Mental Health Matters: Nic Goddard - September 2024

If you ask someone where home is, chances are they will answer with more than just a postal address. It may be where they live now, but it may be where their roots are, where their family are from, a spiritual home, an ancestral home or a place where familiar things are kept.

It may be wherever they lay their hat, where their heart is, where everybody knows their name…(and yes, those were all borrowed from TV shows but cliches exist with good reason!).

I have wandered around enough to rarely feel homesick. I tend to be chasing the next adventure rather than looking backwards and my personal sense of home is tied to the people I care about being close to me and giving me a sense of belonging rather than a geographical place or material items.

I have, however, once felt a longing for roots and it was at this very time of year.

After nine months of travel, the autumn arrived and as I spotted bramble bushes laden with fruit I felt an overwhelming urge to make jam and store it for the winter ahead.

This unfortunately coincided with my most minimalistic September ever when I was living in a small campervan with no space for even a single surplus jar of jam, let alone a shelf full.

Similarly I have only once felt connected to a location and that was after a long and stressful journey from north to south when, for the first time in nearly a decade of living in Scotland, I arrived in Sussex.

I was calmed and soothed by the south coast accents of a group of slightly rowdy fellow train passengers who I realised sounded like me - a phenomena I had been unaware of being absent while in Scotland until I was confronted with it suddenly being present.

The sense of belonging, of place, of home is so key to our feeling of safety and of wellbeing, and is likely so personal to each of us that mine will not be the same as yours.

I am certainly not even aware of that ever-so-slight holding of my breath while away until I catch myself letting it all out in a relieved sigh once I consider myself home once more.

For now that is most definitely the wee spot here in Lochaber from where I am writing this column.