Going back home from a trip

Travel is supposedly about departure. Yet, one of travel's finest pleasures arrives near its end, when your mind quietly abandons wherever your body happens to be and begins travelling home.

Suddenly, the familiar becomes exotic. You picture your own bed with the longing usually reserved for an island in the Mediterranean. The battered sofa, ignored for 340 days a year, assumes the splendour of a throne.

Even the bathroom inspires emotion. No hotel shower, however architectural, can compete with the tap whose peculiarities one has mastered through years of bilateral negotiations.


This anticipation is especially delicious because home has temporarily lost its chores. The unpaid bill, malfunctioning appliance and neighbour's drilling have been edited out. What remains is home as remembered from afar: slippers, favourite mug, curtains, known noises....

The journey back, thus, acquires its own gentle excitement. Airports become tolerable, because they are now pointing in the correct direction. Every kilometre travelled subtracts strangeness.

Maybe this is travel's cleverest trick. We leave home seeking novelty and return having rediscovered familiarity. Distance briefly restores value to what habit had discounted. There are few luxuries greater than going somewhere. Except, after a while, going back.