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Q4 Which object most evokes home for you?
old slippers
Luda Sokolova , Tula
"These Foolish Things" - All cigarettes with lipstick traces / An airline ticket to romantic places.
I've moved around so much that any signs of moving in or out in anyone's house evoke home: empty boxes, a suitcase with dirty washing in it, souvenirs from Ulan Bator, a mango on the table in the heart of an Arctic winter, snowshoes in the Congo. Home is the object where I'm not.
James Sutherland-Smith , Belgrade and other places
The tummy of a pregnant woman.
Edith Hatchikian , Bulgaria
(The following piece is written in Albanian language)
Ne shtepine time mobiljet e te tjera objekte kane ndryshuar shpesh. Te vjetrat jane zevendesuar me te reja por ndryshimi nuk i ka hequr shtepise magjine e te qenit shtepia ime ku objekti me i dashur eshte dashuria e prinderve te mi
Aida Berxholi , Albania
A wooden stool with a top scrubbed 'til it's white. It used to sit in my grandmother's kitchen, just by the back stop where we used to shell peas. I have it now, and since then, my mum has told me that it was the thing that made her feel most at home in her parent's house too.
Lucy Scott , Scotland
Fences (absence of)
The very first home of my youth - there were no fences, no locked doors - because there were no nightmares to be protected from.
Andy C. , PL
There are not a great deal of material objects left in my house. No washing machine, no tables, just one set of cutlery that I am always forgetting to wash up. With the exception of some clothes, a few CDs, my Discman and a book about sea snakes, all my possessions are stored away in lofts and garages around the south of England.
Some of these objects have great sentimental value – things that belonged to my Grandparents and their parents. A pocket watch that belonged to my Great-Great Grandfather, with his family crest inscribed on the back and the date: 1869. Tail feathers that came from my long dead budgerigars. A crystal owl that my Grandparents gave me. Another watch that my friends presented to me on my eighteenth birthday inscribed with the words ‘Happy Eighteenth, Ark Hunter’. (I was researching Noah’s Ark at the time). Boxes of books and CDs.
I have loved it all, but, when the time comes, I’ll walk away from all of it and I won’t look back.
The two objects that remind me of home are my hand weights. I found them when I was clearing out the garage a couple of years ago. They are two small cast iron dumb-bells; proper old-fashioned weights with chipped, uneven globes of metal at either end. They have been painted with white emulsion, which has begun to flake off, exposing the black, rusted iron underneath. I always leave them crossed over on the bare brown carpet of my now empty lounge. They look like the crossed bones on a pirate flag.
I am not a strong man. In the past, physical strength is something that I have thought of as inferior to intelligence and education. Now I think of it as more important. It is the foundation upon which everything else stands.
Everyday I stand in the lounge and lift the weights at the elbow, bringing them up to my shoulders and down again. The pain builds in the muscles of my upper arms. It spills over, stabbing continuously along the length of my arms. It spreads the other way too, along the tops of my shoulders and down my spine. I fix my eyes on a point in the room and keep going. I don’t make any noise. I internalise it all. I try to stay at a constant speed. The pain goes away and then comes back worse than before. I keep lifting until my body starts trembling and the weights drop out of my hands.
Afterwards I feel like a blank canvas. It is the only time I feel rooted in my body – when I am pushing it to its very feeble limits. It makes me aware of my place in the world. I am nothing special. I am an organism made from bone and gristle and a mixture of chemicals that dictate my moods and determine my behaviour. There are over 6 billion others just like me. If I die it doesn’t matter. Your body is the only thing you have. It is the one constant in everyone’s life. It is your home. Take away all your possessions. Walk away from your friends, your workplace, all the things you take for granted, the things you think will be around forever. It is all superfluous.
My weights reminds me that your body is all you have. You have to keep it strong and be strong in your mind. Physical, mental and emotional weakness are luxuries.
When I come downstairs in the morning, the weights are there crossed-over in the middle of the floor. Even though they are small they dominate the room. They are the axis around which my life pivots.
Jonathan kepple , NFA
The empty space of me, when I am not there.
Tina Rothbury , Australia
Keys (absence of)
We never had locks on the doors
Simone Veenstra , Amsterdam, NL
My bed makes me think I am home. It is my comfort zone, where I can snuggle against the one I love and know pure warmth and adoration. It is the fortress inside the castle walls, the space nothing evil can harm me. It is my bed, and it makes me feel I am home.
Shaun Eyles , Australia
I recall summers when it was so hot I would leave my mother - patiently gardening - and go into the bathroom. There I would turn on the cold tap and fill up the washbasin.
Then I would dip my face into the water and hold it there. Slowly opening my eyes until I could see thousands of hairline cracks radiating like veins towards the plug hole; how the sun, distored by the water, made patterns on the curved porcelain. I would wallow in the liquid and, when my lungs were near to bursting, drink in the cool water until the my teeth ached.
Whe we had central heating fitted in 1969, that washbasin was replaced by a sleek, shallow model that we now called a bathroom sink.
