Things I've learnt by going away and coming home

OK, a nod to the little frisson you get when you come home having left home for a day or a weekend or a week, month, year, years. 

The little frisson of knowing you've changed in a major/minor way and you look forward to looking at yourself in the old familiar freckled mirror of home and seeing the same face changed by what you've lived.

So the little frisson tickled me as we made our descent over a landscape that seemed parched after the green fields of Hertfordshire and Essex.

1. Take back what is rightfully yours.  The little concrete dog that sat outside Papa's front door, under which we hid his keys when he went out, had to make it into Nico's rucksack and find it's place back at Sasa's.

2. A semi-black man should probably wait until nightfall in a village full of surveillance cameras and it's good to touch French soil and know he got away with it.

3. Cordelia doesn't mellow with age.  She gets worse.  She's a toxic dwarf.

4.  Sasa's voice is still velvet.  

5. Chris Green is now bald, lives in Paris, works for Euro pol,  somehow knew we'd be in  Cookham and showed up along the river bank.to ask if I'd object to him coming to the memorial service.  I clipped him round his broken nose (the only feature I recognised him by) and told him that of course I didn't mind

6. You're sitting in the church and realise that in the same building there are five men you've slept with but that's what life deals you. so you take a deep breath and stand at the lectern and think of your daddy because he's why your here and he hated all the ones he knew about.

7.  You'll have to remortgage your house because a glass of wine in a pub in the south of England costs 8 quid.

8. That you can buy a tube of Colgate toothpaste in Countrystore for a pound.

9. That the perquisite to live in Cookham is a labrador and a Porsche.

10.  That the narrow country lanes are safe.  Everyone drives carefully because they don't want their Porsche scratched or their labrador run over. 


I dedicate this post to C.P Cavafy and his poem Ithaka that I read at Bobby's memorial service
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