“Maybe the journey isn’t about becoming anything. Maybe it is about unbecoming everything that isn’t really you, so that you can be who you were meant to be in the first place”. 

Paulo Coelho. 

Have you ever resigned yourself to a physical journey before that ends up becoming more than just getting from A to B?  In her book, “Belonging. A culture of place”, the American author, bell hooks, wrote about the issues surrounding people in modern society, the place they should belong to, knowing where they are going and a feeling of helplessness not knowing this deep inside. The Germans call it “heimat”, the Welsh “hiraeth”. There is no word for it other than “home” in English but it lacks the power to fully describe place and belonging for a person.

I sit writing the first of a new blog I wasn’t going to write after 10 years of writing two previous ones, in my cabin, at the bottom of my garden in north Bristol, the home where my family live. I am surrounded by reminders of places around the World I have had the fortune to visit and connected to throughout my life but especially in my working life in education.  In front of me, where I write, there is a framed old map of my county, Shropshire. The county I was born in and grew up until I left to go to university and not come back to live at home again.  Above that is a print of my village, Madeley and in between there are photos of my family and my children at different stages of our family life.

I have struggled with the concept of home all my life.  I spent most of my childhood, running away, hiding, getting lost, and when I did leave at 18, it was more or less for good.  Having lived  in a lot of different places, none of them ever really became “home” although there is something in all of them that is connected to me on a deeper level. 

The near daily journey I take now is a World away from the one I took from the centre of Chisinau to school each day for almost 6 years.  For a start, I no longer car-share with my dear friend and colleague, Tatiana.  Her two daughters no longer suffering from my awful jokes. Now it is the train. Bristol Parkway to Newport and then up through Wales and into Herefordshire.  It is perfect for contemplation, drinking a tea, maybe some Welsh cakes, getting some work done and then onto the most beautiful place imaginable, the Shropshire, Herefordshire and Worcestershire borders.  The hills of Shropshire to the north and the hills of Wales to the West.  St Michael Abbey School sits majestically on its hill, surrounded by woods, just outside the lovely market town of Tenbury.

It was a famous Worcestershire boy, writing his famous “A Shropshire Lad” poem, who has inspired the name of this new blog. What has concerned me, for most of my life since reaching adulthood and leaving this area, are the lines Housman wrote about the inability for us ever to come home again especially as we grow old and nostalgic.  Another Marches/Borders writer, who inspired my very first blog and book as a Head in the Forest of Dean, Dennis Potter, was similarly inspired and he wrote his famous play “Blue Remembered Hills”;

Blue Remembered Hills

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

A.E. Housman

Well, I have come “home” and the older and more nostalgic me believes it is time I look to connect with where I came from and where I do call home.  My home is where my immediate family are, my wife and children (and dog), in Bristol. This cabin, where I have worked, written and escaped to at the bottom of the garden for over 10 years, is also very much my home.  I felt my apartment in Chisinau, off the busy city streets, in a little square full of characters, also provided me a home for nearly 6 years. I even tied my martisor on the magnolia tree in the old quad at St Michael’s not only to bring good fortune for the school, but also to connect Moldova to me here in the Marches. 

The Housmaneseq reconciliation, understanding, contextualising and reflecting element of home for me now in my life as a middle aged man, in education for over 30 years, and living more for work than anything else, wants to see if I can go at least go down “happy highways” and see if the land of lost content, is there, was there and can be readjusted to be more of a dialectical process in one’s life.

I had such an opportunity recently. The other week, the train to get me home was cancelled.  In fact, the whole of the line south was not running any trains and at 4:10pm, standing in the middle of the footbridge between platforms 1 and 2, I could see the northbound train to Shrewsbury and decided to get on it and work the route out from there. 

What happened next was an astonishing journey through my county, places, hills, place names, sites, I hadn’t seen for a long time. When I got on the next train to take me to Birmingham and down to Bristol, several hours later, I reflected on how I had just been through a Shropshire that played a central part in my story.

Travelling from Shrewsbury to north Telford, the Wrekin dominated the view, and the words of my father everytime we came home, loomed into my mind; “First one to spot the Wrekin means we are home”.  Time is definitely not linear in these moments as I heard my father’s voice in my head and I felt I was just a mere boy again.

At Wellington, it all looked familiar and here I went to 6th Form to study for A Levels at New College. Two years  that really did change my life and got me to university, thanks to great teachers. More than this, it is where I met and fell in love with Stacy and had my first romance, love and pain, that took me all the way to university and even the first term at York.  It wasn’t to be as we had grown apart and had very different paths to follow in life. When the train went through the station near her town, I saw her house, remembering all the times we travelled on this train and looked out at the north Shropshire plain from a bench on the hill near her home.

As the train came into Shifnal, I looked down at the viaduct to St Andrew’s redstone medieval church and the graveyard below where so many Fords, Lanes, Abrahams and Shukers, all rest for eternity, including the ashes of my mum and dad. The church they got married in and the church where we said goodbye to them, less than a year apart from one another.  My father found the pain and grief too much when his wife died. 

Shifnal is also the place I was born and the memories of catching the train with aunties and older cousins to go to Wolverhampton, came into my mind.  At Wolverhampton, thinking of my youngest daughter having bravely faced her surgery in April a few weeks ago, I thought of me as a 10 year old going with my mum and dad to the hospital there as a child. I got home eventually from that journey.  The miracle of online food ordering meant my children had pizza delivered for an easy dinner as my wife went to teach at her evening class. 

I didn’t want to write a blog anymore after “Mail from Moldova” and I was also aware of the constraints of not always being able to write so freely, which is a betrayal of the very concept of writing a regular blog and sharing thoughts and experiences.  But the time since leaving Moldova these past few months, missing the people and place, starting a new challenge as well as the chance to bring the disparate strands of my life together, has inevitably led to the fact that I do want to write down these times as well. Desperate and terrible though these times are, it is within our communities we find the hope and realise the values we had instilled and inherited are going to see us through the tyranny and the despair. 

Not having been back to my home in Madeley for two years except once briefly last summer, the place I lived in for 18 years, I found myself driving through the beautiful Shropshire countryside, villages and towns like Cleobury Mortimer and Bridgenorth, to arrive in Madeley and greet my brother on the birthday of my late mother. We drove to the churchyard in Shifnal on a sunny late Spring evening, laid flowers, paid our respects and then walked to a pub my father used to use long ago and had a beer to talk and share life. If home means anything to anyone, it is in such moments like these. The real moments of life.