Where Do You Call Home?

(This is something that I wrote on kottke.org.)

From my mid-twenties I lived in London for almost half my life but it never felt like “home”. It was too big and too impersonal and, while I had plenty of friends, everyone was too spread out for me to feel the density of connections I thought “home” required, compared to the town in which I grew up, or the city in which I went to university.

But since moving away from London to the edge of a tiny village, surrounded by fields, London now feels like it was “home”. I miss those friends, no matter how dispersed across the city they were. I miss the familiar places I used to go, and all the familiar streets I’d walk to get there, no matter how bored of them I’d then become. Now, when I visit London, I smile and breathe a sigh of relief, feeling the comfort.

But if I moved back to London would I look back at this rural peace and quiet, the views of green hills, and think, “Oh, that was home, I do miss it”?

See on kottke.org.