The joys of coming home

It's so nice to go to the islands for a few days, but I'm always happy to come home again as well. There is just something so comforting in pottering or, as I like to call it, faffing. Moving our things from here to there, filling the fridge full of food, playing the music you like, even stupid things like sorting out washing has something comforting about it (am I becoming a Desperate Housewife?) Anyway, you just can't do those things in a hotel room. I guess coming home is part of the joys of traveling. It's hard to appreciate what you've got until you haven't got it anymore, even if this 'lack of' is self-imposed and only for a few days.

My family and I, we're all a bunch of gypsies, yet we all love our homes! We're incredibly homely people yet if we were to lose all our belongings tomorrow, we'd simply brush ourselves off and create new homes all over again.

I know for a fact that I don't get too attached to 'stuff' as a few years ago there was a fire threat to our home. A huge tree next to the Jungle Dome was on fire and ambers were floating onto the wood shingled roof of our wooden Dome. Whilst a group of men climbed on to the roof with buckets and hoses, I was warned to take all valuables out of the house, just in case. I wandered around the house in a daze. What was actually of value to us? I just couldn't answer that question, so I simply grabbed our laptop, some paperwork, creditcards, photographs, a few old MTV videos and some football trophees. That was it! All our 'valuables' fitted into two bags. I couldn't think of anything else to take.

The moment I realized how unimportant all our 'things' were to me, I felt totally liberated. Eventhough everybody still ran up and down the stairs with buckets and the whole situation should have been quite stressful for me, I walked around with a huge grin on my face. I remember that, as Andy hugged me, I thought 'This is all that matters. If the house burns down...so be it. As long as we've got eachother and our animals are safe (this was before our children were born)...all is okay'.

So anyway, isn't it strange that our homes are so comforting to us because we have all our stuff there, yet all this stuff is so unimportant at the same time?

It's a wonderful paradox to me. So, home sweet home.

And enjoy yours, where ever it may be!