Homecoming, or, Searching for a Love Actually moment

As many of you (but not my parents) already knew, back in July I booked flights to come home for Christmas. Since then, I have been looking forward to it like a small child looks forward to Christmas: the thought of Christmas in Blighty has got me through many a tough spot since July.

However, when the time finally came, it was slightly more bogged down in anxiety and self-doubt than I had anticipated. The bureaucratic challenges were many – I spent a sleepless week plotting my options if the Indian embassy refused to give me a visa – but I think the main cause of my disquiet was the idea that I might go home and find things irreversibly changed. As luck would have it, I came home to find that absolutely nothing has changed. Not one thing. Friends, relationships, habits, old haunts – all are pretty much the same as I left them. In some ways, I could find this depressing, but it is actually deeply comforting.

Landing at Heathrow at 7am was something of a shock. When the pilot announced during our descent that the temperature outside was minus three, I think I actually laughed. Having only my flip flops and a cardigan for warmth, I think I was attempting to block out the fact that such a temperature was going to be physically painful. Needless to say, the moment I stepped off the plane, before the air-conditioned blandness of the airport enclosed me, was a tough one.

Of course I was extremely excited to be in London after so many months of fantasizing about it, but I was nevertheless a little disappointed not to find everything a bit more momentous. The man on immigration didn’t say welcome home, for example, and there were no cheering crowds awaiting me in the arrivals hall. There was, devastatingly, no Love Actually moment. Instead, there was me with my stupidly heavy backpack (eighteen kilos, for god’s sake!), my stupid flip flops and my stupid little cardigan.

My first encounter with the rush hour underground brought me many a strange look, which I’m hoping were due to my bare feet and copious scarves than the fact that I hadn’t showered in 12 hours. However, I did note the lack of staring – or eye contact at all - between my fellow passengers – with some sadness.

Arriving at Victoria to meet Emily, I did get to have a bit of a Love Actually moment. She’d got up at 4.30am to get the train from Leeds, she’d brought me socks and a coat, and just as we headed outside to catch the train home, it began to snow. Cue much gleeful shrieking on my part, which did manage to earn one or two stares from passers by.

Later, I had the pleasure of a series of faintly Love Actually moments as I was reunited with friends and family at various stages. The highlight, however, has to be leaping out of a box to greet my unsuspecting parents as they arrived home from work. Bizarrely, I was unaccountably nervous about seeing them – as if they might not be pleased to see me (ridiculous, I know). Although I was momentarily concerned that my mother was going to pass out, it was a priceless moment. Both my mum and dad had fully swallowed the counter story Emily and I had been feeding them since July, that I was going to Vietnam for Christmas. Initially constructed to explain the airline’s debit from my bank account (which my parents consider is there duty to monitor), this bluff had evolved into a fully formed narrative involving the names of travelling companions, hotels and even itineraries, helpfully supplemented by several long conversations with my dad about which were the best places to visit in Vietnam.