Home at last; turning the last corner and there it is, our house. Perhaps we should have felt a sense of relief at being once again on British soil but somehow it didn't come. Quite the reverse, in fact. There is a distinct feeling of sadness, depression even, that our long journey had come to an end. Even the thought of living and sleeping in our own house doesn't have the appeal one might have expected. Surely, after six weeks living, sleeping and eating within the confines of a small campervan we ought to be desperate for our own beds, for the comfort of a warm house, for the convenience of a microwave and a dishwasher, for hot water that comes out of taps! For us though, that's just not how it works.
After a few days of adjustment, meeting friends from this tiny community we live in who, of course, all know how long we've been away, where we've been and roughly when we'd be coming back, we take a walk on the beach...
...and it does its magic, just as it always does. It gives us something new, something unlikely, in this case it is a mass of tiny mussel shells which glisten in the sun, pinks yellows and purples amongst the mother of pearl.
A little research reveals that lady marine mussels release their offspring into the ocean where they float about for anything up to six months before doing like their parents, glueing themselves to a convenient rock. So these were mussel babies who, due to some unforeseen event, all ended their short lives in a heap on our beach. It is sad to think that something so magical for us was the consequence of such a disastrous event. But the natural world doesn't make choices. It simply is.
The last part of our journey home was through England and involved a brief stopover at my brother's project house, which gave us much to think about.
Clearly the everyday pressures of our community lives, treasurer and secretary respectively of the Community Trust and the Village Hall, have not come my brother's way since he returned to the UK after living in Italy for many years or else he would not have been quite so keen to try to turn a quite ordinary semi-detached property into a high tech, state of the art, eco-friendly masterpiece of modern living all capable of being operated from his mobile phone!. (Clearly this surpasses all the house renovations we've ever done.) After stumbling around inside for a while, admiring his floor tiles and the kitchen units, all of which are stacked up in boxes waiting to be fitted, then tripping over the piles of rubble outside caused by his enthusiastic actions with a sledgehammer, we take a few pictures, wish him all the best then leave him to it. We are, secretly, envious of what he is doing and cannot wait to see the final result.
Our final stop is in Glasgow where we purchase an enormous reel of polyester rope, which I shall use to replace all the halliards on Eun na Mara, then we are safely home by late afternoon where we begin wrestling with the clocks, whose reference has shifted in our absence, GMT becoming BST. Some of them, heating timers and computers, have worked things out on their own but our microwave is not so clever and needs help. We had already changed Mrs Google's spoken language from kilometers to miles and Martin's speed display from kilometers per hour to mph before leaving the ferry so we think this takes care of everything... well apart from Kate's watch and our Kindles, and I'm sure there's something else somewhere. Time has played only a minor part in our lives for the last six weeks as we travelled from country to country. Living in our campervan our days started when daylight began and generally ended as it faded away. We ate when hungry, I shaved when the hair on my face became annoying (to me that is), and Martin's dashboard clock played no significant role in our lives. Back home and suddenly clocks are important again. We have meetings to attend, schedules to adhere to, diaries to programme so we don't forget things, this is the real world we escaped from. We're back home.
So what's next for us? Before we can answer this we both have to engineer our escapes from the community roles we currently occupy and which have reached the point where they are dominating our waking lives (and at times our sleeping ones too). Replacements need to be found, people in the community who will accept the responsibilities we have carried for so long, people who can step up to the challenge just as we did and ensure that village life can continue to function as it is now. Volunteers for these roles may be difficult to find but what is certain is that we have served our time and must be allowed to step down.
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