Week 15 - Andrew - Coming Home

All hotel rooms are the same. Entry card holder just inside the door the door, a passage way with a bathroom to one side. The wifi is slow and complicated to access. I never turn on the television.

There’s always a suitcase stand. I stand my suitcase there. I hang my jacket in the wardrobe. I have iron-blindness. More times than not, I have called reception to have an iron dropped up, and there has been an iron in the wardrobe. I know where my iron is at home.

The bathrooms vary - gold taps, marble tiles, silver taps, white tiles. The consistency in the bathroom is that the shower control will be inventive. I once saw a t-shirt in a market, with the slogan:  ‘You think you’re smart until you use someone else’s shower’. Regardless, all hotel bathrooms work better than my shower at home.

In other rooms in this hotel, people are having affairs, romantic mini-breaks. People are travelling for their last visit with their dying mother. Wealthy husbands thrown out by their wives are ordering room service cocktails. I’m a business traveller. I’m a background detail in these stories. I have no individual identity here, like one policeman in a riot squad, or a single dancer in a kick line.

It’s easy to feel lonely, travelling. But home isn’t a place. It’s not where you keep your tools or your pots and pans. Home is the people you love, wherever they are.

Home is a rushed burger before you both run to different trains. It’s under the striplighting of a curry house. Home is on a bridge across the Seine. Home is people.

Why limit your home to the place you keep your stuff? Although you do know how the shower works.

Week 15 - Laura - Coming home

Unarguably, the best way to come home from the bog is on the fruits of your labour - sitting like a king or queen atop a trailer full of turf.

There’s no feeling quite like sailing along the winding roads, cosy in the nook hastily dug out in the five minutes or so while your dad checked the load was secure and ready for the journey.

Turf has been nothing but a burden up to that point of the summer of course - first the back-breaking work footing it, and more recently the arduous task of getting it into a trailer and getting that trailer out of the bog without getting stuck.

Now, though the work of throwing who knows how many hundreds - no thousands - of sods from trailer to shed still lies ahead, it’s time for the turf you've been cursing for weeks to give something back.

The first few minutes of the journey is all about perfecting the vaguely you-shaped cavity you've fashioned in the turf mountain - throwing certain sods out of your little retreat, and rearranging others slightly so that - contrary to form - they’re actually supporting your back.

A minute or two of tweaking, and it’s finally time to settle in for the journey.

It’s not unusual to be lulled almost to sleep, thanks to the combination of the rocking motion as you’re pulled along and the white noise of the tractor’s engine that makes conversation impossible.

Curled up under the blanket that just an hour ago acted as a picnic tablecloth, there’s no meditation in the world that can beat the tired, relaxed feeling as your weary muscles slowly unwind and you let go of your ill-will for the bog and everything connected to it for another year.