The push and pull of a restless homebody

Writer’s block is real

For a week I’ve been trying to write.

I would sit at my desk and open a draft. I’d read other writers’ work with awe and wonder. I tried to fathom how they were able to put such moving and meaningful and insightful words on a page when my thoughts were a writhing mass of snakes in my head, going round and round in circles, piling on top of each other, not knowing where one ends and another begins.

I would get up and go for a run, hoping it would provide its usual magic trick of sparking or solidifying ideas. Anything to get out of my head and remove the obstacles that were preventing me from writing - a thing I love, a thing I need in order to live.

It reminded me of another time I was trying to clear the way for the arrival of something, the birth of my second child, my son. The due date was upon us, I thought I was close and the frustration was building, but I couldn’t quite get the ball rolling. l ate spicy food, I hobbled around the block in my Texas neighbourhood, I had sex. All the tricks to get this giving birth party started.

It didn’t work back then (a baby has its own schedule for when it wants to face the world and Johnny wasn’t ready) and my run-to-write trick didn’t work this week.

Eventually I gave up, I stopped trying. I told myself if I just forgot about trying to write, inspiration would strike. Like when they say to stop looking for love and it will find you. Or if you want to find something you’ve lost, stop looking and start tidying up. Distract yourself. I’m still waiting on love, but the ability to write did eventually find me again.

I didn’t sit at my desk and try. Instead I tackled small jobs I’d been putting off. A small check that needed depositing for my mum in a bank that wasn’t close. Curtains that needed finishing. Spreadsheets that needed amending. Skirts that needed hemming. I finished small jobs I had put off because of their smallness, too insignificant to start/finish, yet occupying a file in my mind labelled ‘you should do this’ that I opened and closed every day.

And it worked. Here I am in the twilight hours tapping away frantically in the notes app on my phone, inspiration having finally struck. All because I found a book on a shelf in a shop I never go in, in a part of town I rarely visit when I went to deposit a check that had been getting dog eared in my purse for weeks.

When home no longer feels like home

I moved to Margate because of what felt like an actual physical pull towards the sea, as well as a nostalgia for a place I’d called home from age 10-17. Early in lockdown I started to chew on an idea that had been simmering for a couple of years and which so far had only amounted to a couple of house viewings in 2018/19 on a dark and dreary day

with a boyfriend who couldn’t yet see the potential in a move to Margate. Eventually I moved to the seaside on my own and he joined me later, finally seeing sense.

Three years on and the pull to move has got me in its grip again. I’m not going to move but the instinct is there and its caused me to think about why. What makes me want to flee. I love my home so why am I desperate to escape?

Kimchi gets it

I picked up a book in a charity shop this week on one of my ‘stop trying to write days’. A Place in the World: Finding the Meaning of Home by Frances Mayes. My eyes were immediately drawn to it amidst the umpteen copies of Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code and Rylan’s biography. I picked it up and immediately put it back on the shelf, put off by the word Tuscan on the cover. Since my breakup (with an Italian) I have been experiencing an irritating and embarrassingly immature aversion to all things Italian. The feelings are sometimes still raw, memories too fresh, future plans dashed. I won’t watch or read or listen to anything relating to Italy, surprisingly difficult to do as it turns out.

But I felt myself being pulled back to the book on the shelf, so I shrugged off these - frankly ridiculous - feelings, swearing not to indulge them anymore and I picked up the book again.

It turns out the author also wrote Under the Tuscan Sun, a memoir that was later turned into a film starring Diane Lane which satisfied my and probably many other women’s fantasy of packing it all in and - on a whim - buying a crumbling house in Tuscany. The book my hand had instinctively reached for was another memoir by the same author, published in 2022 and told as stories of various places Mayes has called home over the years.

“This memoir is a floor plan of a lifetime of house and home obsession”, writes Mayes in the introduction.

(Fun fact: my ex-brother in law Elden Henson had a small role in the opening scene of that movie, but that’s not why I liked it).

This is not a book review. I’m on page 14. But already it resonates.

As I lie awake in the lonely and anxious 3-4am hours as I often do these days, I read about Frances Mayes’ impression of home, and the pull on some restless souls to travel and explore. It’s a feeling I’ve had for years, hopping continents when opportunities arose, rarely settling in a place for more than a few years. And for the past year it’s been back full force. Before I broke up with my ex-partner I told him I had to go away. Had to. It was a physical pull away from home. I thought a week alone in a cabin in the woods would set me right. Give me the space to breathe and to know myself again. He didn’t like the idea. Instead we broke up.

Almost a year on and the pull towards travel is even stronger. But this time I am more tied to my house than ever since my mum moved in and I am, for now, her primary caregiver. But maybe that’s a good thing. Aside from doing the right thing by my mum who sacrificed so much for us, being forced to fight my instinct to flee will likely serve me later. It can’t be healthy to run away when what I probably need to do is drop anchor and take a moment to review, what - life so far? Maybe. Or maybe just face my life for what it currently is instead of always striving, striving.

But then again, it feels like all I’ve done this year is self-reflect and I’m not sure it’s done me any good! Self reflection can quickly spiral into navel-gazing and I’ve definitely been there. That’s probably why I want to flee. But as we know, wherever we go, there we are! We can’t escape ourselves.

