On Going Home

One day, about five years or so ago, I was listening to an album that I had listened to countless times before. I was suddenly struck by a wave of poignancy when I heard the lyric “you can never go home anymore”. I had always felt that was a particularly melancholy lyric, especially the way it’s sung. But this time it really hit me. Where is home, at this point in my life?

My girlfriend’s parents still live in her childhood home. All of my grandparents live/lived in houses that my parents lived in as teenagers. My parents have moved all over, while I was living with them and since.

One of my earliest memories is of moving house. Sat on the bench seat in the front of my dad’s work van, we crested the hill and there was our new house in a small village in Gloucestershire. I have no memory of where we lived before that. I know where we lived. I passed the house I was born in fairly regularly in the years that followed but I have no memory of living there.

That house that I saw from the van is a faint memory now. We moved while I was still very young to a house in a larger town where I lived until I was 17. I have a lot more memories from there. I would have been living there when I first heard those lyrics and I recognised the meaning, but I wouldn’t have felt it in the same way. Then we spent a year in a large house that adjoined a church. Not that we were a Christian family. It was just a house. I have memories from there but they’re fuzzy for other reasons. We moved again into a tiny cottage where I lived for a few months before I moved out and off and away to Bristol. Are any of them home? I don’t know the people living these so I would say no.

After moving out I would continue to listen to that same album. And the meaning of those words changed. For a while I could still go back home, to visit my parents in a house where I had once lived. Then they moved again and I would visit them in the housekeepers cottage where they lived in the grounds of a huge house belonging to an unpleasant man with a Maserati. I never lived there but, while different, it still kind of felt like going home. They, too, moved to Bristol as well a little later. And, in the paradoxical way that these things often work, I visited them less now that it was so easy to.

When I was twenty-three my parents separated. Visiting them separately was bittersweet. I didn’t visit as much as I would like to say that I had. I was depressed and struggling to deal with life at the time and that was something else that I couldn’t deal with. Suffice it to say it didn’t feel like going home.

My dad remarried and my mum surprised everybody by moving abroad. After a time I would see them more. Maybe not as much as I should. Probably. I don’t know. I haven’t checked the manual.

Anyway the point is that by that time there was no going home, there was just going to visit a parent. And at this point in the story we’re back to where I started, listening to music and having this realisation.

But I’m now almost forty-two (a significant age for a nerd) and things have changed again. I now have kind of the opposite problem: I can’t leave home. It’s July and I haven’t left the house since November, save for a few short experimental walks that didn’t even take me to the end of the road. And the last time I did go out was to go to hospital.

I do own the house though (well, I pay the mortgage). And it’s a beautiful one. And the company is great. The view is amazing, too. So I can never go home and I can’t leave home. But at least I feel at home and my parents can still visit.

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Additional Pedantry

I looked up the song. It was Gone from The K&D Sessions by Kruder and Dorfmeister which is a remix of Gone by David Holmes from This Films Crap Lets Slash the Seats.

If you look up the lyrics the internet will tell you it’s “you can never go on anymore”. But that’s doesn’t make sense. Firstly the grammar is wrong. “You can’t go on anymore” would make sense, or just “you can never go on”. But “never … anymore?” That’s just weird.

But more importantly, it’s a (very sparse) remake of I Can Never Go Home Anymore by the Shangri Las.