The laws of balance mean that I must now write about homesickness. I have been reading lots of online articles about the experience. How it can either sneak up on you slowly or hit you in the face. How it affects everyone who lives for some time in another country and culture.

I am going ‘home’ soon to Cornwall with my new partner and his son. It will bring together two of my worlds and after the excitement of planning the trip I now find myself feeling nervous. And for the last few days I have felt a weird inexplicable sadness. A fullness in my head as if I can stuff no more new information inside without exploding. An inability to speak coherently in castellano. And a total absence of those warm fuzzy feelings that I described in the last post.
Strange!

There are hundreds of web sites describing the symptoms of homesickness – how it normally hits after three months in a new country. I used to think it was a feeling of wanting to go home as experienced by a child away at summer camp who lies in bed crying, but now I can see it is something else – something more complicated to do with our need for familiarity, for places and smells and tastes and sounds that link us to the past. And however much you like new places and people and experiences there is something inside that also craves the known and familiar.

It is hard to describe how tiring it is to be always having to think. Every little task can be a mountain to climb. Everything is new. No wonder babies sleep such a lot – learning new patterns is exhausting and you need to take regular breaks. Buying soap powder – no familiar names, no signs to let me know if it is for washing or conditioning, then it doesn’t seem to smell right and the clothes aren’t feeling the same as they did in Cornwall. Confusion, frustration, exhaustion and irritation.

In October three months after arriving in Barcelona I had a crisis of wanting to be at home – not to return to Cornwall but to find a quiet safe place to relax and just be. It became urgent to have a retreat from the world, somewhere to just be myself where noone would think me strange if I did things in my own way rather than the Catalan Way. That was one reason I started to write this blog – to try and understand rather than flail around in a sea of alienation. And now living here in Granollers I have a similar urge. I want to surround myself with some familiar things, to sit in a space that feels safe and known. Suddenly I understand why people buy some British things when they live abroad. Not because they reject the new ones but there is a deep need for tastes and smells and sounds that link you to your roots. Just sometimes….This trip to Cornwall is partly to bring back some of my things – I have a list that contains teapot, birdfeeder, mug, blanket, cookery books, baked beans! Not because they are better but because they link me to some deep inner current. Thank goodness for the internet and for being able to connect with friends and family regularly. And through the internet i can read about other people’s experiences and find out how normal these feelings are. For several weeks now I have been ‘seeing’ familiar people from Penzance walking the streets of Granollers. It is similar to when someone dies and you think you see them walking past – a trick of the mind. I know that when I am in Cornwal I will also start to ‘see’ people from here, magically transported across Europe.
And more thanks to the internet because I can listen to Radio 4 -feeling a little guilty when I do it, imagining I should be immersing myself more in Castellano/Catalan – I now realise it is a vital link and helps me stay sane.
As I have been writing this post I have been thinking of Proust and all his wonderful thoughts on memory and time and perception and yearning. I named this blog with a sideways glance at his book title Swanns Way. But no time to expand on this now as it is time to go….to the airport to fly to England.