Missing

The trouble with missing your home country is that what you miss most intensely is intangible. I left London for San Francisco at least two years ago now (I've not been properly keeping track). This is long enough to miss the place I spent the first 28 years of my life in and around.

Living in the future as we do today I have every ability to fly across the ocean and be back there, but whenever I do, I never quite grasp what it is I missed enough to feel all of what felt like it was missing. I never quite manage to catch that feeling enough with both hands.

I think that when I turn those thoughts over in my mind – the things that make me most miss home, the trouble is that they are not places, and they are not things. They're little magical moments that happen by chance. The kinds you trip over.

If a place is a larder, full with ingredients; some unique, some universal, the meals I miss most are not the ones you can make on purpose. They're the ones that one day happen upon you with ingredients you just picked up on the way to something else.

Summers in England can be punishingly hot. The field grasses dry out almost to hay while still in the soil. In the westcountry, the valleys these fields are nestled in tend to funnel groundwater to springs. The waterways carve goyles out of the soft soil at the high points and settle into brooks at the shallow valley basins.

In that late spring period, these brooks become flush with water between the ever-intermittent rain which falls thickly over the valley. In turn, these brooks form natural field boundaries as the trees grow thick and healthily around the water source. The hedgerows on both sides are pierced by clearings for gates onto fords to cross the water.

In that transition space from parched field to parched field, the running water cools the air. The thick trees ample coverage form dark pools of shadow around the water. If you travel by these gulleys, you emerge in some other field blinking from bright daylight.

I am sure back home, many of us have that experience of resting under a tree next to a gate on one of these natural boundaries. I find myself missing the experience, but I don't find myself seeking it out. It's not the activity I miss, or a specific place – but simply a happening that you happen upon every few years, and then one day, a world away on another continent, you simply don't.

I miss also the bluebells that push up from the grass in the woodlands in spring. As I understand it now, for many hundreds of years those woodlands were worked for sticks and firewood, creating space for undergrowth like those tiny flowers. There are places in England back home that are famous for this event, and people seek out particularly grounds to find themselves in when this happens.

It's not as though I couldn't go to one of these places at just the right time and seek the experience out – but to fly 9-10 hours for that would be like flying back for a particular church service at a particularly beautiful church. These things are caught up with passing the time there, and to construct international travel plans to experience such a beautiful, special, and yet mundane moment dilutes its meaning.

I miss the snow in winter, and how it so palpably transforms every place. The snow falls, and you re-visit every place you love wanting to see its new face. But I don't miss the disappointment of a cold and yet snowless christmas the same way I don't miss the disappointment of a summer that never quite aligns with expectations.

The snow, like the transformation of late spring and summer has some of its magic in recontextualising the life you already lead there. These experiences are the sparse things that happen inevitably over 28 years. You look out of your bedroom window and your everyday is shifted with the tide of the world.

I suppose in that sense, I miss it the way I miss the bread like back home – I know that I can sit down to put the pieces together to access it, or something like it; but it is the ease at which these things once happened that has me longing.

Two months ago, in September, I took the Night Riviera Sleeper over to Penzance, near land's end – a strange, beautiful, sub-tropical part of the UK much written about in famous Victorian novels.

It felt like by taking myself out to this place I managed to construct for myself somehow some of that serendipity I write about that I missed. Ascending St Michael's Mount, I felt more than I had done in a long time that feeling that sits somewhere between those sparse moments I talk about.

I wonder why? Perhaps the newness and strangeness let me live in the moment with them again.

Thomas