Home

I think "home" is probably my favourite word in English - sounds like something you should be able to wrap yourself up in to keep warm through the winter.

Apparently, Rudyard Kipling wrote in the Honorable Visitors  (no, I haven't read it either ) that "All things considred, there are only two kinds of men - those who stay at home, and those who do not. The second are the more interesting." Not so sure about this : I don't think it's quite that simple.

Home for me is two streets, a handful of farms, the pub, the church, the war memorial, the whole thing perched on a north-facing hill looking out over the Irish Sea. The gales come in off the sea in winter and rattle the windows ; autumn nights you hear the owls in the churchyard across the road, the gentle twit-twoo that everyone recognises and  the unsettling screech of the banshee. The colours are green, grey and the white of the cottages; summer evenings after rain sunlight washes gently over the village like the love of God.

And yet home is also Madrid, my dirty, polluted, overcrowded, busy city of four million immigrants, kind of a city that never sleeps and often won't let you sleep much either. There's nothing quite like a stroll after work up the Gran Via, surrounded by people who have no idea who you are, anonymous : for a brief while you can hang your identity up, you could be anyone, go anywhere, do anything, at least in your imagination.

And so of course you finish up making shadow puppets, going hillwalking, watching doomed football teams, drinking too much beer, playing Gaelic football, getting into unlikely theatre groups with like-minded idiots from places as improbable as New York, Waterford, Barcelona, Buenos Aires and even England.

I'd like to think that Kipling got it wrong; I'd like to think that home can be both a physical place, and the energy and emotion you invest in wherever you are, that you can stand still and move at the same time.

But then again,  I'm a homeboy who didn't stay at home; I'll always need to find out what's around the next corner, over the next hill, while a part of me stays sitting in the churchyard, looking down to where the Clwyd meets the sea, waiting for the Kinmel Arms to open.