Porto (and where home is)

I walked to the Bouca Housing estate on a November Sunday morning past beautiful streets of townhouses where derelict buildings stood aside modernly renovated ones. 

The derelict buildings weren’t boarded up - their windows glassless, the peeling shutters wide open and the doors ajar but for the small amount a padlock would allow them to open. Inside was darkness, collapse, fragments of ownership and on their doorsteps there was the occasion person sitting folded.

You enter the Bouca Housing estate through a moment of pastel modernity - a hidden stairwell of weathered yellow and red railings, geometrically punctured by rectangles of light. The shadows of old people coming home with groceries past in the stairwells above.

After taking lots of photos, I enjoyed just sitting in the middle of it. It was probably only around 10 or 11am. It was late November, but was warm (for a ginger man). 

It amused me to think of sitting here on a Sunday morning at 10am a thousand miles from the house I lived in - how far I was. How unfamiliar the place I was in, but sitting outside these peoples’ homes just sat down in their midst.  How familiar we are in the places we live and how we can travel to different parts of the world and not consider how we’ve been plopped into a part of the world like the Google maps man we grab by the scruff of the neck and drop. 

I know people who’ve never travelled and I know people who travel without really knowing they are travelling. They get on a plane, land somewhere and it’s like the plane was a portal and not a train in the sky that heaved to carry them through thousands of miles of sky. They accept a foreign place like they’d accept a MacDonalds they’d never been to before. To be honest, that’s how I accepted it until I would sit somewhere remote on my own and think how rare it would be to even do that in my own street. 

In general, I have a detached sense of home. I moved around growing up and left home without telling my parents I was moving. I left the house with a holdall of clothing and left my belongings behind - including hundreds of LPs, CDs and cassettes that I loved but was prepared to leave. I was officially homeless after then when my dad was in a halfway house after a time in a psych ward and my mum was in temporary accommodation. 

I went on to you university and when my friends went home, I stayed alone in the only home I had - the student accommodation. Home really came about the comfort of familiarity in a place and how welcome you are. 

Maybe we carve ruts for ourselves like some animals bury themselves in sand. Like the beautiful green parakeets that escaped from London flats to London parks that don’t know that their bodies’ home is thousands of miles away. They escaped to an extent without knowing its an extent of anything. Even sitting in a cafe is an interesting experience in the difference of feeling between entering and initially sitting down to the comfort of having sat down in the environment for half an hour. 

As I walked around the streets of Porto, I walked past lots of people who I’d presume to be homeless. They weren’t sleeping in the streets, so I assumed they were sleeping in any one of the abandoned buildings. These buildings might have even been their homes that deteriorated over time. Deteriorated until the point that someone puts a padlock on the door and loses the key. These people seem like they didn’t have anywhere to go and that they’ve been left behind.

Every time we move into a home and leave it there is that same moment of emptiness. It's hard to imagine the moments that we felt comfortable and cosy enough to lie on its floor. It isn't just about the stuff we fill a home with, it is probably about smell, the everydayness of a home, the knowingness of how to get the right temperature in the shower, the speed we can run up the stairs, the comfort of waking up in bed and knowing where we are... but its just bricks, pipes and wires. 

When you see the shell of a building that was once a home, you see how easy it is for a house to lose its home.