Only connect!

That’s the key sentence in Howard’s End of course, whatsisname’s great book on class in England. Normally, I would look up the internet and find out what whatsisname’s name is but tonight I can’t be bothered. I’ll think of it in a minute anyway.

I wonder what he’d have made of the internet. And telephones. And cell phones. And Skype.

E.M. Forster.

Queenie can’t do without them of course, because she likes to be connected. Spin that great cancerian web of ‘do I know you? Yes I do therefore we are connected forever. In my head anyways. Despite your best attempts to get away from me.’

I found out tonight that one of my distant past exes thought I had gone to Halifax to get married. Not connected enough there obviously.

Although I know there has been virtual mountains of garbage written and rivers of bull, as Chief Flowing Bull would say, spewed about how all of this cyberspace data packaging, and telephone lines, and wireless doo-dahs is really changing the way we live and connect with each other and totally reinventing our landscape and whatever village it is we call home, I still get stop and pinch myself moments about it.

For example, today, I talked to an Irish woman who lives in the States; an American woman who lives in Ireland, and some people from ‘down the valley’, which is a place that bears no resemblance to what The Boss was singing about in his song The River.

The last few people who read my blog were from California, Alberta, Texas, Pennsylvania, Thailand, Belgium and Ireland.

And somebody from Mali, who lives in Dublin now, got on the phone and asked me when I was coming home.

I felt like giving that old response I used to give when I was being stroppy with my mother when she asked me that.

I am home.

Meaning I was in whatever flat I was renting in Dublin. Knowing it would irritate her, because of course, home was where the family was. Is. Will be.

But is it anymore?

When I bought a place that became home. Although I remember the mother of a friend of mine telling me at the time that despite living in Springtown for thirty years, she still felt Donegal was home. And I understood what she meant.

Springtown is home. Except I haven’t been there for six months. My apartment in Dublin is home. Except I don’t live there now of course, someone else does. Halifax is home. Except it’s not of course, because I’m renting again, and I’m on a temporary visa and my job is not forever.

So where is home?

Home is a telephone number; an email address; somewhere I can be reached. It is wherever I am at a particular point. And because I’m a crab, home is my rucksack and my clothes and my wash bag and whatever book I am reading and whatever pair of shoes I am obsessing about at the time, and the nice pair of angora wool knee socks I bought today for wearing with my winter boots and my iPod and my laptop, and the people I talk to by voice or type.

Home is wanting to have a conversation with my mother on a Saturday morning because it is a Saturday morning.

Home is talking to Colombo after a party at one am in the morning. Because it is one am in the morning and that’s when we talk.

Home, more and more, is talking to people in three or four different time zones in the space of one day, which I will do tomorrow. Because Sunday is catching up day.

Do we have to be in the same room? Sometimes, yes. Does it always have to be the same room though? No. A room is a room is a room.

So, to answer your question, Abdoul, when am I coming home?

I am home. I’m always home.