Nomad

 Tolly Maw is all very nice. Or certainly for us who have fitted in well despite our two Swedes still being smuggled out and Jobs chucking apples at our windows but I get a hankering at times for other places. I’ve lived pretty much everywhere it sometimes seems and of that everywhere it’s Wiltshire where I’ve felt most at home. I could walk there still, and sometimes do, and will again next month at the end where the best of folk lurk.

I have a talent too that if I’ve been to a place once and later meet up with someone who has moved there since, whichever pub in which we meet or later go – I will have been there before. In the days before Paul could hunt up a storm on his interweb for me for people, places and what withal they had been up to then I was able to track folk down without such aids. If on a whim or raised in passing conversation one other I (or we) had missed, I would seek and I would find. You, perhaps. It’s wonderful I no longer have to, you too, so easy now but perhaps without the hunt, the wonder at who you are now, where you are or what you have one then perhaps that little bit of romance has gone from the world?

The nights are drawing in here in Tolly Maw where they do so fifty-three minutes earlier than elsewhere in any case. I apologise for the fireside tone. And let me then in the spirit of the evening make a list of where I’ve lived. And if you’re moving for perhaps the second, third, a little more time then content yourself you have not lived in...

...College Town. Sandhurst. Bracknell and Yateley.

Then once beyond my parents... Bournemouth, Bromley, Bromley, St. Mary’s Cray, Stratford. Penge, the Elephant and Castle, Borehamwood, Brixton, Tulse Hill, West Norwood, Guildford, Leicester, Eastleigh, Winchester, Clock House, Croydon, Croydon, Shrewton, Broughton, Setmurthy, Setmurthy. Little Broughton, Tolly Maw.

Each an actual residence, with a bed and an address. Beat that.

My carpet bag is barely able to take the stress of it the longer. I long to settle. One day there will be a house that is a home. There never has entirely yet.

The poker's good and hot, let me steep that wine for you a little.       

Art: Berkeley Breathed.