Edinburgh, you were alright, but there's nothing quite like home
"Why would a young girl like you come back to a town like this," people would say to me. Little did they know that I was as happy as I had ever been being back in Fife.
It happened one night when I was least expecting it. I was 19 and had been living in student halls in Edinburgh for maybe two months. I was doing my usual; sitting in my room, drinking cheap Merlot and listening to Tom Waits (what I do best), hiding from the rest of my flatmates in case they realised I was lying about being ill because I couldn't be bothered drinking Venoms all night and dancing to whoever was the latest idiot with a number one in the charts in Why Not Nightclub.
I really was a pathetic student. I still am rubbish at it. I'm more like a 62 year old man who just wants some piece with his paper and a warm pair of baffies (a word for slippers that I immediately missed after I moved from Dunfermline.) I heard the 'youngsters' leave and I felt I could breathe again. Be myself again. And then I realised what I was feeling. I was homesick. Something I had never experienced before had consumed me when I thought all I ever wanted was to live in Edinburgh. How wrong was I?
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Until about the age of 18, the only phrases that ever came to mind when thinking about Fife were "dull", "boring" and "I cannot wait to get the hell out of this place!" It's funny how things change.
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View from my friend's top floor Edinburgh flat
First drink in my Dunfermline flat. Auchentoshan American Oak Old Fashioned.
The day I moved back home into my first flat in Dunfermline, it was scorching! Moving from a top floor flat into a top floor flat was not the thing my mum was desperate to do on a day so beautiful, but the idea of sitting sipping gin in the beer garden next to my new home kept her going. The room was falling apart at the seams and felt like a sauna in the already unbearable heat. I dumped my boxes, bags, bits and bobs and headed straight out. I couldn't wait to get back into the town I remembered so well.
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As soon as I walked out of the town centre flat, I was home, and I use the word home in a different way from what you might expect. I mean home in the men tanning Tennents in baggy sports shorts with beer bellies hanging over them in the sweaty sun, kids getting anything they want to give their parents 5 minutes in the sun in peace, middle aged women hitting on Wetherspoons staff after one too many Gordon's kind of way.
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We sat in the sun for the rest of the afternoon, nursing our sore backs, feet, arms and everything else we worked to the bone trying to move my whole life back home and I hadn't been so happy in so long. I knew everyone. The busy beer garden was loud, with families all clambered together squeezed into the last corner of the big balcony with any sun shining on it as it was almost six o'clock by this point. People sang along to 90's Brit pop whilst gulping warm lager and laughing and dancing on rickety picnic tables. All I could do was sit there and watch and smile. I was home again, finally.
I still love Edinburgh, don't get me wrong, and it will always be a place I love to go back to. But (and I hate to sound so Judy Garland about it) there's no place quite like home.