On homesickness

. Earlier in the summer I spent a few days at home - by which I mean the place I don’t live. I mean - of course - the place I’m from. Angus. Beautiful Angus on the East Coast of Scotland. North of Dundee, South of Aberdeen, it’s not even the good bit of Scotland, but it shits all over anything south of the border. Imagine Northumberland had a baby with West Wales, and it lay in a pram with a frill of ancient mountains around its beautiful face. Go back four generations on my mum’s side and you find ancestors in Angus; go back four generations on my dad’s side? Angus. I’m from there. It’s odd to be so very rooted somewhere but to have left, and for it not to be betrayed in any way by my accent. I’m a Scot like a vegan’s a vegan. You can’t immediately tell, but don’t worry. I’ll let you know. And I will judge your sausages. After this recent trip, I came back to England where I have lived for thirty five years, and filled my notes app with things like: “Dreamed I was repeatedly driving the road back from the beach - that view as you drive towards Friockheim; again and again looking north towards the Cairngorms across the bright of the fields. The light in my eyes and the lightness in my heart and the sand between my toes and the salt in my hair.” and: “Down here, the sky is so small and the rivers are muddy and it’s too hot and there are no hares galloping across the barley and where am I supposed to get raspberries? And where are the hills?” I’ve always missed Scotland. In 1990 I left to go to university in Surrey - nominatively in Surrey, but in reality in a sort of Switzerland of the South East: a point where in a handful of miles in either direction you could be in Berkshire or Middlesex or Buckinghamshire. If you don’t know what Surrey is, it’s what “they” are thinking about when they talk about England. A mild, wooded, landscaped, Tudorbethan, prosperous, self-satisfied cucumber sandwich of a place. Sliced up by dual carriageways, seasoned with cul-de-sacs, even its name is an apology. Surrey. You can live there perfectly happily and never own wellies. It has good transport links. Even the pretty bits are a suburban type of beauty. A girl next door, virtually indistinguishable from the other basic bitches in the girl gang known as the Home Counties, the girls with names like Bucks and Herts and Berks! Imagine Essex went to private school and was actually ruddy good at tennis. That’s Surrey. Anyway, once, at uni in Surrey, I asked that question: “Where are the hills?” I remember feeling like Heidi. You might know her from the most poorly-dubbed television programme of the 80s. She was the little girl who ran across the mountains with goats in the real Switzerland. In the books I loved, she went to stay in the city with her friend, but she couldn’t sleep for homesickness. She couldn’t sleep without the sound of the wind blowing through the pine trees. Heidi prowled the city night, seeking the comfort of home and I felt such kinship with her in those early years. “Where are the hills?” I asked Julie Gardner - the first musical theatre girly I ever met and a resident of the Home Counties. She replied: “We’re on one.” We’re on one. My outrage. The hill we were “on” has the A30 on it. And not in a wild Bodmin-Moor-ish Cornish way. In a dual carriageway with a Porsche dealership at the bottom of it and an entire university at the top kind of way. Not good enough. There’s a proper mountain in the middle of my capital city for god’s sake. Where are the hills? I missed the wildness, the sky… the fucking sky that wasn’t on a flight path. Where planes going over was an event. We were somewhat North of RAF Leuchars and somewhat South of RAF Lossiemouth. Occasional aircraft were Vulcans on Manoeuvres. They meant something. Not the incessant banal drone of Heathrow. And so I have always missed Scotland, the country. But when people asked me about moving back I would say “Well… on the one hand, all my family are there. And on the other… all my family are there.” I was good at missing the landscape - and the sausages - but I didn’t really miss the people. Three reasons: 1- ADHD means I don’t, really, miss people. 2- Boarding School from 12 means I got all of the missing people done in my youth 3- I was desperate to escape the sticky web of interconnectedness you live in as member of a small, middle class population. I’ve written about the joys of this in another Substack, but as a young adult it felt suffocating. In my show, Distracted I joked that the women of my home town were Olympic level judgers, holding the record for Synchronised Tutting, Freestyle Nitpicking and the Individual Damning with Faint Praise. Someone once told my mother she “hung a lovely washing.” Judgement of even her smallest things. Now, though, at fifty-three, the petty rivalries, the judgements that felt like attacks on my un-realised self are deflected by the flak jacket of being more sure of who I am, of having almost adult children: the delicious fruits not only of my loins but also of some decisions that might not have been approved. Great A level results from local comp - hoorah! Iffy table manners, beautiful hearts. I have very little left to be judged on. So now, I’m free to painfully miss not only the hills, the sky, the peaty water of the lochs, the sweetness of the berries, the clarity of the light, but also the people. Shit. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit louiseleigh.substack.com