I'll be home at Christmas----no I won't

Homesickness is a strange thing. It bears in on us at Christmas. It afflicts us as we mature, it almost seemed as though it would kill me when I first went to Uni, a hidden stress that went unnamed that was the most dominating feature of my life in the first six months of 1970.
Every now and then, and particularly at Christmas it irrationally takes me back to the town of my birth, Whitehaven in Cumbria a small town in the extreme North West of England. The picture to the left gives you a sense of it.
Why does it look odd? It looks odd as we look at the boats in the harbour on this sun-shiney day because they are not sitting right in the water. In fact it is because the harbour is frozen!!
It will be like that today in Whitehaven, (0 degrees and below) if it is not dull and rainy. Here in Adelaide it will be in the low 30's.
Yet there is a pang to be back there.
I have lived in South Australia for nearly 40 years or about three quarters of my life. Yet still it there.
It is also there because I am an orphan, and in a real sense there are no parents for me to go home to.
I do what I can to treasure the time with my wife and my children, and to juggle the tension of helping the girls to always feel that they will have a home to be sick of; and at the same time to encourage them to fly the coop.
Christmas....aaah Christmas!