Another time, another place

A reader writes to say she is homesick. She has not left these shores. She hasn't even left her county, much less her country.

She is one of those people who has been priced out of her area and is now raging quietly about her predicament somewhere in another part of Dublin. A foreign place where, it seems to her, they speak a different language. She can't stroll around the corner for a glimpse of the sea or sit on a bench in the park where she used to play as a child. She is one of them. The dispossessed. The new refugees.

Me too, I found myself murmuring, me too. I spent a couple of hours last week in my home village of Sandymount, coincidentally also the reader's home village. I ended up there for no other reason than the fact that, when the taxi driver asked where I was headed, I told him there. He noticed I was yawning quite a lot in the back of his cab. I told him I was tired, just needed a bit of a lie down. For half a sweet second I saw myself back in the bedroom of my old house, catching a nap on my old bed, admiring my black-and-white Beatles collage.

I made do with a sit down on the bench on the green opposite the site where my childhood home once was, followed by a plate of rigatoni in the Italian restaurant where the Chinese takeaway used to be. This was our playground. Oh, build a bridge, as my sister would say. And get over it.

We wish we could. The reader who is homesick is certainly trying. But the memories won't let her move on. She remembers a village before it was invaded by four-wheel drives. She clings to the memory of May Roddy, in her frock coat, cutting slices of haslet behind the counter of her shop. She remembers the Tea Time Express cakes in the window of the Gem, the sawdust on the floor of Strecker's pork butchers. She remembers "everything that was ordinary, run-of-the-mill Sandymount village, and not Dublin 4".

She says she is "one of the dispossessed". Someone who, "through a lapse in concentration, stalled, hesitated and dithered long enough to now not be able to afford to live in my home village". She feels shoved to the outskirts of the city, she feels "displaced, bereft, lost" in her new environment.

"I'm sure there are hundreds of us," she muses, as if she is sending a missive from some distant place, a message in a bottle from a faraway land. "Please write about us."

The person who lives with me is even farther away from his place. An hour and a half by train. He goes back, too. Wanders around as if the place still makes sense to him. And, up to a point, it does. It makes sense in the language of football matches and family and friends he has left behind. He has stopped saying he is "going home" before these visits. Now he says "up north" while wearing an expression that suggests what he really means is that he is going home.

I can't help wondering when this pointless yearning will stop. I wonder when I will change banks, to a branch near where I live, not where I wish I did. I wonder when the time will come when I stop drifting back there for no reason, like a confused homing pigeon that refuses to believe her loft has been moved. The young women walking around the village with yoga mats, the children with iPods, the shopkeeper selling postcards of Ganesh: they fit in, they look right, they look - and this is at the heart of it, really - as if they belong. But I, with my morose expression and memories of throwing sticks up at those old trees to shake the conkers down at this time of year, do not. Not any longer, at least. I have become one of them. One of us.

And yet I live in a perfectly good place, where, if I'd only let go, I could start to build new memories. Almost without noticing, I am doing that. Memories of neighbours who take in packages when we miss the postman. Who phone you at work to say you've left the window open. A local park filled with secret follies, a rose garden and a place for picnics and for boule. People who wander around in pyjamas and don't care that there aren't Italian coffee shops on every corner. This, actually, is something of a relief.

We are not dispossessed. We have just been struck down with what sometimes feels like an incurable bout of nostalgia. We are lucky to have homes at all, however far they are from what we still, in our less lucid moments, like to call home. It's not as if we had to leave the country to get these houses. We didn't have to leave everything we know and love behind to settle in strange and foreign lands. Even if, sometimes, when you are heartsore for your home, it can feel a bit like that.