When we left Truro we expected to spend a couple of days at my Mum and Dads in Fareham. For various reasons those days turned into a couple of months.
Willow of course loved it as it meant she could go back to her base school and see all the friends she hadn't seen for a year. It was also quite nice for me to catch up with old friends as well. Its great when you see someone you haven’t seen in years and 20 minutes suddenly become 6 hours and you hardly even noticed. It was also nice to spend real time with family and for Willow and her cousin it seemed like they had never been apart.
I know it has been a while since I blogged, partly because I have been in the habit of blogging after I have left a place but also because it has been a hard one to write about. When travelling to new places you notice the good and bad about a place fairly quickly, though I'm sure sometimes the first impressions are completely wrong but it is an impression all the same. You go out exploring and take the place in. You wander across buildings and public street art that catch your attention. You go to museums, galleries and zoos as well as all the other varied attraction. Ticking the boxes off the things to do in that area and a few more thrown in for good measure.
I'm not saying Hampshire is lacking in this type of thing, but when you have grown up somewhere, seeing it everyday you start to not notice. Sometimes you don't even visit places right on your door step that others travel to see.
You can walk past the same building everyday and not notice the detail, like a date of 1705. You also forget quite how old Britain really is. I really like the houses down Castle Street in Portchester, they are a real mix of large and small, new and really old, and it leads you as its name suggests to the Castle which started its life as a fort in the 3rd century. When we lived here we could walk from our house all along the shore line to the castle and even though we did this a lot, we should have done it more.
Another old building I really like is The Kings theatre. I used to work there years ago and it was nice to spend some time back there with Tweedy working with Zippos Circus over the half term. It was even better catching up with old friends also in the show and others who made the effort to come and visit.
Being local, there was a lot of publicity to do and Tweedy seemed to be in a paper or on the radio every week for a while. Even me and Willow made an appearance.
Also during half term Willow spent some time at another place I used to work, The Ashcroft Art Centre. She made comic strips, became a superhero and spent a day singing and dancing in the style of Glee. We also managed to get some swimming lessons in while we were here, which Willow loved.
I spent more time in Fareham than Tweedy as he had various things to do all over the place which meant we were apart properly for the first time in over two years. Its strange but something that was so normal now feels strange and horrible.
I moved to Fareham from Scotland in 1977 and this is were I grew up but it feels less and less like home the more time I spend away. Not really sure where I would call home now, especially as we don't actually have one. Not in the sense of bricks and mortar anyway. For us 'home' seems to move about quite a lot and come in a lot of different guises, but we are fine with that.
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