mns  2010-06-22 10:07   

I keep thinking about home and what makes a home a home. I don’t know how many places I have called home. By the time I was eight years old I had moved country and already lived in four different places before my parents bought a house next door to my grandparents in Ballsbridge in Dublin. Since then, there have been my homes in England, Italy, Germany, Malta, Ireland and England again. And yes, now back in Ireland. Of all the places I lived in, it was our apartment in Islington that I thought was the safest and the most beautiful. New and clean and fresh and ours; and within three days the bombs went off. That was July 2005 and that particular idyll was blown out of the water very abruptly.

This is something I am writing about at the moment, the idea that there is nowhere that is actually safe. This may sound morbid but I don’t mean it that way. That apartment in Islington, high up on the third floor, with a view of a garden where foxes played at night, and ducks nested on the roof of the block opposite was the closest I had ever come to a sanctuary, and somehow in the space of an hour that was shattered. I always start writing at about eight in the morning and on that particular morning, with no idea of what was happening I began my daily routine. Minutes after nine o’clock a Dutch friend in Dublin messaged me to ask were we okay, and then, just like that, everything went dead. No mobiles, no internet, just the television with its horrifying news to keep us updated, and the endless drone of helicopters over the next few days.

There have been two homes since then, one in Chester and now here in Dublin. Home is where you lock the door and it is yours on the inside. What you do with it, how you make it, the changes you choose to make it more comfortable, those are personal, but those are the things that make it pleasing when you leave and return. The odd thing is, over the past few nights, a helicopter has circled over the neighbourhood been one and two in the morning. At first I assumed it was flying someone to the Beacon Hospital which is just down the road, but standing out in the garden under a crescent moon it became clear that it was just circling. Why? Why does it keep doing this? This morning it started its circling at six o’clock.

I have finished my next novel, but I won’t put its working title here as it will undoubtedly change at least once before its birth and baptism. I am now preparing for a tip to Vancouver in just a few weeks. I am going to see my son and his girlfriend, and I’m going to swim in the Pacific, meet a friend from Seattle, and then visit Niagara on my way home.

I am uncommonly excited about this, especially as I had sworn some fourteen years ago not to cross the Atlantic again. I have not been to Canada before, and I really enjoyed all the trips to the States, but I always found the return journey beyond exhausting with a fear of losing a small child while trying to stay awake in a stop-over airport. There is one return trip that still haunts me. Boarding a plane in Atlanta, my then four-year old daughter put her little hand on the bare leg of a man seated beside her, and said, ‘Oh, what nice hairy legs.’ And all I could think was how am I going to handle this? Please take your hand off the nice man’s hairy legs? Umm, shall we swap seats so I am the one beside the hairy legs? To give him his due, he was incredibly tolerant of her admiration but I was a nervous wreck by the time we landed hours, though it seemed like days, later. Everyone reassures me that long-haul flights are a doddle when there is no accompanying child.

The big excitement though, is seeing my son and Jen and where they live in Vancouver. It’s ten months since they moved, and while I have seen him twice since, I miss him and think about him all the time. It makes me think of my years living abroad and wondering how my parents coped. It was never discussed. Back in the Seventies in Ireland it was considered unacceptable for girlfriend and boyfriend to be living together, and during those years of cohabitating in Germany my parents never visited our home. When I met them it was always in some other German city or down in Switzerland, which is sad really as they never saw the early homes we created.

I’m looking forward to seeing the home my son and his girlfriend have made, eating with them in the place they’ve created and just sitting and talking with them.

Happy days ahead.