I’m sitting in my best friend’s kitchen, folding her laundry whilst she sculpts our kids' initials in mashed potato. There’s nothing remarkable about this moment, except that for the last seven years, it's rarely been possible.
C. and I have known each other pretty much since we were born. Our mothers are each other’s closest friends and in one of those brilliant quirks of DNA, obviously passed on the complementary genes to us; we’ve been friends since we were first able to share Farley's rusks. As toddlers we were inseparable; even when we hit double figures and went off to different schools and eventually different cities, something elemental in our bond kept the friendship from withering into one of obligation.
We’ve been through all sorts of big events together, happy and sad. What strikes me, though, is that what I've been missing are the little times. The times like this, when I perch on a stool balancing a pile of her six-year-old’s clothing on my knee (clothing, frankly, which is far trendier than any I’ve ever possessed) whilst our kids hang out in her front room. Despite a few age differences, it seems that the friendship gene is third-generation; our kids adore each other.
When you live abroad, trips home become wildly condensed versions of “real life” – a year or so’s worth of major events crushed into an evening’s worth of conversation. Now, though, we’ve made the decision. Seven years, one marriage, two kids and two countries after we left the UK, we’re on our way back home.
Three years ago I made a list of things we were missing by living 5,000 miles away. More than a dozen births, we being of that age; a handful of weddings which heavy pregnancy put us in the no-fly zone for; at least two funerals, one of which was documented here. Somehow, oddly, missing the funeral stings me more deeply than any of the weddings or births – probably because there’s still the chance to celebrate those things, but there’s no other way of commemorating someone’s death.
These were all the biggies, the point-of-no-return issues. There were other, less personal ones which it still felt really odd to miss. England winning the Rugby World Cup (and Jonny Wilkinson’s thighs, more to the point). The summer of flooding. The end of the Blair era. None of these things were actually changing my world, but they were parts of my world that I was missing. And we've been away for a further four years, now. I don't even want to think about how long that list would be if I tried it again.
So now we’re on our way back, seven years later. I’m curious, and nervous, about returning home, and there are going to be a lot of issues that come up here, I’m sure. But even with the missing of all those big things, the real reason for coming home is the small things. I want to spend more aimless late afternoons in C’s kitchen flooded with envy at her daughter’s wardrobe choices. I want to spend more time, actually, with everyone primal to me. There’s a whole other post to be written about the people we’re leaving behind; but this one is the post where I think about knowing someone well enough to do their laundry, and being very, very glad to have the chance to do small things like that with them. We’re going home.
