, but still look forward to the promise of going home at the end of the adventure.

How would you describe ‘home,’ then? The Germans have a word called Heimat, of which there exists no exact English translation. Literally, it means place of home, but I think the real reason there is no precise equivalent is because you would need an entire English sentence to accurately convey the meaning of what the Germans manage in a mere two syllables. ‘Heimat’ suggests so much more than the geographical location of where your home is located. It is the feeling of being home, rather than the physical spot.

I like to think that we are tethered to our Heimat by an invisible elastic band. If you stretch it far enough, that band will take you across the seven seas, to the far corners of the earth. It can be stretched for a fairly long amount of time without breaking. Though the elastic band will willingly bear the tension of being stretched so far, however, it is always ready and waiting to ping back to its original state, carrying you home along with it. At present, my own elastic band is just about ready to ping me in the direction of Blighty.

Ironically enough, it’s taken me 500 miles and the best part of seven months living in a country on the other side of the North Sea to work out that actually, my favourite place in the entire world is in a rather unobtrusive house on a rather unobtrusive street in a rather unobtrusive town nestled in the outskirts of Greater London, despite the chavs and the bloody awful weather. I guess that's why it's so easy to romanticise the prospect of going home. It's because when all’s said and done, home is home. Home is safety. Home is relief. Home is well and truly where the heart is.

I have a few days in a castle to look forward to, and then England, I'll be on my way! Put that kettle on!

Home is never too far away:

See you after Easter.

Emily