List #4: The things that remind me of home

Image via The Questionable

About six months ago, I wrote about the meaning of 'home' and I still find it quite difficult to determine what the term means to me; whether home is the house I own in Leicester, or the house my mum lives in, in West Yorkshire.  When I'm at my house, I talk about "going home," by which I mean driving up the M1 to Bradford.  But home is also emphatically my own house, so the things that remind me of home are a combination of both places...

1. Books - of course! I grew up in a house filled with books and have collected them since childhood. My dream was always to have a room in my house with white, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Lucky me, then, that the Ikea Billy bookcases, when arranged in combination with a couple of CD units, fit perfectly along two walls in my front room. If I ever moved, it would be a condition of the move that the new place would have to have a similar reading space.

2. The sound of rain on a roof.  My mum's house is the best place to listen to the rain; I love to sit in the big armchair, in the bay window with views across the Pennines, and hear the rain falling outside.

3. The smell of woodsmoke from a chimney immediately makes me think of my cosy living room when the log burner is lit.

4. South African stuff.  Be it fabrics, stone carvings, music, books, or just the South African accent, I've never lived in a house that wasn't filled with things (and often people ) from my parents' birthplace. 

5. The smell of Nag Champa incense.  This is one from my late teens, when I used to haunt (and eventually work in) the local hippy shop; you know, the kind that sells clothes with mirrors sewn on, and overpriced rainbow candles.  My style has - thankfully - evolved since then, but I'm still very fond of these Indian incense sticks.