HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS

I love going home. "Home" being England. Or is it? I have realised that in fact I have spent half of my life away from "Home" - 20 years of living in France and now a year in Switzerland - but every time I return to England there is still that tug on the heart strings and the comfort of going back to where I grew up.

Times have changed of course, and when I go home I am a visitor - no longer my own bedroom with all the junk accumulated over the years - now I am in the guest room, which as children we thought very grand! But despite that, it is comforting to go back and be surrounded by things that have always been there - the furniture, the objects, the cold,crisp sheets on the bed, the jar of sea shells on the kitchen window that we collected over thirty years ago - without realising it, I check to make sure that everything is still there.

I have never been part of an expat community and often go out of my way to avoid those who grouse about not finding baked beans, salad cream, marmite or whatever in their new foreign life (although now you find English things everywhere in Europe). What suddenly makes me wish for England is when I see a programme on TV - the other day I was idly watching Ispecteur Barnaby (I think it was called Midsomer Murders in England), and although the contents were of little interest, I suddenly found myself looking at the gorgeous English countryside and the trim lawns, and the rose beds and the lovely houses.

Rose-tinted spectacles - most definitely! And of course when I do go home (as a visitor) we 'do' basic things that I miss, living abroad ... real pubs that serve real pub food, visiting a National Trust property, Wisley Gardens, catching up with friends - but of course this is not the everyday life of English people all the year round. And when I do take off my glasses, England has changed over the last few years and I'm not too sure it is for the better.

My home town has changed out of all recognition and if it wasn't for the fact that the High Street is still cobbled (but pedestrian now) it could be anywhere - all the old shops have long gone to be replaced by those one finds in any High Street in England, the market that used to sell potatoes, cabbages and brussel sprouts in winter has stocks of avocados and lychees, the car congestion is beyond belief and now there is the shopping mall - what terrible places, open seven days a week and filled with zombie-like people who, it would seem, MUST spend money. What on earth do they buy?

Would I go back? Who knows ... perhaps once the 'changeling' has finished his education and is pushed into the outside world ... but I shall have to take off my rose-tinted specs. first.