NO PLACE LIKE HOME

One of the world’ s great clichés but it’s true, there really is no place like home. You don’t realise it until you’ve been away for a long time. I’ve found myself contemplating my own mortality in a way I never did before, and many times I reflect on some of the things I’ve read in the past, tales of travel to another land, another world. Oddly enough, my coming home has lent a context to my time in China, as if it doesn’t mean anything without a homecoming. Ordinary as England and Nottingham now seems, perhaps I have just exchanged one kind of ordinariness for another. Before I did it travel to this amazing land seemed a remarkable concept: now it seems totally ordinary.

I visit old friends and and family looking to the future because there is no place else to go. 

Sarah and I visit Castleton and Lincoln, walking along the hills in Derbyshire, and staying in the Cathedral grounds in Lincoln, It is  a good way to say goodbye or at least, see you next time!

I have been so happy to see my family and spend some quality time with them. Sometimes the idea of going on such a long journey seems deathlike, filled with goodbyes and feelings of leaving. I know this is a kind of metaphorical thinking, but it’s hard not to draw this parallel. 

Now I am saying goodbye to England again, but I have found a new way of looking at it: the vision of the visitor. I feel as if I were walking toward an abyss. The only healthy way to look forward is to take things one step at a time, as my wife Sarah says to me always: the wise woman.