Beyond Selidor

I would love to go to the town where you grew up with you as the tour guide/event planner, that's for sure! What an amazingly varied list of fantastic things to do! I still haven't been to Copenhagen — Denmark is the one Scandinavian/Nordic country I haven't visited and it's high on my list, but I need to find a reason to go there. Now that I know about the canal tour, I'll be sure to include it if I ever made my way there.

What you say about thinking of somewhere at home, and just living somewhere is really interesting, and I agree with your markers of just knowing what public transport to catch and having a really good mental map of the place, especially the locations of all the incidental little things necessary for daily living.

For me 'home' is very firmly rooted in other people. The city I grew up in is quite small (400,000 people or so then, it's bigger now), and it was extremely common to be able to find a connection with someone in every shop or at any social event — someone would be someone else's brother, or the woman behind the counter would have a cousin who went to school with my sister, or I would have competed against some random person's best friend in a gymnastics competition or whatever. It used to be the case until I hit my mid-twenties that if I met a person from that city, I'd be able to find at least a third-degree connection within about five minutes of talking to them. So I grew up with a sense that 'home' meant 'being known' — a kind of network of shared experiences and overlapping social circles. And then I left, and went to Sydney — and then I returned after university for work (but my family had all moved away) and it wasn't home any more, because all my friends who had stayed had stayed for university and had four years' worth of 'being known' that I'd missed out on. It was the most incredibly disorienting feeling.

What you say about London is really interesting, because I always feel very much at home there — apart from the expense, and the fact that the expense means most residents have to live really far away from where they work and commute punishing distances, I would move there in a heartbeat. I think basically after what happened with my old hometown and that sense of rupture and loss, I mistrusted the idea of living somewhere small with that potentially to be known, because I could see how easily it might be taken away, and I felt that I would only feel at home in places so big, and so far away from where I grew up that it would be impossible to ever be known in that way again! I yearn for the busyness and anonymity of huge cities — and yet I keep moving to smaller and smaller places, because that's where life has taken me! I do understand what you're saying about London (and New York, Tokyo etc) — it makes perfect sense, and maybe I'd feel less romantic about big cities if I'd lived in one recently. I was born in New York (but left as a small baby) and I lived in Sydney for a while, and so many people in my family and social circles live in big famous cities like them, so I guess I don't have that particular sense of disconnect, but I really do understand your feelings on the matter.