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What does home mean to you?

Home is the only place I watch TV. I used to also watch at my parents house and my daughter’s flat but I suppose they are both home in an abstract way.

Thanks to a misunderstanding from yesterday’s blog, where a friend thought that Nigel was my dog, rather than the dog on Gardener’s World I have discovered the delight that is Grayson’s Art Club on Channel 4 and more especially a new TV animal to get overly attached to. Kevin the cat is quite special.

I’ve watched the first two: portraits and animals and they are, quite simply, the best thing on television. It’s a programme that would work whenever it was on but is absolutely perfect for right now. I don’t know why I was surprised because Grayson Perry is a genius, as is his wife (whose books are a must read if you are at all interested in psychology). There is a beautiful, calm chemistry between them. He calls her Philbert and she subtly psychoanalyses every thought he has. The cat wanders through and Grayson says, “I think a cat makes a home.”

Since then, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about ‘home’ as a concept.

Home is more than the building you live in. It’s the people you have in it, the pets, the things, the thoughts you have that bring you back to yourself. Some people don’t feel that the place they live is home.

For the last six weeks we have been asked to stay home to protect the NHS and save lives. For many of us that has been a good thing. We have reconnected to what home means. People have spent time with their family, cared for their pets, cooked, gardened, exercised, watched TV, read books and generally spent time on the things that make them feel happy. The people who have found it hardest are those who are not living where their heart believes it is home; people whose home is scattered over more than one residence.

Now that home doesn’t feature in our instructions we are sad. If we have to be alert then the instruction is to leave our home. However, if home is not the building then maybe we could all take ‘home’ with us.

For me, home is a sense of peace. It’s a feeling that I am where I’m meant to be. I agree with Grayson and think that a home without a pet wouldn’t feel much like a home and even if the dog does fart constantly and walks out the room whenever I walk in we would be lost without him. The garden, with its squabbling starlings and roses whose scent take me right back to making perfume from petals in my garden as a child are an important part of home for me. Home is a place where my family are. Even the family that are not with me reside in my home, in albums as photographs, in notebooks of stories I’ve written, on the walls in the art of my mum, in the garden as my grandma’s lily of the valley start to push their heads through or the rose bush that we planted Dad’s ashes on comes into bud. It’s the place where we nourish ourselves; where we eat cake and, now, every meal. It’s a place where we can make things.

I was inspired to sew cat buttons onto the latest baby cardigan
from my comfortable knitting nest

The next episode I’m going to watch has ‘abstract’ as a theme. I think I’m there already. Home is an abstract concept that has shielded us from the coronavirus. I have a picture in my mind of myself surrounded by my ideas of home, batting away green virus balls and keeping me safe.  That works, right?