8 May

On Mothers Day, I've been thinking about a magical mystery that women do. Men build houses, but women create homes. Home is a word like love, almost impossible to define. But, with love, the most important thing in the world. It's my love of and thoughts about home that drives my criticism of travel culture. 'There's no place like home', really true. But we've forgotten what home actually means, it's one of the most profound and difficult ideas in the world. What is it women (it's nearly always women, whether with children or not) do when they create a 'home' from a house? If we could understand that, we'd understand so much. I'm not sure many women could articulate it either. They ground us, they make where we live sacred, rather than a lot number. Another way men have ruled the world is the increasing forgetting of this most fundamental act. Our 'economies' are lethal to homes, they're about constantly undermining them. 'Move to where the jobs are!'. Yeh, nah.