Cosy

What I miss about home can be summed up easily in a single word: cosy. Honduras is many things, many great things, like beautiful, hot, fun, fascinating, amusing - as well as some horrible things like dangerous, perplexing, and poor. But what it never ever is is cosy.
This week we suffered a four day frente frio, cold front. They blow in and out from time to time, and they're miserable when they come. Everything is cold and damp, and there's no escape apart from bed. You sit on the sofa piled high with blankets, as the breeze comes in through the slat-windows, and whips around the house. When you shower, rain comes in from the skylight (we don't have a ladder so I can't close it; and most of the time I wouldn't want to), mingling cold with hot water, and dampening your towel. I miss fires. I miss polo neck jumpers. I miss soft furnishings. And pubs that are designed as a refuge from the elements, dark caves of places with orange lights and thick black beer, I'm thinking very specifically of the Lord Edward here, and I miss it. I miss feeling cosy.
The frente frio passed on Thursday, and by Saturday it was back to applying the factor 15 to go outside for 10 minutes. But I still miss all of those things. Cosy is more than just weather and weather-preparedness. It's that sense of being - cushioned - which I have in Ireland, and which maybe prompted me to leave. But which I miss. The security of being part of many different communities, of having a million different places to turn on a bad day. Knowing the geography of a place so well that there's a perfect destination for every state of mind. The opposite, I guess, of adventure. Knowledge. Comfort. Cosiness.

I have a lot of ex-pat friends here. Predictably enough, all are, in one way or another, searching for something, none have a defined sense of belonging to any one place. I used to think it was romantic to feel that nowhere was home. I used to consider myself a wandering spirit, wafting past in a haze of adventure and openness. Of all my friends here, now I'm the only one who can put my hand up honestly and say: I have a home, and I love it. Home is Dublin, is my little house in Darley's Terrace, the kitchen where Simon's cooking and surviving on much more than apples (you'll be happy to know). Beyond that, it's where my brother and sister are, and my family, and many of my friends. It's where the map of the streets also maps my life, landmarks in my personal history. And that's very lucky, because nobody I love here really knows where they want to be; and few of them think that's romantic anymore. They're much more impressed by the romance of being in love and having made a commitment and seeing it through. I'm impressed by that too, to be honest.

I think I decided this week that I wasn't going to stay in Honduras for more than a year. We'll see what happens. There are compelling reasons to be here from the point of view of my career. But my life goes way beyond that. I wanted to be adventurous and exotic and romantic once. Now I'll settle for cosy. I don't think that's so bad.