Where have I been …? No blog for over six weeks – do I not care?

I like what Louise Gluck, American poet and essayist, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2020, said: ‘Anyone who writes is a seeker. You look at a blank page and you’re seeking.’ So perhaps I left this space empty to entice you to probe your own mystery, mine the treasure within. Write the thing you want to read, as the advice goes. For a rose-coloured learning outcome …

Or – I could be teasing you, in this moment! Truth is – I went on a journey without my laptop. I did bring a notebook and took pictures on my phone. But no travelogue, because it wasn’t what I’d call travelling. Nowhere new. Odd, for a person committed to adventure?

More than a year ago, as you know, my life partner and I sold up in the UK and came here – to an island in the Azores. I’m back home now – yes, home. My there and back again was a tour of London, Kent, Yorkshire, and Suffolk, the significance of the places residing in the people I love who live there.

To be fair, I could have taken off in one of several directions to see loved ones. With my husband’s South African origins, our three ‘boys’ in India, Australia, and California, and like-minded far-flung friends, our community is wider than this post suggests.

But this trip was precipitated by a friend of mine from uni days getting married for the first time – a joy after previous suitors, in my loyal opinion, had not proved worthy of her beauty and character. This gentleman was a love match!

And the rest, given over to family: my stepma with whom I’m very close, a sister, a brother, three brothers-in-law, three sisters-in law, gorgeous nieces and nephews; and faithful friends from both student days and my husband’s and my old stamping-ground of the past quarter-century.

Poignant waypoints were the Yorkshire moors near where I grew up, which caught my heart off guard; and covering our daughter’s grave with sunflowers on her birthday.

But what was I really doing there?

My husband, keen to disrupt neither the gradual pace of the house renovation, nor the magic spell of the Azores, declined to go – while generously urging me to be free, and not to miss.

The answer – to my surprise – is that I went for the same reason as I came here. Seeking, as Louise Gluck understood it. On the blank page of two-and-a-half weeks of my life, to discover something worth jotting in the notebook I was carrying – and drilling into later, on this computer screen I’d left behind.

I went suppressing a faint apprehension. That, with the drama on the world stage such as it is, Britain would also have changed to an extent I’d feel a stranger there.

I encountered disillusionment with all the political parties, urban spread owing to housing developments I hoped buyers in need of new homes could afford, and a craze for matcha over bubble tea. But as one friend with whom I shared a 44-year history put it, ‘People are getting on with their routines. What else can we do?’

And I found: that love and friendship only deepen and don’t let you down; that these people, who know everything about me, including the bits I wince at, are proof that life is more comedy than tragedy; and that those bittersweet memories – a childhood, and a child – are the necessary measure of their lost originals.

I would not be without any of this. I’m thankful I circled back, to remind me, adding a fresh layer to the structure of mutuality, one more ring inside our tree.

It seems to me, the point of seeking – and finding – is keeping. Glad as I am to be home again, reunited with my unique and irreplaceable beloved, I am subtly changed. Not aching for the past but realising just how much goodwill I carry with me in the present.