Tip-Off #41 - The Importance of Elsewhere

"… to arrive where we started/ And know the place for the first time." - T.S. Eliot

Belfast - photo by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash

Growing up abroad, I did not miss home but found it. As the poet, Philip Larkin put it:

Lonely in Ireland, since it was not home,

Strangeness made sense. The salt rebuff of speech,

Insisting so on difference, made me welcome:

Once that was recognized, we were in touch/

 . . . To prove me separate, but not unworkab…