Home

I am thinking of home. I don’t mean the UK; or rather I don’t just mean the UK. Home is an abstract concept; or rather it is not solely a concrete concept. On an everyday basis, home is a building, a physical space, and yet it is more than that. For most people, most of the time, home is probably a simple idea: it is place, possibly a house, with some depth of emotional connection. Those emotional connections may not be positive; if a place is a location with meaning, then ‘home’ is a reasonably good example of a place which nearly everyone can associate with.

Spot, above, the over-analysis of a geographer and a geographer who likes who over-analyse things at that. Over the past six months or so, my life has been a living experiment with the concept of home. Last August I left Warrington, which wasn’t just my hometown but also the town which physically was my home for most of my life. Since then I have called Washington DC home. My apartment on Wisconsin Avenue is now my home.

When I first landed at Dulles airport, I didn’t actually have the physical home; I didn’t a place to make meaning with. Then when I got my apartment, it was an empty shell. I now had a blank canvas to give meaning to. Making meaning goes beyond the appropriation of space though. I guess there are levels of home. Even when I was sleeping on an airbed for a week waiting for an actual bed to arrive, this was still a home. And now, sat here with a (almost) fully furnished apartment, I often feel not that I’ve swapped homes but rather than I now have more than one.

Emotion and meaning doesn’t disappear. There is reason why Facebook asks you where you’re from and where you currently live. I’m fairly confident that I’ll always see Warrington as my hometown. So much of me and my memories are tied up with the town. Time might pass, connections with Warrington may weaken, but it’ll probably still be home.

Having a dual connection like this gives life some complexity. It sometimes feels like trying to straddle an ocean, living a ‘split site life’. I tried to do something similar, at a smaller scale, when I lived in London during my time at BP, regularly travelling home (there’s that word again) to Warrington at weekends. It’s not so much a case of divided loyalties, but rather trying to spread your cognitive load between the thoughts you need to stay connected to both places.

I’m travelling back to the UK in a couple of weeks, something I’ve been thinking about. I’ve been contacting people, arranging catch-ups. I’ve got a diary packed of things I’d like to do. Before moving away from Warrington, I’d already spend time catching up with former colleagues who I wasn’t seeing at work everyday anymore. Now, with the added time compression, I feel added time pressure to see the people I want to and do the things I’ve been missing. I’m especially excited to have a proper meat pie again.

Amongst the people and pies I want to catch up on, I’m also looking forward to visiting my storage lock-up. One of the most interesting psychological aspects of my life-changing experiment was packing so much of my life up in boxes. With limited shipping, most of the stuff that made my home ‘home’ is now sat in a lock-up; almost a lifetime’s worth of accumulated stuff in stacks of boxes. I remember thinking at the time that a lot of the stuff went into the lock-up because I couldn’t bring myself to part with it. I knew even then that I was deferring the detachment. A lot of the stuff hasn’t been missed, maybe it wasn’t necessary. There are other bits that I want to bring back though and an extra case is coming back with me. Then that extra stuff will go into making this home ‘home’.