![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
52/52 - Home
Dec. 31st, 2020 02:59 pmThere were 53 weeks in this year. We won't dwell on that.
For my final week I thought it would be satisfying to finish off with one of my prompts. I took a 12 letter word (housewarming) in January and vowed to use a letter a month as a prompt. November escaped me, so I am left with "ng" this month. Which is as good a prompt as any.
"NG" is the beginning of the postcode of my parents house, and where I lived for 17 years. That house is 'home' in both the sense of security, of solidity, and in terms of the comprehensible location indicated when people asked me "are you going home for Christmas this year?" But it hasn't been my permanent home for 17 years. Home is also Brighton, and Southampton.
I'm also not comfortably 'from' an 'NG' postcode. I don't have a Nottingham accent, I have a Leicestershire one. And as everyone from the East Midlands knows (I think the West Mids has a more distnctive identity) we have little in the way of clear identity - depending on where I am in the country I am understood as either Northern or Southern. My accent also has curious twangs, picked up from North Lincolnshire relatives, time spent living in Lancashire (and with people from Lancashire), and a lifetime of wanting to be identifably from somewhere.
The place I live, the place which is most consistently described as 'home' now, is Southampton. It doesn't feel very much like home, even after a year and half here. My accent seems more Northern here than it did in Brighton, curiously. I wonder how much of that has been to do with how little I have spoken to people this year and something like my childhood accent bubbling back up in my isolation.
This flat doesn't feel like home though, despite my optimism it might at the beginning of the year. I think part of it is the fact my landlord put it on the market over a year ago and it has sold twice (the first sale fell through, I am unsure if the second has as well) so I've been living with the threat of eviction. But it's also been the stunted sort of life I've been living here. I have only had a handful of people here in the last year, two or three nights of people over for dinner or drinks, no parties since New Year's Eve, and a sense of holding my breath for life to start, for a different way of living to reveal itself.
Home is about not thinking, not tensing yourself for the next thing, not feeling you are baricading the door against the world. I haven't had much of that feeling here. The pandemic has obviously contributed to that - and this flat has been tremendously accomodating in that respect. I had space to sit outside, to grow plants, to work, and live in a way my flat in Brighton could never have provided. But for so many reasons which go beyond that, this flat has not yet been a place I feel I can breathe out, stop thinking, and feel held.
I hope 2021 brings me something of that.
I keep experiencing huge sweeps of indecision over the house I am trying to buy (not helped by the total lack of progress on contracts thanks to the seller's solicitors) which has something to do with the state of the country (and world) making it feel like buying a house now might be a truly ridiculous financial choice, and something to do with this idea of needing to make home, and my indecision over whether Southampton can ever be that place. Can I ever achieve that on my own? Do I have enough in me to put down the roots and produce that sense of security needed to craft a home which feels as stable as the place I grew up, in 'NG', did.
For my final week I thought it would be satisfying to finish off with one of my prompts. I took a 12 letter word (housewarming) in January and vowed to use a letter a month as a prompt. November escaped me, so I am left with "ng" this month. Which is as good a prompt as any.
"NG" is the beginning of the postcode of my parents house, and where I lived for 17 years. That house is 'home' in both the sense of security, of solidity, and in terms of the comprehensible location indicated when people asked me "are you going home for Christmas this year?" But it hasn't been my permanent home for 17 years. Home is also Brighton, and Southampton.
I'm also not comfortably 'from' an 'NG' postcode. I don't have a Nottingham accent, I have a Leicestershire one. And as everyone from the East Midlands knows (I think the West Mids has a more distnctive identity) we have little in the way of clear identity - depending on where I am in the country I am understood as either Northern or Southern. My accent also has curious twangs, picked up from North Lincolnshire relatives, time spent living in Lancashire (and with people from Lancashire), and a lifetime of wanting to be identifably from somewhere.
The place I live, the place which is most consistently described as 'home' now, is Southampton. It doesn't feel very much like home, even after a year and half here. My accent seems more Northern here than it did in Brighton, curiously. I wonder how much of that has been to do with how little I have spoken to people this year and something like my childhood accent bubbling back up in my isolation.
This flat doesn't feel like home though, despite my optimism it might at the beginning of the year. I think part of it is the fact my landlord put it on the market over a year ago and it has sold twice (the first sale fell through, I am unsure if the second has as well) so I've been living with the threat of eviction. But it's also been the stunted sort of life I've been living here. I have only had a handful of people here in the last year, two or three nights of people over for dinner or drinks, no parties since New Year's Eve, and a sense of holding my breath for life to start, for a different way of living to reveal itself.
Home is about not thinking, not tensing yourself for the next thing, not feeling you are baricading the door against the world. I haven't had much of that feeling here. The pandemic has obviously contributed to that - and this flat has been tremendously accomodating in that respect. I had space to sit outside, to grow plants, to work, and live in a way my flat in Brighton could never have provided. But for so many reasons which go beyond that, this flat has not yet been a place I feel I can breathe out, stop thinking, and feel held.
I hope 2021 brings me something of that.
I keep experiencing huge sweeps of indecision over the house I am trying to buy (not helped by the total lack of progress on contracts thanks to the seller's solicitors) which has something to do with the state of the country (and world) making it feel like buying a house now might be a truly ridiculous financial choice, and something to do with this idea of needing to make home, and my indecision over whether Southampton can ever be that place. Can I ever achieve that on my own? Do I have enough in me to put down the roots and produce that sense of security needed to craft a home which feels as stable as the place I grew up, in 'NG', did.
