It is the last day of June and summer is here. I travelled again to Cornwall to see my beautiful dogs who are still living ‘at home’ and waiting for me to find a home for them here with a garden for us all.

But meanwhile they can enjoy privileges Catalan dogs can only dream of…… My cats too are happy in the Cornish countryside where they were born I had two days of intensive tango in Devon seeing old friends and letting my legs rediscover total freedom from conscious control. Then a sleepless night and an early flight home to Catalunya.  I had many thoughts about Home and what it means to leave behind all that is familiar and known and build a life in a new and sometimes strange environment. What it feels like to reposition myself in fresh earth, in another climate, with new foods and waters. And how I move between these two worlds when I travel back and forth, balancing between the two. What is happening now to my roots as they dig down finding new ways to provide stability? Why do some people stay very close to their origins and others go on journeys to different lands? I have headed south in my life – from Inverness to Edinburgh to London to Penzance to Catalunya. I know what it is like to be the new one, the different one, the foreigner. Here we are called ‘guiris’ and I asked recently what it means to be a ‘guiri’ – it can be translated as tourist or foreigner normally someone from the north of Europe with blue eyes and blond hair and pale skin. I hear the word used sometimes in a dismissive way –  ‘that restaurant is only for guiris’ and at other times as if it is just a description of someone different. I will always be a little bit the outsider here, no matter how long I stay or how well I speak Catalan.  Interesting questions to ask myself –

Why do I find it so easy to live somewhere where I am always different?

Have I ever felt I am more or less the same as those around me? Perhaps it is something to do with being red-haired when I was young – always a little different and sometimes uncomfortable with this visibility but now I seem to enjoy just being myself in a new world. My roots are not only seeking out new stability but are intertwining with others at a new level.

When I was living in Barcelona I had the strange experience of feeling like a ‘guiri’ but being treated like an unofficial tour guide. Every day I was approached by people – Spanish/Catalan people – asking me for directions, checking if they were on the right train, wanting to know the nearest chemist….. I couldn’t look more like an outsider but clearly something in me was exuding ‘ I belong’.