For some reason I associate Christmas with making a journey. I think of heading away down roads that become progressively smaller, until finally I reach a remote valley where the people live who are the nearest thing I have to family. That, I think, is a product of being adopted: the search for unknown people in a secret place. One thing is certain: those at the destination are not that pair of strangers with whom I have next to nothing in common, my adoptive parents.
This thought process represents a search for home. The nearest that I discovered to that elusive objective was in exile, perhaps because I did live in a strange place at the end of a long valley. However that was a primitive place and peasants are linked by kinship more than friendship. By bond with neighbours was traditional: I employed them therefore, as in a feudal situation, they and I were subject to obligations. So that valley was a facsimile for home, and maybe that is the best that I can hope to find?
It is a strange thing to go through life feeling no bond to the strangers who would deem themselves my family. Again, as with my peasant neighbours, obligations exist. I've just made two long and tedious return trips by car to collect my mother and return her home. There is a fast hourly train service linking her town and mine, however she demands to be driven. I fed and accommodated her, and endured two days with a woman who has no hobbies or interests, thinks of nothing beyond the banal, and blames every problem on 'foreigners' and whoever is in government. My former peasant neighbours were far more interesting to spend time with.
The long quiet valley will remain a vision. It isn't compatible with the reality of holding down a job, not the sort that I do anyway. Home, then, seems to be a virtual thing. Networks of friends nowadays are virtual, and not dictated by how far one can walk or ride a horse. Home in the sense of a safe, secure and pleasant place to live is what I create. A desire for remoteness represents the introvert's need for space and quiet at least some of the time. As for true family, they will be perceived intuitively: not visited or hugged but rather reached out to via the occasional revelatory thought. They, too, are virtual because our courses diverged. No longer involved, we took separate paths excluding direct influence. Therefore I wonder and I speculate. After years of wandering it is clear that no man is an island. Not entirely. I live surrounded for the most part by the lapping salt sea, or the enveloping hills: but neither is impervious to wandering travellers, nor are the safe ways completely hidden.
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