Fave coffee mug and the people you love – that’s home

Home represents (hopefully) safety.

It’s the one place where you should be free to be you.

The place where you are comfortable and accepted, able to relax and forget about what goes on outside of your front door.

When we walk into our homes at night, we can shrug off the cares of the day and the worries that mount up, and focus on a bit of us-time.

We spend years carefully choosing the items that surround us, the furniture of our everyday lives, and all the little things that seem inconsequential on a day-to-day basis in the grand scheme of things.

We might not give much thought to our utensils, for example.

But you know yourself exactly which knife is going to chop a pepper the way you want it chopped.

You know which mug your coffee is going to taste better in when you stagger downstairs in the morning, groggy and groaning before work.

And it can take a long time to create a home.

Sometimes it can depend on whom we are with.

A person can feel so much like home to us that it doesn’t matter where we are, as long as we are with them.

You know them inside out, much as you do your own living room, and you can find your way around them with your eyes closed.

As human beings, we need these homely anchors in our lives.

Without them, we are thrown to the wind.

When times are tough, home is where we can slam the door on the outside world and exist in our little bubble until we feel ready to face it all again.

Conversely of course, not everybody does feel safe in their own home and not everybody is fortunate enough to have one.

Circumstances such as these go to show us that, as with so much in life, we can never take it for granted.

June already! I know we say it all the time, but where on earth do the months go?

Halfway through the year and what have we got to show for it? We are no nearer Brexit. The end of May – the month – has come and gone, and the end of May – the Theresa – will soon be with us as well.What changes have occurred since New Year resolutions were made and the party poppers were blown on 2018? Did you make promises and have you achieved them?Now is the perfect time to review how our year is going and to make necessary adjustments if we had a plan and places to go, or if our year is not proceeding in the manner we expected.

In the evening I am usually to be found, exhausted, on the sofa.

However, this week I am going Out-Out not once, but twice. How my middle-aged self shall cope is anyone’s guess – though the sofa afterwards will still factor.Looking back, I have no idea how I ever had the energy to go out as often as I did, for as long as I did, nor get away without hangovers in the manner that I did.The saying that ‘youth is wasted on the young’ begins to ring true simply because you cannot tell your younger self to milk it for all it’s worth.One day you won’t even be able to sit crossed-legged and then get back up unaided – and it’ll come round sooner than you think.