MOTD

My brother and my sister both (each a few years younger than me) have always lived within a few miles of my mother, who lives in the house where I dwelt from age 11 to age 18. When I left for university I thought it would just be like heading for some kind of vacation or training course and I'd be back at home when it was all over. I met people at university who clearly had that mentality and maintained it and now, after all these years, live a few miles from their parents. Before my first term at university was over I knew I, personally, could never go back home. As well as the (small) city of my birth I have lived in two major cities in England (including over seven years in London) and three major cities in the USA. Until I ended up at my current location I never felt especially attached to a particular place (not, alas, the place where I am currently living). I remember passing through a few locales in the USA (Sperryville on the way to the Shenandoah Valley, the eastern shore of Maryland, Gilroy California and southern Wisconsin) where I was suprised to realise that there would be people who were born there, would live there and who would probably die there and would be completely content about the whole thing - never dreaming of Paris or Tokyo or even New York. Until moving here I have been living the kind of life where the breakpoints were dictated externally and I just had to go with the flow. Now (theoretically at least) I am master of my own destiny. What is shocking is to find out just how limited freedom can be.

[To be continued after the Cabernet wears off]