On growing up further from home

The first time I cooked rice properly on my own — not the microwave pouches, actually from scratch — I called my mum to ask how long to leave it, and she said "you don't own a rice cooker?" which launched a twenty-minute conversation about why a rice cooker was a reasonable thing to own as an adult, which I eventually won by just buying one. It cost £18. I use it almost every day.

That kind of thing happened a lot in the first year. Small domestic competencies I'd never had to develop because they'd just been around me at home. Knowing when something in the fridge needs to be used up. Actually knowing how to iron a shirt rather than just avoiding shirts that need ironing. Learning that the smoke alarm in my flat was positioned directly above the hob in a way that made cooking anything with oil an event.

The practical stuff I figured out. That wasn't really the hard part.

The harder part was more subtle. There were things I used to know about myself that I'd learned from the way my family reflected them back at me — my older brother taking the mickey about something, my dad asking me how something had gone at work. Without that, some of that information just went quiet. You have to build new versions of it, from different people, which takes time.

I went back for Christmas and noticed things I'd stopped noticing when I lived there full-time. How loud the house is. How the kitchen always smells like something. The specific shorthand of four people who've known each other for decades — references that date back years and don't need explaining.

I think you have to leave somewhere to really understand what it was. I appreciate home differently now. Not in a sentimental way — more like I know what it is, properly, in a way I didn't when it was just the default.