Going Home

It's no secret that I don't like my parents very much. However, if we factor out the occasional binge-drinking session (me) or the occasional guilt inspired cheque (them) this has little bearing on our day to day lives- my reasoning being the distance between Manchester and London, theirs being that they have better things to concern themselves with.

Anyway, that all being the way it is, I don't go back to visit them anything like as often as might be expected of someone who recieves healthy guilt cheques and with a complete inability to remember to eat; I have friends who call their parents' place 'home,' and their flat just gets referred to as 'the flat.' I'm only half there- my flat is 'the flat,' and my parents' house gets referred to as just that, often accompanied by that finely honed PMS look (and I smashed a plate once, but it was an accident, my hand slipped). So really, I don't call anywhere home; I only realised this this weekend.

This is all fine.

Within minutes of realising that, I also realised I do have somewhere, except my home isn't a place so much as people. And they know it, I know it, and I'm going home this summer.

Lottie was my best friend all the way through school, from the age of five to fifteen. I moved off for college (from very south Wales to rather north England) and we drifted a little, but we're still close.
So this last weekend was her birthday party, and I went back for a visit; ignoring the train trip which was absolutely hideous, I had such a lovely weekend, getting back in touch with old friends, making new ones and getting no sleep- very rock and roll.
Apart from the bit where I watched kids cartoons with her little brother for about five hours on Sunday morning, or the milk and cookies that were offered round about sunrise on Saturday, when those of us still awake (specifically, me, another old friend or two and Jim, her stepfather) were beginning to come down/ feel hungover and erring towards bleak.

It's a scientific fact that milk, cookies and kids tv cures everything.

Her parents, Ca and Jim, are great; when I was little, they were the source of all hugs and kisses, comfort and advice- they actually still are, except now they've morphed from parents into sort of combined parental figures and friends; which essentially just means I say thanks every so often and only bitch a little before going to make tea, but can still ask how old they are, tell them off for swearing too much and play drinking games with them.

They're a ready made, very weird, very close family, and they adopted me years ago.
Ok, so I'm slow on the uptake, but I never pretended to be anything less than rubbish, now did I?

But I had to dash back here, because, joy of joys, it's exam season and I have yet to motivate myself in the general direction of having a stab at understanding Chaucer.
*shudders*
Shakespeare I like. But Chaucer should have been drowned at birth.

I'm not really sure how to describe the way I'm feeling about all this right now, but I think grown-up fits in there somewhere. And since I always wanted to be Peter Pan, my mind's having a hard time getting round the idea that this is feeling like A Good Thing.

Anyway, I've been back here for about an hour now, and I'm about to lose my mind. I love London, but I want to go back.

Right now.

Train journey or no train journey, one hours worth of sleep or not

*pauses*
But if someones driving from London to very south Wales (that'd be a sideways drive, right? I was never any good at Geography, spending all my time giggling at the teachers' name; I mean, what were they thinking hiring someone called Mr Nobson?) then I wouldn't turn up my nose if a lift was waved in front of it.
Even if the lift was in a blue car; I never did look good in blue.