I bet you remember, like me, if you’ve seen the film E.T.  him saying the iconic words ‘E.T. phone home’   Although at first refusing to see it, but when I did, I was swept up and touched by a sense of longing for something, but I didn’t know what.  A memory, set in stone, reportedly made on mass, was in fact  first uttered by E.T.’s as ‘home phone E.T’   My somewhat decidedly alienated adolescent, 14 year-old self, had tapped into a fundamental human need for belonging at the heart of many great stories.  

 To go home has deep spiritual connections, too, with the divine, to become one with God or with nature, with the earth.  It speaks of unity, of communality with a meaningful place: the mountains from which you are refreshed and recharged.  It is earthy – family, brothers, sisters, sons and daughters and pure.

 Home, too, to me, is something you carry always when you are away a sense of love for a country, a place idolised, viewed within memory.  A snapshot of love, pain, what is absent, and no longer.  Home is a place that comes with ties, snapped, pulled tight, replaced, and readjusted repeatedly.    Stories told and remembered from multiple viewpoints.  Scottish pride, subdued and flattened by over a year of covid rules let out on a Scotland, England football away trip.  A tartan life-affirming pride of kilted flashes, blue pale skin sunburnt red riding across viral boundaries.  Like the shy Capercaillie once almost obliterated in Scotland and successfully brought back ‘home’ to Scotland here at Taymouth Castle, in 1837 we strut; in full knowledge of our painful shortcomings and with determination, for we are forever hopeful.

For home is a nest from which we fledge, some of us successfully; some only to fall straight from the nest, never to experience the ultimate nurturing required to create, build and recreate.   With amenities of the right food, education, environment we can fledge with strong healthy feathers and at speed or at least through carefully controlled parental monitoring out for short periods, then longer and then finally on to the ultimate flight into independence. 

Home is with people, or it can be alone – at peace.  It can be a beautiful house, an expression of who you are – your sanctity.   Broken hoovers, washing machines, oh, how the household list mounts up –  a broken life needing healing.

 A home can become a sanctity, that divine experience of oneness with yourself and within that the very many multitudes of expressions of place.