Airports and home...

As you may have noticed, I was recently featured in a TCK short-film: "I am home: thoughts of a nomad". Not all of my transcript made the cut so here is the full version, in two parts:

Home

"Home is the red earth and mountains of South India; the smell of tea plantations and eucalyptus trees being kissed by monsoon rains. It is having a delicious feast of curry and chapattis at 10 o’clock in the evening, being waited on by attentive, loving Asian ladies in England. It is summers spent traversing through beautiful Norwegian meadows, drinking from waterfalls, eating grandma’s home-cooked food....armed with the spirit of freedom and adventure. It is the exhilarating midnight run from a steaming sauna into a crystal clear Finnish lake. 

Home is a feeling that doesn’t come around all too often.

Home is motion. Home is change. Home is a contradiction. I feel more at home in chaos and dirt than order and cleanliness. I feel at homehere, there, and everywhere yet belong nowhere. 

I don’t have a special doll from my childhood or clothes from when I was a baby. I have lost a little more with every move. All I have to hold on to are photographs and memories, but even they fade with time. 

Home is a place within me that my heart always longs for. A treasure I’ve never found. A myth that is spoken about with such ease and normality yet something I can’t even put my finger on. Home keeps moving."

Airports

"Departures. Arrivals. Farewells. Hello’s. Tears and Laughter. 

Airports encapsulate the emotions of my life.

So many of my childhood memories are intertwined with airports, so much of my life has been spent in random terminal buildings. 

The moment I enter an airport, I flick in to autopilot and am embraced by a sense of familiarity and safety. They are portals to the outside world. A gateway to freedom. The possibilities are endless, the world at your fingertips. Airports propel us onwards, to the next chapter of life. And in that motion, I find comfort. In the transition, I find home.

Airports breed stories. Everyone has one whether they are leaving or arriving..."