Coming Home

Coming home after being away is peculiar.

Not coming home from a holiday, exactly. Holidays have a habit of ending neatly. You unpack the suitcase, put the washing machine on, complain about the weather and, within a couple of days, normal life closes around you again.

This feels different.

For three weeks, almost everything about my life changed. I woke somewhere different, ate differently, worked differently and spent my days with people I hadn't known before I arrived. I became accustomed to early starts and communal meals, to journeys along dusty roads, to wondering whether there would be electricity and to occasionally having to wait because an elephant had decided that the highway was temporarily his.

Then, rather abruptly, I came home.

The strange thing is that home had barely noticed I was gone.

The house was still here. My room was exactly as I had left it. The kettle still took precisely as long to boil. The same roads led into town, the same shops occupied the same buildings and the same collection of jobs, emails and mildly irritating responsibilities had been patiently waiting for my return.

Even the British weather appeared to have made remarkably little effort to welcome me back.

In a way, that is reassuring. Home is supposed to be familiar. After weeks of having to think about where things are, how things work and what happens next, there is enormous comfort in being somewhere you can operate almost entirely on instinct.

I know which cupboard contains the mugs.

I know what noise the stairs make.

I know where the light switches are without looking for them.

These are ridiculously small things, but after weeks away they suddenly feel luxurious.

And yet, for all its familiarity, home feels fractionally different.

Not wrong. Not disappointing. Certainly not diminished by comparison. Just slightly shifted, as though somebody has moved all the furniture half an inch to the left while I wasn't looking.

Except, of course, they haven't.

I am the thing that moved.

That sounds rather grander than I mean it to. I haven't returned from Zambia as an entirely different person, glowing with wisdom and ready to dispense profound observations about the meaning of life to anyone unfortunate enough to stand near me for too long. Three weeks in Africa has not, despite what Instagram might suggest, made me a philosopher.

I am still me.

I still get impatient. I still spend too much time looking at my phone. I still become disproportionately irritated by things that don't matter. I have not achieved enlightenment, and I strongly suspect that within a fortnight I will once again be complaining about traffic as though being delayed by six minutes constitutes a humanitarian emergency.

But something does feel different.

What has changed, I think, is the scale against which I'm measuring things.

For three weeks, my days had an unusual clarity to them. There were things that needed doing, people to meet and places to be. Sometimes the work was significant and sometimes it involved painting a floor, digging a garden or carrying things from one side of a building to another. Either way, there was usually a visible connection between effort and outcome.

At home, life is rarely quite so obliging.

Here, so much of what fills a day is invisible. Emails are answered. Meetings happen. Bills are paid. Washing is done. Things are added to lists and crossed off again. There is nothing wrong with any of it, but returning to it after three weeks of such tangible activity makes the machinery of ordinary life suddenly much more noticeable.

So does the sheer amount of stuff.

I have opened cupboards and wondered why I own so many things. I have looked at clothes I apparently considered necessary a month ago and regarded them with suspicion. I have rediscovered drawers containing objects whose purpose I cannot immediately identify but which I have nevertheless transported between houses for years.

None of this means I am about to renounce worldly possessions and live with a bowl and three carefully selected shirts. My childhood monastic ambitions have not resurfaced quite that dramatically.

Let's not get carried away.

But I am noticing.

I notice the reliable electricity. The water from the tap. The hot shower. The full fridge. The quiet roads. The ridiculous convenience of almost everything.

I notice how quickly I had stopped noticing them before.

And alongside all of that are the things I miss.

The warmth. The noise. The birds announcing the morning long before anyone had invited them to. The people I became used to seeing every day. The easy conversations. The laughter. The particular rhythm of life that felt unfamiliar when I arrived and completely normal by the time I left.

For a while, Zambia was the strange place and England was home.

Then Zambia became familiar too.

Now I am back, and somehow I seem to be carrying both versions of normal around with me.

You don't simply come back to the place you left. You bring another place home with you, not just in photographs and souvenirs but in habits, comparisons, memories and little recalibrations of what you consider important.

I don't yet know which of those will last.

Some will probably fade surprisingly quickly. Others may surface months from now, when something ordinary suddenly reminds me of a person, a place or a moment on the other side of the world.

It is probably too soon to decide what any of it means.

For now, I am home.

The suitcase needs unpacking. There is washing to do. There are emails waiting. The kettle has boiled.

Everything is exactly where I left it.

And somehow, it isn't quite the same.