No Place Like Home

It's been nearly a year since I joined Pride in London as their Head of Fundraising. A year of great learnings and work, of meeting new people (and making new friends), of getting pushed out of my comfort zone - of growth. A year of gaining a new family.

On Saturday, I joined other volunteers who are part of the core team[1] for the first All Team meeting of the year, where we discussed our successes last year, our challenges, and the new theme we are going to be working on for this year. During the meeting, they aired the video that was made last year and shown on TV, which features Somewhere Over the Rainbow:

It was a lovely day for catching up with some colleagues, meeting new members of the team, and then having a nice drink afterwards with two members of my team, who also got to meet my boyfriend (who had just finished his Spanish lessons in preparation for his summer move to Madrid.[2]) My boyfriend and I then quickly popped into a local Prêt a Manger for lunch then fortuitously stumbled into steer, who had just finished a workout and was on his way to a pub. We also got the chance to wish him a happy birthday in person.

On the way home, on the Number 8 bus, the Wizard of Oz song still stuck in my head, I saw a poster outside a bank -- I think a poster about mortgages -- featuring Dorothy, with the quote: "There's no place like home."

When I got off the bus in Bethnal Green, a busker played the accordion nearby... Somewhere Over the Rainbow. Now my curiosity was piqued: I love a synchronicity. I got home and sat in the living room, enjoying the flat all to myself (the housemate was out and the boyfriend had stayed behind to shop for new trousers at Uniqlo.)

A few days earlier, on the Thursday, I'd been to our local bookclub to discuss Anna Burns' Milkman. We've been part of this bookclub for many years - nearly from the point we moved into the tower block just south of Victoria Park, back in 2005, which we lived in until 2014. My landlady, who was also a friend from work and lived on the same street as the tower block, invited us to join the fledging neighbourhood bookclub back then, and we grew with it over the years, became friends with everyone in it -- only taking a break during 2014, when I moved back to Brazil to help run my mom's guesthouse, and then last year, whilst we lived in the narrowboat.

I was warmly received by everyone in the bookclub and we had a good evening discussing the novel, which we all loved, as well as getting some inside scoop on Anna Burns' creative process, as she happened to have dedicated the book to one of our members! As it also happens with this bookclub, we eventually got talking about other things, and for this evening it was the current issue with pollution in London and what everybody was doing about it. While everyone chatted, I thought of my other bookclub - recently formed with colleagues at the BHF - and our current read, Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch.[3] I thought of how long it was (over 800 pages) and wouldn't it be nice if this bookclub also chose it, so I wouldn't have two massive novels to get through in the coming month.

Someone then mentioned the death of insects across the UK -- an apparent drop of nearly 70% -- and of how their memories from the 70s were of driving through the countryside and having their windshields covered with bugs, and how this didn't happen anymore. But then someone else mentioned that birds seemed to be returning to their garden. "Did you see the goldfinches?" she asked. "They are coming back."

Two days later, sitting alone in my new home, thinking of Somewhere Over the Rainbow, I opened The Goldfinch and a few pages into my reading came across a passage where the characters discussed Judy Garland's addiction to sleeping pills, and how she was served strong tea in the morning so it would flush the barbs out of her system. Then, a few chapters later, the main character (a 13-year-old boy called Theo who had lost his mother to a terrorist bomb in a NYC museum) visited a convalescing survivor of the attack and, in her bedroom, noticed a poster of The Wizard of Oz above her bed.

And what was the book selected by the bookclub on Thursday night you ask? Not The Wizard of Oz, I'm afraid, but Marilynne Robinson's Home.

[1] About 150 people volunteer all year round to help put on Pride in London - the capital's 3rd largest celebration.  The largest is the New Year fireworks display, followed by the London Marathon.
[2] I promise I'll give an update on this soon!
[3] As soon as the book was chosen -- from a byzantine process involving an online random list generator -- I tweeted millionreasons if I could borrow her copy, as I knew she'd have one -- and a week later, while sitting in a vegan fast food join in Camden, she handed me a hardcover copy which had been gifted to her by her parents.