MY VERSION OF EVENTS....

I'm prepared to accept that I am anti-social. I don't much like people around me, close to me, and certainly not in significant numbers. By significant, I mean greater than five. This may strike you as odd if you have seen me at OHP surrounded by patrons, fulsomely socialising, but please be assured, as the saying goes, I'm drowning, not waving. But it's work. It's habitual and it's just what I do, an act I have perfected over decades and there is a kind if silent terror bubbling away beneath, even when I'm telling everybody to piss-off. It's a terror - or perhaps a profound discomfort - that rises in crowds and situations you might find normal.  I furiously ask myself 'what the bloody hell are these people doing HERE?'. So it is with something akin to frantic haste that I retire to sunnier climates once the season is done, to find some peace, tranquility and a calm space into which I breathe a desperate sigh of relief. This year, one w...

Where do you feel at home? Is it the house in which you live? The city in which you live? The town in which you grew up? A country in which you spent your formative years? Where your friends are, or your work? Could it be a country that you have never lived in? And just what does 'feeling at home' mean anyway? I've been wrestling with this whole idea for at least two years; I had always kind of wondered about it, argued about it with friends and family, but in truth, I have never really felt fully at home in the UK, despite my upbringing there. It isn't a conscious, nationalist thing whereby I have a forced, manufactured connection to the country of my parents' birth (Italy) but is more a visceral, emotional sympathy with all things associated with the place. 'At home' is literally how I feel when I arrive there. In fact, the whole matter is becoming obsessive and I have even written a couple of chapters of a potential book. Right now I am in Sicily, an ...