Home From Home

[poliphilo]

We were driving into Tonbridge yesterday morning; it was a bright, sunny day,  and I could see the North Downs rising up behind the town and I thought "I know this place, I like it. Why it's almost as if it were home."

I got another ripple of the same feeling listening to the Kentish accents in Lidl.

Ailz put a post up on Facebook yesterday saying how she wishes she could sell the house in Oldham and relocate permanently. But that's not so much about how lovely Kent is and more about how her mother keeps scratching away at her self esteem. Next time we go north we're taking a day or a couple of days to be with Odi while she's in hospital in Liverpool having her third baby. "But that's not fair," says Dot- meaning, I suppose, that we should be spending all the time we're not in Kent sitting in her frowsty living room listening to her litanies of self pity.

I tried to imagine myself in Dot's shoes last night, thinking as she thinks, feeling as she feels, wanting what she wants. I'm afraid it sent me to sleep.

Comments

Kent

[alice grist (from livejournal.com)]

Kent is beautiful. Move there. Alice x

Re: Kent

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Yes, it is. Maybe we will....

[pondhopper.livejournal.com]

I love the Kentish countryside and villages.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

It's amazing how unspoiled so much of it is- in spite of the closeness of London. After a while you get blase about half-timbered houses; there are just so many of them around.

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

As a Maid of Kent (not, be you sure, a Kentish Maid) I know I'm home when the castle and cathedral in Rochester come back into view, wherever in the world I've been! :o)

[w. lotus (from livejournal.com)]

Dot sounds a lot like my grandmother. No, thank you.

I wish Ailz could find it in herself to step away from Dot. Relocating isn't the answer, because someone else somewhere else will just latch onto this tendency she has to let people walk over her in that way. "Everywhere you go, there you are."