Leaving 'home'

23:00 UTC 01/12/07 16'15N 053'11W Wind SE4

It's been almost three weeks now since we set off from La Gomera, three weeks since I left England. Unlike Dad and Ed, my departure isn't a short holiday, but a more permanent emigration. I don't even know when I'll next visit the UK, and certainly don't know when, or even if, I'll live there again. So what does that feel like?

Surprisingly uneventful appears to be the answer. I've searched for strong feelings and emotions, the call of the verdant English landscape to a background of the rousing tones of Vera Lynn and 'We'll meet again'. But it's just not there. Perhaps it takes time, a growing longing or nostalgia for Old Blighty and all that it means, and I'll have to wait a while to report on that. Yet I did expect departure to be something of a momentous event, moving me somehow, so why not?

I'll always be Nick Ward, the boy born in Durham, brought (dragged?) up in Northumberland and for fifteen years a resident of Cambridge. The UK holds an enormous amount of memories and experiences for me and has clearly helped to shape who I am today. But that's just the place, the physical geography and structures of the British Isles. I can easily look forward to enjoying different geography and places, and so it is the people that really matter, the thousands of people who have helped to form me and my life over the years, many of whom continue to feature strongly in my unwritten list of what matters most.

In today's world, it is very easy to remain 'connected' to others, as I have discussed earlier in this trip. Those connections help but there is something deeper that hints at why I am so unconcerned to be leaving the UK. If you'll forgive me, I'm going to quote another writer, this time Paul Theroux the novelist and travel writer. In his introduction to 'Fresh-Air Fiend', he talks about staying with some villagers in the Trobriand Islands off Papua New Guinea. After staying for two weeks, he leaves and six months later, paddles ashore again in his kayak, unannounced. A woman on the beach smiles and says 'We were just talking about you'. Of this he concludes: 'The friendship of people who come and go is not diminished by their absence. What matters is your existence in the consciousness of the village. If someone talks about you, or you appear in their dreams, you are present, you have reality.'

And that is how it feels. As long as our friends remember us, and we them, we talk about and to each other, we are as good as there. With the best of friends, and we are lucky to count many people in this category, I feel that we can return after a week, a month, a year or a decade away and slip into a chair around the kitchen table, take the proffered glass of wine, beer or juice, and chat as if we just left yesterday. When you have those privileges in life, distance is irrelevant.

It is also important that we are going to, not running from. We are not leaving the UK because of some dissatisfaction or problem. There are those who leave because of the government, or the 'wave of immigrants' or the many other reasons that the country is clearly going to the dogs. I fear that they will settle elsewhere and find that once the sheen of novelty has started to wear off their new life, similar discontent will rise around some other topic. Happiness is internal and relies on a state of mind rather than a place to live.

We are very lucky that we are not chased out of the UK by financial difficulty, political concerns or other pressures and persecutions. We have the freedom and the wealth to live pretty much anywhere we choose, and to return to Britain whenever we wish. That underlying security and stability surely does much to dispel the fears and concerns that might traditionally arise from leaving one's home nation.

So in short, I think I have to be thankful for the amazing set of people that we can count as family and friends around the world, and for the fortunate circumstances that give us the security and freedom to choose so much of our path through this life. Long may these continue, and I wish them to all of you too.

N.

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