Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

late.
    Or is it?
    Freud, one of the grand masters of narrative, knew that the past is not fixed in the way that linear time suggests. We can return. We can pick up what we dropped. We can mend what others broke. We can talk with the dead.
    Mrs Winterson left behind things that she could not do.
    One of those things was to make a home.
    The Romanian philosopher Mircea Eliade talks about home – ontological as well as geographical home – and in a lovely phrase, he calls home ‘the heart of the real’.
    Home, he tells us, is the intersection of two lines – the vertical and the horizontal. The vertical plane has heaven, or the upper world, at one end, and the world of the dead at the other end. The horizontal plane is the traffic of this world, moving to and fro – our own traffic and that of teeming others.
    Home was a place of order. A place where the order of things come together – the living and dead – the spirits of the ancestors and the present inhabitants, and the gathering up and stilling of all the to-and-fro.
    Leaving home can only happen because there is a home to leave. And the leaving is never just a geographical or spatial separation; it is an emotional separation – wanted or unwanted. Steady or ambivalent.
    For the refugee, for the homeless, the lack of this crucial coordinate in the placing of the self has severe consequences. At best it must be managed, made up for in some way. At worst, a displaced person, literally, does not know which way is up, because there is no true north. No compass point. Home is much more than shelter; home is our centre of gravity.
    A nomadic people learn to take their homes with them – and the familiar objects are spread out or re-erected from place to place. When we move house, we take with us the invisible concept of home – but it is a very powerful concept. Mental health and emotional continuity do not require us to stay in the same house or the same place, but they do require a sturdy structure on the inside – and that structure is built in part by what has happened on the outside. The inside and the outside of our lives are each the shell where we learn to live.
    Home was problematic for me. It did not represent order and it did not stand for safety. I left home at sixteen, and after that I was always moving, until finally, almost by accident, I found and kept two places, both modest, one in London and one in the country. I have never lived with anyone in either of those homes.
    I am not entirely happy about that, but when I did live with someone, and for thirteen years, I could only manage it by having a lot of separate space. I am not messy, I am organised, and I cook and clean very happily, but another presence is hard for me. I wish it were not so, because I would really like to live with someone I love.
    I just don’t think I know how to do that.
    So it is better to accept my not quite adjusted need for distance and privacy.
    Mrs Winterson never respected my privacy. She ransacked my possessions, read my diaries, my notebooks, my stories, my letters. I never felt safe in the house and when she made me leave it I felt betrayed. The horrible sick feeling that I had never belonged and never would belong is assuaged now by the fact that my homes are mine and I can come and go as I please.
    I never had a key to the house in Water Street, and so entry depended on being let in – or not. I don’t know why I am still so fond of doorsteps – it seems perverse, given that I spent so much time sitting on one, but the two parts of home that mattered to me in Accrington are the parts I could least do without now.
    They are the threshold and the hearth.
    My friends joke that I won’t shut the door unless it is officially bedtime or actually snowing into the kitchen. The first thing I do when I get up in the morning is to open the back door. The next thing I do, in winter, is to light the fire.
    All those hours spent sitting on my bum on the doorstep have given me a feeling for liminal space. I love the way cats like to be half in half out, the wild and the tame, and I too am the wild and the tame. I am domestic, but only if the door is open.
    And I guess that is the key – no one is ever going to lock me in or lock me out again. My door is open and I am the one who opens it.
    The threshold and the hearth are mythic spaces. Each has sacred and ceremonial aspects in the history of our myth. To cross the threshold is to enter another world – whether the