It's been a few days, and I need to get some of the noise out of my head, so I think it's time for another of my frequent whinges. Been wondering about home recently, as an abstract concept, rather than the place you hang your hat [not enough people wear hats now, not proper ones anyway, time was that wearing a hat was dignified, now it seems it's just people that the papers refer to as 'youths']. So all my life has been divided between living with my parents in Swansea, and living on my own in Aberystwyth. Swansea is a small town in mid-west Wales. a small city on the south wales coast. Swansea has been described famously as an 'ugly lovely town', [or, a 'pretty, shitty city']. I've always thought of it as where hope goes to die, it is essentially a pokey town centre and an eff load of suburbs of limited architectural merit, it's one redeeming feature is that it's subsumed some very pretty rural areas, but the the novelty of that wore off over the two decades I've lived there. A little too late, I moved up to Aber to go to university, which didn't work out too well, and left me unemployed in a small coastal town, where the main industry was the uni. So finding work there failed miserably, and I'm now back in Swansea, staying in my best friend's spare room, whilst his parents out of the country and he's in uni in Birmingham.
I've never felt like Swansea was home, at least not since I was old enough to have a valid opinion on such things, and whilst Aber felt right, I always had the nagging awareness in the back of my head that it was too small for me to ever live there long term. Now living in someone else's room, worrying about outstaying my welcome but being unable to do anything about it until I find work, I'm very aware that I don't really have a home, per se. This has got me wondering, I'm more or less in my mid twenties now, with nothing really to show for it, and whilst many of my friends are in a similar position, I know that a lot of my contemporaries have started to settle, and form a life for themselves. So as I said, wondering when we're supposed to find home, is it just where you are at the time, or should it be somewhere permanent even at my age? I know that the age of jobs for life and settling down and marrying early has pretty much passed, but is the idea of home as somewhere that defines your life still relevant? Should I be searching for somewhere I want to make a life, or should I just make home wherever my laptop is, and make the best of it.
Maybe it's just me, my parents never moved, I went from birth to my early twenties more or less in the same house, and being in university isn't really independance, you're still tethered to where ever your parents have settled. I suppose I'm just anxious about my life, I've never been able to see that far ahead, to plan my life for the next five years, an the idea of moving out into the great unknown with nothing to fall back on scares the shit out of me.
I've never felt like Swansea was home, at least not since I was old enough to have a valid opinion on such things, and whilst Aber felt right, I always had the nagging awareness in the back of my head that it was too small for me to ever live there long term. Now living in someone else's room, worrying about outstaying my welcome but being unable to do anything about it until I find work, I'm very aware that I don't really have a home, per se. This has got me wondering, I'm more or less in my mid twenties now, with nothing really to show for it, and whilst many of my friends are in a similar position, I know that a lot of my contemporaries have started to settle, and form a life for themselves. So as I said, wondering when we're supposed to find home, is it just where you are at the time, or should it be somewhere permanent even at my age? I know that the age of jobs for life and settling down and marrying early has pretty much passed, but is the idea of home as somewhere that defines your life still relevant? Should I be searching for somewhere I want to make a life, or should I just make home wherever my laptop is, and make the best of it.
Maybe it's just me, my parents never moved, I went from birth to my early twenties more or less in the same house, and being in university isn't really independance, you're still tethered to where ever your parents have settled. I suppose I'm just anxious about my life, I've never been able to see that far ahead, to plan my life for the next five years, an the idea of moving out into the great unknown with nothing to fall back on scares the shit out of me.