...When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip.
A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
My childhood was a comfortable one: a fiercely close sister, a warm extended family, and plenty of books and time spent in the kitchen. I grew up with a palpable love of home, and so sometimes find it difficult to explain my decision to board a plane to London as soon as I was old enough. Far from running away, I left because my parents had instilled in me a desire to explore the world that lay beyond our suburb. But my first year was tricky; Whitechapel was grey, the mould in our bathroom was pervasive, my commute was endless. I missed home desperately.
I had managed to find myself in a liminal state between one home and the next. And so, while I worked and waited, I became adept at seeking out comfort. I found it in a blanket I bought on a holiday in Mexico, which has followed me from sofa to sofa. I found it in the familiar, reassuring books I grew up with: I Capture the Castle, the Harry Potter series, Jane Austen’s novels, The Secret Garden. I brought comfort into my kitchen with tinned tomato soup, cheese on toast, deep bowls of chicken noodle broth, and buttered soldiers spread with Vegemite and dipped into runny-yolked eggs: food I could make on autopilot, without having to think. And slowly, as I started to think of England as my home, I found I needed to draw on these things less and less.
When I miss my family now, or when anxiety is eating away at me, or when ‘my brain begins to reel’ (thank you, Ignatius J. Reilly), I still seek out comfort. But my definition of it has broadened; I no longer seek only the comfort of my parents’ home, or of childhood, but of memories and of homes I have built here. I remember the cosy nights spent in my friend Jen’s old flat, when we cooked jambalaya in a weighty pot on the stove. I remember being inspired by E. L. Konigsburg’s From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler to make a deep dish of macaroni cheese one rainy night for the children I used to nanny. And I can measure my life in the various batches of brownies I have baked in whatever pan I had to hand, to share, still warm, with friends on the sofa.