Last week I spent a few days in a city. I found myself in a cafe at 8am in the morning while shop owners were still wiping windows. I was thinking about how I could possibly make my home once more in a place where you can’t see fields beyond the houses.
Tomorrow is the publication day for
’s beautiful book about the nature of home, Home Matters. I am obsessed with what makes a home - my first book, Twelve Moons was in part about my attempts to fall in love with the Northumbrian landscape at a time when I wanted to run for the hills.I interviewed Penny for her podcast, Not Too Busy To Write - you can listen here. We talked all about the politics of the domestic sphere, the art of compromise, and why bigger isn’t necessarily better.
But back to last week: I was sitting in a cafe in Glasgow with what might have been the biggest latté in Scotland and a sugary pastry. The pastry was glistening and round with a large circle of raspberry jam daubed in the middle like a strange burgundy egg yolk. Every time I pick it up to take a bite I had to lick my fingers and wipe them on my denim dungarees before I could start typing words into my laptop once more.
I chose a seat in the window right next to the door, where sunlight was pouring through the glass doors and making the stainless steel counter tops sparkle. There were cosy booths towards the back of the cafe but I always chase the light so I perched on a high stool and looked out of the window. Byers Road was glossy with puddles from overnight rain and the puddles at the pedestrian-crossing rippled slightly in the breeze. When I looked up from my screen I could see an opticians and an estate agent: boards with images of flats and houses were reflected in the panes of glass, homes that I usually stop and stare at as I wander up and down this road, as if staring hard enough will make one of them mine.
Glasgow feels more like home than anywhere I lived for sixteen years, when I left London. There’s a man who calls me the girl from nowhere, because when people ask me where I am from I don’t know what to tell them. Where were you born? they say, and I tell them about the little semi-detached red-brick house in a Midlands village that I only remember because photos tell me that my Grandpa once held me in his arms in the back garden. But where did you grow up? they say, and I describe the chocolate box village in rural Devon where our family grew from four to six. So that’s where you’re from, they say, and I tell them no, because when I was ten we left the south-west and moved to a market town in Yorkshire, and I spent my high school years feeling like an incomer, a transient being who was only passing through. And then I talk about the college years in Guildford, which only really constituted a held breath before I could move to London. The city had always been the end-game as far as I was concerned. Which is why it is strange that I left it so abruptly after ten years.
I wrote an entire book about learning to love a very different kind of landscape. About embodying the Northumbrian wilderness so thoroughly that I became a sea witch, matching the energy of the waves and pouring my tears into the tides. And the truth is that part of me is that sea witch, free and thrashing, sandy and salt-kissed. I crave the sense that I am something tiny swirling around in something much mightier than me, because my emotions are frequently bottled up with nowhere to go, and sometimes they must come out. I am a mother though, remember that, so I must be careful not to wear my wildness too blatantly. But there has to be an outlet, and the sea has been mine.
But it’s more than that. Sometimes I stand knee deep in seawater and feel an invisible gaze on my skin. I stare out at the horizon and search for an alternative image of myself, one where I am not alone. During these moment the weight that I carry is both extraordinarily heavy and non-existent. I am in a liminal place where a different version of myself is calling out to my reality, reaching a hand over the waves. As I lean back on the water and look up at the terns circling and diving I am both immersed and other. I know that the sea is saving me, but also it is not my home.
The coffee machine is whirring now, pulling me back from the North Sea onto this landlocked street one hundred and six miles from the terraced house where a little grey cat waits for me to return. Somewhere nearby there is a man who knows exactly where he is from, the man who calls me the girl from nowhere.
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