Chris Sewart , Leicester
My cat, the tortieshell tiger who stalkes the house with a proprietary self-confidence that defies anyone to break the threshold without her say so. Her expectant gaze as I sit on the sofa eating my tea; or her loud demonstrations on the other side of her cat flap as if to say how demeaning to have to use this instead of the door like a normal human being.
When I'm away I pretend I can hear her tinkling collar and her subtle meow and I am home and comforted once more.
Home is where I cuddle my cat.
Laura Shade , Chesterfield
When I think of home the objects that fly around are always toys...balls and bats and a paddling pool, and all the plastic brightly coloured toys that would float around in it when I played. We had a coal shed where all the toys lived and all I can see is the annual opening of the shed and the fight to get in amongst the cobwebs and throw everything out on to the path...my mum always complained but not with enough conviction to prove to me that she really objected. She enjoyed it as much as me. It's also, for some reason, the yellow washing line that stretches down the path and kitchen that will probably never be overhauled.
Kelly Pipes , Leicester, England
A cigarette packet,
a coach and horses made from Italian silver,
a set of Dickens, -drawings by Fiz-,
a plywood table,
a toy robot, a teapot...
None of these things though,
when I touch them, either in memory
or in passing,
evoke that childhood place
of hidden passages and secret stares
that we call home in quite the same way that the pobble does.
The pobble was the name we gave to a bollard - (Or do I mean fender? It was, anyway, one of those things hung from the decks of ships so their hulls will not rub and scrape along a dockside.) - that had fallen from a freighter leaving Preston dock bound for wherever, and which we, four kids, found, one spring tide, washed up at the foot of the seawall about a hundred yards from our house.
It was about three foot in diameter and shaped like a fat pocket watch. The workings of the watch were a sandbag, the watch case a thick, tightly woven outer layer of hemp, the watch chain a frayed rope from which it had once hung.
We grabbed the rope and hauled the thing up a slipway from the beach and down the road from the promenade, past the white tiled church, across the traffic lights to our house.
There we fixed it to the branch of tree that leaned over beside the driveway and for years afterwards, used it as a swing.
A giant's pocketwatch,
a kid's pendulum and swing,
a pobble: - a most excellent
object, - a thing.
Nick Pemberton , Cumbria, England
A big bed swathed in crisp cotton with soft lights and warmth - a place where I am with the man I love, where we rest and play and embrace each other as we absorb ourselves in books, pray and whisper to each other as our baby sleeps, where we dream and imagine, hope, cling to one another and set one another free. Where God speaks and we hear and where everything is possible, and everything is safe.
Maura Bedloe , Hobart, Tasmania
Ice Flowers
Ice flowers cover my window,
My look can't get outside,
Because cold and ice doesn't let it through
So it silently slips back...
Into my room.
Santo Ion
Santo Ion , Romania
I used to live away from home a quarter of the globe away. the smell of two stroke oil set me off once. the smells of tarmac road construction always provokes a nice memory.
i think the most overall jab would be when ou catch the weather or cloud patterns to be that just bit familiar. maybe the wind in trees or the setting sun on a patchy - mine personally is fresh - warm dry , but grey mornings. doesnt matter where i am in the world. this combination takes me back to home when i was 6-8 years old - fantastic !!
Ian , UK
Who went away.
I opened the booklet just arrived in the post and drew a sharp breath -- for places long remembered.
All professionally snapped from their best angles, granted, and all on clear sunny days, but even so -- .
Memories like long bleached grass revived after autumn rain in colours achingly lush -- the South Downs so unchanged from when I trod the bridle paths that I could smell the wildflowers and taste the blackberries. The sea front, smarter and fresher, than before and bright with bunting.
And I fell to wondering -- where was the girl who had once been a part of this scenery of gardens and seafronts, castles and churches, palace piers and pavilions?
Where was the girl who had loved to tramp through moist woods, finding sycamore and beech seeds and the odd dead shrew -- or over the South Downs picking pails of blackberries -- the girl whose sister insisted on wearing a vest and ankle socks with her swimming costume at the beach -- the girl who built sandcastles and trimmed them with seaweed, pebbles and shells for the mermaids -- the girl who drove dodgem cars and played shove halfpenny but couldn't sit through a game of Bingo -- the girl whose grandfather drove her all over the district with her cousins to show them not only castles and pavilions but badgers' sets and fox dens off deserted country lanes?
I fell to wondering about the girl who went away.
Sharon Rundle , Australia
Any other dwelling that isn't the one I must walk into nightly. The house around the corner that looks so warm, safe and loving. Then reality slaps the "HELL" out of me --reminding me, every thing that looks good to you isn't good for you.
Trevor ,
Most evocative of home:
As a child, living in a house with no indoor sanitation, it was the chamber pot under my bed. Its familiar odour always beckoned with the promise of eight hours of comfort and solitude before the big bad world would take possession again.
Now it is the three cats who allow me to share their home, and now it is they who have only an outdoor toilet.
Arthur Loosley , Newark
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