Drain Problems

In lessons we are thinking about homes and what makes them, something we can all relate to. Suddenly this new place is meant to be our "home" and I was wondering if anyone was having difficulty settling in or if people found it really easy to set up camp here. Only last week my boyfriend Rob told me off for calling this place home rather than calling my home 'home'. He felt as if I was leaving him behind because my previous town is the place where we both used to live and now it is not home to me. I tell him the word "home" has no spiritual meaning for me but I am lying, I think to make full advantage of a new habitat you have to embrace it as a home, as I feel I have.

However!!! I am having real problems applying this theory to my new room in Athlone. As you may remember from what I mentioned last lesson the drains in Reid (my home) have collapsed so I have been shipped off to dank, hellish Athlone, the purgatory for all sinners!! My room smells, the walls are breezeblocks painted a cheap cream, mouldy fridge, microwave... the list goes on! Anyway, the reason I feel so uncomfortable here is that I know it's not a permanent residence, which makes me think back to a question Dan asked in "Homes Nowhere" about those poor people who were being smuggled over in a tiny compartment of a lorry and whether their tiny uninhabitable environment ever became home. I do not think so, like myself, they were probably always projecting an image of their future destination and how much nicer a home it is than their present. This is what I presume them to think, I do not have the guts to say I knew how they must have felt as it all sounded too horrible.

Another point I'd like to make is how upsetting I found the overnight move to Athlone, a dingier place and a place not home, and if that is how I feel imagine how it must feel being an immigrant forced out of their country into another.

Sam Wood