A Cup of Hot Water

Met with a friend the other day, someone I don't see much from year to year, but am very fond of. She lives in Bristol now but used to live in the hideous hippy hole of Totnes. A beautiful town reeking of incense and smugness. Some good bookshops though I have to admit. She was on her way back to Bristol after visiting friends down here, but we managed to meet for a coffee, or a cup of hot water in her case. Sure there's a reason for that, but too polite to ask. Cheap though.

She too is a parent and most of the time we talked about our children and how the choices we had made affected them, something that's been on my mind a lot as you may have noticed. My friend's children are older, teens, all different and all very strong personalities. I think she has done a fabulous of bringing them up, so was moved to find she has her doubts and concerns the same as I do, her move to Bristol being one of them. Of all the cities in the UK, Bristol is one of the few I could ever see myself in if I had to, a city in a beautiful area and on a human scale, so I understand why she chose it - especially after Totnes. Her children seem to have embraced it on the whole, but there is still a little residual anxiety I think. Not sure I could have made a move like that, and not sure why.

My choice has always been to live here, earning far less than I could have elsewhere maybe but giving my son a safe and beautiful environment to explore and grow into; to give him some kind of anchor, a home port, he could trace his life from. Failing to give him a family is a great shame to me, and I hope that the locus of a sense of place will ameliorate that, at least to an extent. I don't know. I had the opposite, a strong and loving family but no sense of home, of roots in the way many of my friends here do. Like I have said before, people are home to me, not places.

The slum clearances of the early 60's meant that I like many others was inserted into a strange New! planned environment, one without any past, which I am sure changed us, made us different from those who did. I think those of us who grew up in the New Towns had a true existential genesis; coming from somewhere(s) that no longer existed, atomised into nuclear family sized units. We grew raw and rough, becoming what we actually were, untouched by community and tradition. For good or ill, as many have pointed out since. It also gave me license to roam, to drift if I'm honest, with no pull of homesickness, or sense of place, of a true hearth, to tug me back to safety and conformity like the Mole in the Wind of the Willows (a darker and weirder book than most realise, read it again). Positive or negative? Don't know.

But what next? The wolf's son will grow and move away, will I still need or want to stay here? I fell in love with this land a long time ago and wonder now how I will look at it when I am truly alone, no partner, no son. Will it still be home? I think it might. When I first fell for it, I had no family, friends or lover, no reason, no plan, no hope, to draw or hold me here; it was no dream of mine, no imagined destination. It was a real and instant love, unexpected, almost unwanted, and visceral. True.

But now I wonder, after having had and lost so many during my life here, lost to the sea, to others, to time; who will I be when my duty to my son is no longer tied to his location and only to him?
Where should I be?