I'm sitting in an old armchair, two of my dogs sleeping, listening to Arvo Pärt... and I was just thinking once again about "Home"...
Home in the sense of "where I come from", my "home country", and so on... I left my home country, the UK, when I was three years old, to live in Saudi Arabia. People ask me if I speak Arabic, but I don't, my father worked for British Aerospace and we lived on a compound. (well at first some appartments in the capital, but really when moving to Jubail). A compound is like a village built for a company's employees, one side is for the families, and the other side is for the bachelors who share flats etc. The whole thing is surrounded by a big wall. All that to explain that we were pretty much seperated from the rest of the people, so I didn't get to know any of the culture and stuff even though I lived there for seven years.
I went to an English school, in this school of three sections (American, Dutch, and English), most of the kids were Arabic, most of them were from Pakistan. It was great. In that kind of environment, and at that age, it was a real mix of all kinds of people getting along, not caring about where we came from. I was there till I was 10, but it was a synthetic environment in a way.. and by that I mean living in an appartment, with a cleaner, growing up in a foreign country, it was all a little weird... Not "home"...
In June 1996 I arrived here, in France. The nearest village has about a thousand inhabitants (allegedly)... most of which are rather old, if not very old. Who am I kidding the average age is like 65.. The only kids who are left, that I know, have never moved out of this place, and frankly it shows, it's so freaky.. I was 10, and I arrived here and already found it weird to find kids playing with marbles and farm toys (like those Majorette cars but they were farm vehicles, bringing catalogues of them to school to show etc..) - now ok I'm just saying what it was like for me back then... Trying to explain what it can feel like. I was playing Doom and other games (dune 2!!) before coming over, I quickly got a pc and half-life, and they just didn't seem to see time go by...
Ok that's kinda off topic, what I really need to explain is that my house is about 3km away from this crummy village, in the forest, our nearest neighbours are 100m away, and that's a farm anyway... I've been growing up in this... place.. completely isolated, from everything, for 9 years now, 8 of which were spent exclusively here, quickly losing interest in TV, no one around here, the only people my age gasp at technology (ok the select few that I brought home back then did..)... so i get so insanely bored... and missed out on so much, missed out on life... I just stayed in, and this is where this gets back to the main topic, because I never really felt accepted here (being foreign, especially English, hardly surprising), and never really fitted in with the culture etc, so this is far from being my Home.
People talk of the UK, Germany, France, or some place else, as their home, but I left the uk very young, I was isolated in Saudi, i'm isolated here, I don't have a place I can call home, with all the background that goes with it, culture, heritage, I barely know any of the slang that's used these days in the UK!
I'm expecting most of you will find this silly... probably too long.. but I'm hoping someone will read this all the way through and if he or she's living or has lived this kind of weird feeling, of... I dunno being a nomad or something.. then please leave a comment on a question, I'd appreciate it, ty:)