Probably the best thing about going for a walk close to home is that you get to make it up as you go along. Whatever the plan was when you set out, you can tweak it, change it, completely abandon it…you can nose around in interesting corners, wander down alleyways that you'd never noticed before, pause when something unexpected catches your ear.
I had a plan. One of the things I like least about myself is that if I don't have a plan I won't get out the door. It's ridiculous because I'm more than happy to abandon it less than half a mile down the road, but I haven't yet mastered the art of needing it at all. So, I had a plan – but it morphed into two different ones before I'd even got down into town.
City! I remember when I first came to Norwich, the local bus drivers that collected the hordes of students from Horsham heading for a night out would correct every single one of us that had the nerve to suggest we were heading to 'town'. Ci-eee! they'd admonish, dropping the 't'. Perhaps it's a football thing, local rivals Ipswich being a mere 'Town'. Perhaps it's that that underlies the pride the locals have in the fact that they live in a City.
I don't count as local, for all I've been here for fully two-thirds of my life and cannot imagine moving away. I don't speak like a local, cannot master either the Norwich accent, or the Norfolk one, but it's more than that. I do think of Norwich as home most of the time, but when I talk about going back up north, I talk about going 'up home'.
There's an echo of my Mam in there. She would always talk about going 'down home' meaning back to Cippenham where her mother and some of her sisters were: 'down home' even as the years passed and many of the family with them. Cippenham was 'home' to her in a sense that I don't think my Dad ever understood. It was 'home' even though she'd been brought up in Wales and spent her 60+ years of marriage in the North East.
That North East is home to me in the same sense, even though I left at 18 and have no inclination to return.
'Home' is a complicated notion.
People often ask if I'd go back, but no. If it weren't for Clive, I would muse, I would probably head west. Wales, maybe, or Cornwall. Now it's not for him and I cannot imagine leaving this city where I've lived for the last 38 years. It's a different kind of 'home'…not one tied to family or even friends. Yes there are memories. It has been my base for virtually all of my adult life. But the things those memories are tied to, they change or disappear. Whites was never the same after Ray & Joan left. UEA has grown phenomenally. Horsham is now a housing estate. The Broad has matured. Whatever happened to The Jacquard? Does anyone remember Samantha's? Family houses get divided up into student accommodation, and occasionally the reverse happens and someone will claim something back, turn it back into a single house. Some of the run-down places I lived it are looking a lot smarter these days.
A city has a life of its own…and I wonder if that is what makes it feel like home…the fact that you watch these changes happening. Somethings improve, others decline, and others take you a while to make up your mind about. And all the while you are changing too. The two of you are growing into and around each other.
As I walked a different route to the one I'd set out on, I realised that a 'home town' (or city) is very much like a family in that you love it not in spite of its changing, but because of it. Like a friend or a lover, you love it not just because it is familiar, but because it keeps showing you sides of itself that you didn't know, quiet corners or exuberant displays. You love it because some parts of it look like somewhere else entirely.
Sometimes the somewhere else it reminds you of escapes memory, but at this time of year walking a particular part of the riverside walk where it is down below the road, reminds me of the banks of the Wear. The bridges are different, the Cathedrals also, but there is a spiritual sameness, a meeting of autumn leaves and flowing waters, spanned by ancient bridges.
And because it poses questions…asks you to guess at things that cannot be so easily read, whose tomb is that, and why is it the only one left standing? Was the door frame built that crooked or has it twisted over the years? As I wander through The Close and see that my favourite trees have been felled because they were in decline, I can't help but ask: even so? Was such a brutal solution the only one? And why?
Sometimes I think that maybe one of the reasons this city is still home and will probably always be so, is because I don't yet know it well enough to leave.
