I wanted to assert that we are homeless.  To some small extent this may be true – when we left the house in Hampshire, we had no date for moving into the London flat, and we are currently dependent upon the kindness of my best friend to give us shelter.   But we are not really homeless.  This is – to use the cliché – a first-world, middle-class, temporary problem which is about as genuine as Marie Antoinette’s forays into farming at Hameau de la Reine.  By the end of next week, we should have completed our second move and be safely installed in the flat, while sharing a four-bedroomed rectory in a Suffolk market town in the interim is more akin to a holiday than a hostel.

Nonetheless, the word “home” has been much in my thoughts over these last few months and consequently its antonym is also resonant.  I find the suffix “less” rather poignant: it creates words which suggest something and negate it at the same time.  Hopeless, loveless, powerless, homeless:  these only make sense if you know the quality – hope, love, power, home – which is missing.  They create, as it were, a jigsaw-piece-shape gap, telling you exactly what is absent.

The more I have thought about it over the past few months, however, the more the concept of home has receded.  Where my parents lived and I grew up, the quarters we occupied when we were a Forces family, even our lovely house in Hampshire where we were able to stop and settle – these are all simply places.  While we were in each of them, in their turn they were invaluable:  they provided shelter and stability, a place to rest and feel safe, somewhere to dwell.   But moving away  – and forgive me for stating the bleedin’ obvious here – we have recognised that what made them special were the relationships both within and surrounding them.  Family.  Good Friends.  Good Colleagues.  Good Neighbours.   It’s not about stuff.  It’s about people.

Throughout the summer, as I left my job, as we prepared to move, and as things grew hectic at the end, we were surrounded and supported by kind, generous friendship.  The colleagues at work who put time and thought into a most incredible, personal, leaving card;  our neighbours organising a surprise street-party barbeque – a precious evening to talk about community, reflect on time passing, children growing up and parents growing old, and to drink gin;  the same neighbours who, during the actual move, offered coffee, food, did “tip-runs” for us and uttered no word of criticism or even comment about how chaotic and stressful it had obviously become;  the best friend who, from the outset, offered her house as fall-back and welcomed us in;  and our children who book-ended the actual move, one helping tirelessly, with unceasing good humour, to load, and clean, and clear the house; the other unexpectedly arriving at the rectory to welcome us and help unload.  It was all entirely surprising and yet familiar at the same time, confirmation and recognition of the good qualities that had underpinned our day to day encounters.

The summer has been hard work and exhausting.  The summer has been humbling and joyous.

So yes, we are homeless.  But we are not loveless, or friendless.  And that means we are not powerless, and indeed we are full of hope.