"Home, sweet home..."

Well ladies and gentlemen, I have neglected my duties towards you as the female cuckoo neglects her young; foisting her eggs upon an unsuspecting meadow pippet as opposed to nurturing them with love, care and the odd note of motherly disapproval. I am ashamed to have done such a thing, but once again the lack of internet connection has prevented me from supporting you as I should. I shall try to father you better henceforth with regular support payments and trips to watch football. That aside it's good to be back and I write to you from the comfort of a sofa at home with my family. My girlfriend is sat on one side reading and my brother on the other playing some dinosaur game on his iPod touch. I have just spent the morning blackberrying and am now writing for you with a cup of tea at my side and a rather irritating thorn in my right leg. Bliss.

Being at home is a truly odd thing. You go from being an adult (well, nearly an adult) to being bizarrely transported back in time to when you were in your late teens, desperate to leave home yet still unsure of how to use a washing machine and even what it's meant to be washing (is it plates or pants in this one?). It's strange and a tad unnerving that your parents still believe they have the same degree of control over your life as when you left, that you find yourself acting in a childish way (I decided to dance like a crab to the tune of 'Under the Sea'yesterday, and then offered to perform it to a friend when she visits tomorrow) and that, oddest of all, you don't seem to notice all that much, or even necessarily to mind when you do.

I used to think this was a case of parents not wanting to relinquish the control over us, wishing still to treat us like the toddlers we once were by wiping our noses, blending our food up and sending us to work 18 hours at the local sawmill, but more recently I've started to wonder whether this is in fact because we don't want to let go of our childhoods. This isn't something confined to the parental home, this is an attitude that pervades adult life. I'm a student and spend a significant proportion of my life drinking to regain the mentality and a style of walking of the average three-year old; there are whole club nights devoted to dressing up as school-children, even if the skirts are much shorter than teachers would allow and the average student didn't liberally spatter his uniform with vodka and coke; and you can walk into many a girl's room to find more teddies than floor space (normally when she's there as well, unless you have an unhealthy interest in cuddly toys and eyeliner pencils). But even real adults with jobs, homes and several divorces attempt to return nostalgically to their youth. I saw a 45-year old man on a train playing a racing game on his phone the other day like someone 30 years younger than himself. Heck, even having children is a way of reliving one's childhood; parents seem to spend more time playing with the toys and talking in the baby voice (incidentally, when did you ever hear a baby say "goo" or "ga"?) than the children themselves, who seem bored and in need of a coffee and copy of the Sunday Times.

Once again I'm not here to give answers or well-wrapped up conclusions, only to offer thoughts and observations, but maybe it isn't such a bad thing to return to our childhood. The world is a big, terrifying and unpredictable place, and sometimes it must be nice to escape into the mind of a child where the most horrifying prospect is not going to the corner shop on the way home or having less carrots than his younger sister.