Hiraeth – when you long for home


At this time of the year, my thoughts often turn to home.  It’s understandable as it’s a time for family and togetherness, but it’s also a time when your social media feed is littered with photos of people on beaches enjoying their Christmas holiday.

I’ve often wondered about this feeling, this nameless discomfort that crops up from time to time, what exactly is it?  I really can’t say I’m actually homesick because I am not.  But there things I miss, things that would be considered “homely”.  Taking my loved ones out of the equation, I thought long and hard about this….what is it that I miss about home and does this mean I’m unhappy in the UK if I have these feelings?

The short answer is no, it doesn’t mean I’m unhappy and I don’t consider myself homesick either.  So what is it that makes me wistful or nostalgic at certain times?

The Welsh have a beautiful word for it – hiraeth, pronounced heer-eyeth.  Hiraeth is a word that cannot be translated but it can be described.

Hiraeth is nostalgia and longing for something that is familiar to you, but you no longer have.

Hiraeth is wrapping my Christmas presents in a heated room with a cup of hot chocolate and remembering a time when I used to wrap my gifts while sitting on the cool tiles in my lounge, fan blowing on me, a glass of wine sweating in the heat and Christmas beetles zinging everywhere.

Hiraeth is watching the leaves in the UK turn from green to yellow to red in September and being reminded of the dusty transition from winter to spring on the highveld, when all the grass is yellow and sticks to every surface, red dust tinges everything and the ground is desperate for some rain.

Hiraeth is appreciating the heat of the English summer and enjoying a braai but having a weird festive feeling, and then realising that it’s because you used to braai the most around the festive season back home, and it’s hard to separate the two in your mind.

Hiraeth is appreciating the beauty of the English countryside but being reminded in parts, of the African bushveld.  A leafless tree here, wide open spaces that could pass for savannah there, the greyish-green winter tinge on the countryside everywhere keeps reminding you of the Bush.
Reminders of the African bush are everywhere

Hiraeth is a beautiful word and to me, it means seeing the memories of a place that you love in the presence of a new place that you love.  It’s nostalgia but not sadness. Hiraeth means that my new home is not as foreign as I first thought, especially not as I get unexpected reminders of home at the strangest times. 

My new home reminds me of my old home in lovely, warm, squishy ways and can’t be called homesickness – it can only be called hiraeth.

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