On Homes and Hopelessness
It's my Nana's 80th birthday, so the entire clan is ascending on South Shields and taking her out for Sunday lunch. Of course, most of the clan still lives in or around Newcastle (that's pronounced, Newcastle), except for my branch, who are flowery southerners, and my uncle Michael, who you couldn't crowbar out of Sheffield with, uhm, with a crowbar. A big one.

I haven't seen my Nana for several years. The last time I was up Tyneside way was for WWE Insurrexion (awesome), but that was four years ago. I'm a little worried how much older she might appear. But yeah: I'm not going home. My dad's going home. I'm just occasionally thinking the word. I'm quite looking forward to it - I'll get to freak everyone out with the new hair, and I will be inevitably quizzed on my personal and professional lives, which I shall convey as increasingly complicated as the weekend goes on. I may even fall back on hilarious bluntness! It'll be mad.

I don't have many specific memories of Geordieland holidays; I imagine it more as a collage of images, but one that quite effectively summarises my childhood. There was a lot of kite-flying (staring into the middle distance, daydreaming), putting (disguised boredom) and rowing (exercise through ineffective transportation). I lost a fortune of tuppences into arcade machines. There were ice-creams on gravelly beaches (disappointment interspersed with moments of joy), incredibly old board games (not really a metaphor) and swimming at the leisure centre which, Heather tells me, has since been turned into a school. There's your allegory, right there.

My favourite part of South Shields is The Marsden Rattler, which I remember like eating lunch in an Agatha Christie novel, except nobody dies and the food's actually a bit crap. It's quite an irrational favourite. The cake stand was very impressive when I was little.

My favourite part of my Nana's house is the smell. It's an old nicotine smell, of lived-in carpets, crumbly biscuits and cucumber sandwiches. Nana's house smells of home. It's probably why I keep getting confused.

My Facebook lists Sheffield as my home town - partly for pragmatism, but largely because this is my home now. My technical family live back "home," but the family I see every day live right here. It's bound to be a combination of my time of life and state of mind when I arrived here, and far more the people I found than the city itself. But I've never felt more at home anywhere.

Please forgive me for continuing to be slightly introspective for the next week or so. A team of MIT graduates recently found work to be "fucking ridiculous" at the moment, 'though I sha'n't spoil their paper by telling you why right now (or right here). I am also *incredibly* bored of wading through the same shit every day, and waking up every morning to the same inevitable disappointments is starting to take its toll. Ordinarily I would regroup and blast through this wall in a frenzied vortex of effort, but I've lost the energy. I've lost my flame. Again. I wonder if Waterstone's has the second Robin Hobb book in the correct paperback. That seemed to work, last time.