Monday 19 December 2022
We are back in Lewisham, where the frosty, icy rural landscape of the past week or so seems from somewhere a long way away. We drove away from our Scottish home at 10:15 on Saturday, arriving back in Lewisham at 18:05 with two stops.
I had a great, long walk with a friend on Saturday night (incidentally, significantly more snow in London than Scottish Borders), was out yesterday afternoon with four friends for our annual Christmas karaoke and I’m heading out shortly to meet another friend, so already life is different. As with our last stay in Lewisham, it’s good to be back. I really think that our two homes, which, perhaps crucially, I associate with different lifestyles, are so different that it isn’t possible to prefer one to the other.
I chatted with the friends I’ve seen since we’ve been back, all asking about life in Scotland. It feels like describing the life of someone else, I just can’t quite comprehend how different it is. One of my friends asked how I was getting on with the new sounds and not having curtains. I said that I’d been adamant I’d want curtains, or at least something, put up immediately but that, somehow, I’m sort of okay with it. In London, not having curtains would mean potentially tens of people could see almost everything I did in my home. In Scotland, other than one neighbouring house with no windows directly facing our house, there’s not going to be anyone looking in. I would still prefer curtains though. Things that bother me in London don’t bother me in Scotland. Likewise, the other way round. For example, on my evening walk on Saturday, my friend and I walked across Blackheath in the snow but walked on pavements before getting back home. There was no wet-footwear issue once inside the flat.
Everyone I spoke to over the weekend has said they will visit. The couple we had lunch with who live a few miles from us in Scotland have been in their house for about ten years, having moved up from London. I asked them about visitors. They laughed and said that most people had indeed come to visit but that almost none of them had ever come up for a second time, a recurring comment being along the lines of how far away it is. Chris and I sometimes drive back from Lockerbie, commenting what friends might think when we pick them up from the station, driving over thirty minutes through countryside, forests, hills and hardly any houses and no shops, no pubs and loads of sheep. Right now, thinking about that drive, even I can’t fully comprehend that that is where we live. It is such a long way from here in so many ways, which is exactly what we wanted and why we now live in that house.