So I plan and I scheme and I imagine a time in the future when I might be able to indulge in my selfish fantasy of travel. My kids are grown and I didn’t have the chance to mess up and explore in my twenties because I was raising them and trying to figure out a career (I wouldn’t change any of it, for the record) so I’m looking to my fifties to be the twenties I never had. Which gives me about a year to make a plan.

Missing home

I love the home. I love my home. I am a homebody through and through. But it turns out, even I can get sick of it. With less opportunity to leave this year - a diminished work schedule and now a carer role that anchors me to the house with three meals a day needing to be cooked and a frail person needing to be protected - I’ve had little chance to miss my home. And missing home is a vital part of appreciating it. Absence makes the heart grow fonder applies to homes as well as relationships.

When I first moved down here and up until a year ago, upon returning to Margate from a shoot in London, I would roll down my car windows as I rounded the corner by the run down Nayland Rock Hotel. The iconic Margate landmarks would come into view and the seaweed rich air would flood in. Margate Sands beach to my left, with the Turner Contemporary jutting out at the far end; Dreamland and the arcades to my right, all lit up with garish neon; Arlington house, the Brutalist grey beast looming over it all - some say it blights the seafront, I say makes it more interesting.

I’d sigh with relief. I was home.

This year I haven’t felt that way for reasons too personal to write about, even for me, indiscriminate barer of my soul. I desperately want to feel at home here once again, but for now it is what it is.

I want to be someone who puts down roots but I also crave adventure and change.

I day dream of when I might travel again. Because if I leave, surely it will make coming back more comforting, less lonely, more of an actual homecoming, or so the train of thought goes.

I watch re-runs of Anthony Bourdain slurping bowls of steaming and spicy noodles and gulping icy beer, while he sits in town squares on plastic chairs in Cambodia and Malaysia and Thailand, chatting to locals about politics and life.

I browse Airbnb and Hotels.com, saving my favourites for some future date.

I day dream on my daily runs of where I’d like to spend my 50th birthday, a year and a couple of months from now. Japan feels right.

I had saved and planned on taking my kids there and then Covid hit and all my work (and therefore my money) vanished and that dream was parked. Perhaps with a quick hop to revisit South Korea and Seoul specifically, where I lived 20 years ago when my children were small. Living in Seoul for two years is the reason my cat is called Kimchi and our favoured London restaurant for birthdays and other celebrations is Korean.

Mayes speaks of having had an “instinct for the taproot place one passes on to the next generation”. And yet, like me, she moved and moved and made homes wherever she went. I have feelings of nostalgia for lives not lived and places not visited but also for the stable life and that one family home you live in for years. My kids have friends - now in their early twenties - who go home to their parents’ house and sleep in their childhood beds. My kids have had so many different beds through their childhoods. I don’t think this is a bad thing at all and they have never complained - they’ll be the first to say I make a good home wherever we go! (God I love them). And the reality is I’d get far too bored. But still there is, at times, a sense of loss for a different type of life not lived.

Mayes refers to another of her memoirs A Year in the World (*adds immediately to shopping list) where she explored what it would be like to live in other countries, travelling to Greece, Turkey, Wales and others.

“Renting houses, apartments, even a boat, turned into a way of asking: What is home here? Who are these people and how has here caused them to be who they are?”

This resonated with me so deeply because it’s the question I’ve been interested in when writing all my books since 2012. I care less about how we decorate and more about why. It’s also not dissimilar to the podcast/tv series idea I’ve had for years, relating to interiors and the different ways we live around the world. Getting a tv show commissioned seems to be one of the hardest things if you aren’t a big name, but I’ve tried and tried! So podcast and You|Tube channel it will have to be.

Strangely it’s also part of the reason I’ve struggled to write here as regularly as I’d like. I have no interest in sharing top ten lists of homewares you should buy or what the next interiors trends are (I have nothing against this but it’s just not what I’m drawn to write about). Yet I still have this lingering worry that that is what is expected of me as ‘an interiors writer’, particularly those of you discovering my writing through recommendations from other interiors writers on here. But I’ll continue to write about the home in the way I choose knowing you’ll find me if it interests you.

If this essay reads as melancholic, it’s not. As I said in my introduction video, this is why I moved my blog here - to connect with others through writing and to develop and grow and share together. Life isn’t all fun and games no matter how much we might wish it so or how some people try to make it seem. But that doesn’t mean it’s all sadness and seriousness. The more I write from a place of truth, the more we can connect in a way that actually matters.

Sending all my love to you.

Please leave a comment below. It makes my day when I realise I’m not writing into an abyss xx

Running didn’t kick start my writing this week, but it did allow me to find this chair discarded by a neighbour and promptly claimed by the cat before I’d even cleaned it and found it a place

I don’t salute a magpie when I only see one. I don’t cross the road when I see a black cat. I don’t mind walking under ladders. But I do make a wish when the time reads 11:11. So I’m seeing it as a good omen for the future that these are my numbers for my upcoming race. I’ll take whatever I can get these days!