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Back in the UK

~ Kate Wilson ~ 1 Comment

Every visit back home has felt different.  If someone asked me ‘how does it feel coming back?’ I’d find it impossible to give the same answer from one trip to the next.
All I know is that there is something very relaxing about being in a familiar place where everyone speaks the same language as I do.
I catch myself preparing to speak, forming phrases (in English mind) and then mentally kicking myself – no need to stress, it’s easy, just say it!

We got back yesterday. I drove to Suffolk from Folkestone and found for the first time I needed to remember to drive on the left. That must be the result of driving more often recently in Catalunya.
While I complain a lot about roads around Barcelona I had to admit that the M20, the M25 and the A12 were all horrible to drive on. Too busy and full of impatient lorry drivers. There were not enough service stations and it was a huge relief to get onto quiet country lanes after Ipswich.

Looking for a coffee stop we eventually came off the main road and stopped in a random and, to me, unknown Essex town of Witham.
Discovered it was where Dorothy L Sayers lived and died

Found a good old traditional pub with a sunny garden out the back – the White Hart

which had a wonderful ladies toilet with photos and quotations in each cubicle




I asked Pep to check out who they had in the Men’s but there were only blank walls and a condom machine! 
Men of Essex not expected to be interested in the thoughts of Clark Gable or Cary Grant.

Back in Cornwall

~ Kate Wilson ~ 3 Comments

Sorry for lack of posts recently. Life is busy in Cornwall and I am currently trying to sell things on ebay – this takes up almost all of my available internet time.

What I have been thinking about is how lovely it is to be in Cornwall, to see friends, to walk up Chapel Carn Brea and see the Scillies glistening in the distance, to have coffee in The Honeypot, to drop into Penzance Home Hardware and buy some masking tape, to have lunch in the Lamorna Pottery, to bump into familiar people in the streets, to understand all that is spoken around me, to watch the sun setting from the Merry Maidens, to eat brambles freshly picked from the lane, to see huge flocks of rooks circling over the fields, to hear tractors rumbling along the road, to buy fish in Newlyn, to dance tango in the British Legion, to read the Cornishman from cover to cover, to look forward to Film Club in the Savoy on Sunday, to see fresh flowers and vegetables for sale by the edge of the road, to see millions of stars when I take the dogs out for their last pee of the night……

What does this mean?  That I feel at home?  That I have been missing Penwith?  That I want to stay here? 

Or is it just that I love Cornwall as well as Catalunya and I am now in the situation familiar to many travellers where I have two homes and two places to enjoy?   And two places to miss.
It’s a strange process.

What is Home?

~ Kate Wilson ~ 8 Comments

It’s funny being here again – so familiar and so comfortable.
I can talk. I can understand other people talking. I can drive without having any worries about making a mistake. I am surrounded by familiar things which I find pleasing – paintings and sculptures, chairs and curtains, plates and cups. (I am a Taurean so these things matter!)


My animals sleep in front of the log fire. When something went wrong with my van today I knew who to ring and he fixed it for me on the same day, because he knows me.
Here I know what to do and how to be and who to ask and where to go.

But on a long walk with Bonnie today I realised I don’t want to live here. I like living in Catalunya. I like learning new languages, I enjoy the challenge of being in new places and meeting new people.  I like the warmth of my new life – I don’t mean just the weather though. The first thing people here say is ‘it must be lovely to live somewhere sunny’ and of course that is true but it isn’t the most important thing.   I like how people kiss each other on greeting, how they so hate to say goodbye that it can be an hour from the first sign of departure to the moment when they disappear round the corner.  Perhaps it is to do with the weather after all – when you can spent more time outside it is much more possible to be sociable and relaxed and physical.
Many people that I know in Barcelona and Granollers have not moved very far from their first home. Families are still well within Christmas visiting distance and if you ask most people where they come from they will name some place within a few kilometres.  It’s no longer like that for many people in the UK and I have moved from Scotland to London to Cornwall to Catalunya – letting my heart lead me south while trying to find my roots inside myself rather than in native soil. I’d like to think that I carry my home within me but it is a work still in progress.

A few weeks in Lamorna

~ Kate Wilson ~ 6 Comments

What do I call this?
Coming home?  Coming to the UK?  Having a holiday in Cornwall?
Certainly it doesn’t feel like a holiday although I suppose it could be seen that way.

For me one of the things I wasn’t expecting when I moved to Spain was how it would feel coming back to my old home.

Perhaps it would be different if I had left here with the intention of not coming back. Or if I had at some point packed up my house and belongings and driven south to take my chances in Barcelona. Or if I had got four pet passports and taken two dogs and two cats in their cages across the sea from Plymouth to Santander and driven them barking and miewing down to Catalunya.

But I didn’t do these things so when I come back to Cornwall I find a house, filled with my stuff, lived in by my animals (as well as my friends who look after them).  I am met with happy barks and purrs which make me feel guilty as I know the day will come all too soon when I bring out the suitcases again.
I left them for three months and ended up staying in Catalunya for good. I am still in transition one and a half years later and I wonder if other people have this long drawn out moving process?

There is a mountain of post to deal with, dripping taps to mend, damp corners to worry about, overgrown brambles to cut, bills to pay, vets to visit and a lot of questions to think about while I search for answers.

  • Is it fair to take a 15 year old deaf collie to live in a hot country?
  • What is more important to a cat or a dog – familiar home or loving owner?
  • What furniture would I drag across a continent to a new home?
  • Where can we  find a home close to Granollers that has a lovely big garden and is not too close to a busy road nor part of an urbanisation?

 Apart from these and many other questions that wake me early every morning I am having a lovely time. There are vegetarian options in the cafes, the view of St Michaels Mount is as beautiful as ever,  the air is fresh and the night sky is crammed with stars. Today I bought fresh fish from Stevensons in Newlyn.

It is cold but still dry and after we cut back the brambles around the trees that I planted over ten years ago we had a huge bonfire and I burned several bags of letters and photos as part of my attempt to clear the clutter in my house and head.

Remembrance of Lost Times

~ Kate Wilson ~ 1 Comment
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.