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An Englishman's home is his castle

At this point in the calendar millions of Christians will be making journeys across the world to celebrate an ancient rite with kinfolk. One member of the family will have volunteered, been volunteered or cajoled to host the get-together. Their house is chosen because it is large enough to accommodate the crowd or the location is convenient to the majority.

Probably without thinking we take advantage of developments in transport of the last fifty years as we jump into a motorcar, board an aeroplane or a ship to take us in record time to our destination. For all of us involved in these activities the pivotal requirement is a large house. This, many travellers may say, is a place they call home. Generations within one family will gravitate to this ‘home’, it being symbolic of their childhood or the place where family elders reside. For many, this is the place they call home even though they may now reside hundreds or thousands of miles away due to work, inter-national’s marriage or abhorrence of the European winter climate. It is a Western mode of living, this desire to have a house or apartment and call it home. “An Englishman’s home is his castle”, pronounced Sir William Coke in 1628. Yet it is a curiously English trait, in that we require a structure that we must own and call ‘home’ and fill with ‘stuff’.

Home for the people of Delhi

For Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Zoroastrians, Warlpiri people in Australia’s Northern Territories, the Squamish in British Columbia and many poor people of other religious faiths, home is not a building. It could have been these people of whom George Bernard Shaw wrote, “Home life as we understand it is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo”. Through either choice, (or in many cases economic circumstances), these peoples have no house, no castle nor modest flat. Home could be a piece of canvas thrown over a pole; a bed is a scratch in the dirt with a blanket for a covering – if they’re lucky. To 1 million Hindus home is Dharavi, a 550 acre shared slum in Mumbai. Here, if you want to use your allotted toilet any one of 15,000 of other co-residents could be waiting ahead of you. Further, despite the endeavours of its President, we still consider the United States of America to be a rich country with universal home ownership; but this month in Alabama and other states in the south, thousands of black and white citizens will call a leaky trailer ‘home’ in which they might pray to God or drown their sorrow that a southern Democrat is (democratically) elected to the U.S. Senate.

Home for The Squamish

Home for the Warlpiri people

Having this month gawped in astonishment at the squash of humanity living in the markets and bazaars in filthy back lanes of Old Delhi, Jaipur and Mumbai I am re-assessing the importance of my modest sized Yorkshire ‘castle’. In Old Delhi, the smells, din, colours, flavours and crush of normal daily existence assault the senses and the values of Western visitors. It is difficult to comprehend how thousands of women, (whose daily journey at sunrise on crowded trains to the Sassoon docks in Mumbai where they buy one tray of stinking fish and return to sell), can form a home and contribute to a community. Yet they do.

British expatriates in Durban, Vancouver, Melbourne and Delhi do find fresh and cultural inspiration from their adopted national flavours. Traditional family Christmases ‘at home’ are, for many, an experience of the past as families move apart in search of something; is it happiness, security, fulfilment, prosperity or the real self?

For me and increasing bands of people throughout the world, being at peace with nature is becoming more essential yet precariously less easy. Thinking ourselves ill-served by our elected leaders, aghast at the direction our country is taking and appalled at how the landscape is being treated in our back yard we natives of the globe are considering what ‘living well’ really means. I am drawn to the lives of the peoples of the Amazonian rainforest. For them life is a ceaseless evolution of constructing relationships that bind folk to each other in the landscape in which they reside. Like them I believe living happily is not about acquiring more stuff. It is about finding wonder and joy with our life’s companions and cherishing different people who become neighbours. Furthermore we must ensure our proximate landscape and seascape is protected from the horrifying excesses of city living.

There should be much evaluation of these core tenets of life as we jet across the world to celebrate within our families, particularly so as we shudder at societal pressures over which we feel a lack of control.

One of my hopes this festive season and next year is that the friendly, noisy, colourful and joyful Indian people will cease discarding plastic bottles in The Ganga and the Indus. Then, there may be a happy future for all peoples of the lands across the globe.