I read a fascinating blog yesterday called The Hermitage - talented art/music couple roaming the British roads in a wheely wooden caravan/truck.
It got me wondering and wandering a bit about being stationary (most of the time) on the earth. I suddenly had an urge to purge...to throw away all collected detritus, buy a donkey or two and stumble off into the unknown. Not realistic with boy at school, piano, 20,000 books, thing I am writing on etc, etc.
After a moment's reflection I remembered that I would not be happy without our base, somewhere to put plants in the ground, somewhere to be able to watch Star Trek DVDs whenever one felt like it.
So, what is it that makes us attached to one place, or, are most of us attached to several places. I certainly have a few bits of the world that I feel an affinity with, the coast around Cerbère, Areas of London and Dorset. Although I lived in Brum for many years and Derbyshire before that, I don't hold any real nostalgic memories about those places, except a few little lanes in Wirksworth, our back garden in Birmingham and the nearby 'reservoir cafe'.
Sometimes it's small details that make me feel connected with where I am. This road outside our house, the trees as they change with the seasons, the cherries and the walnuts, the hills and shadows.
On seeing a fragment of floor tile on the way back from a dog walk, I suddenly remembered an exhibition I had seen in London when I was very young. It must have made a well-embedded memory as I have recalled it often in the past.
It featured several works by the Boyle family - the series where they pinpointed, through a series of stages, a tiny fragment of the Earth's surface, and then copied its minute detail through resin and paint. The one I recall most strongly was a rectangle of pathway from somewhere in London. The cracked surface of black and cream tile, the earth and weeds: the very essence of so many of the city's front gardens.
