In recounting his
experiences of living an various parts of the country, and in houses
of varying character, Tom Cox is paying close attention to the ways
we are influenced by place. Some of the places he lived enriched his
spirit, others were draining – and the differences between them
were subtle – it is hard to pin down exactly what it is about a
place that gives it a positive energy, it is more that the sum of the
parts.
He writes “These
places weren’t homes. But where exactly was ‘home’? There’d
been so many, now. The definition of the word had splintered. Home –
by the ‘house where your parents live’ definition – was a
wonderful place but it wasn’t a building where I’d ever been a
resident. Home – by the ‘house where you lived the longest period
during your childhood’ definition – now had strangers living in
it… [These] towns and villages I was passing through on my walking
expeditions were not places where I’d ever lived, just places half
an hour away from places where I’d lived; places where I used to go
with my family a lot.” but he finds in them an experience of ‘home’
‘turned up to eleven’.
This question of
home, and of belonging, is probably increasingly tricky as society
becomes more mobile – perhaps the popularity of the BBC “Who do
you think you are?”, and genealogy generally, is a response to a
certain sense of rootlessness for many people.
He also writes of
his Cats, and it was through the twitter personality of one of them,
The Bear - aka “my cat is sad”, that I discovered Tom as a writer
in the first place – he writes powerfully about place the Cats had
in his life, and the hole they left when they passed away
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