Fifteen years is a long time when it's half a lifetime. I moved to the US fifteen years ago yesterday. 28th June, 1995. I left my Grandfathers home in Salisbury and flew to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where my parents had already lived for a year with my Brother and Sister. By some coincidence, the 28th was the same date they had left England, but they didn't go straight to Baton Rouge. They went through New York City, where they did a lot of the tourist things people are supposed to do: The statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, the World Trade Center.

I joined them about a month after they got the Baton Rouge, for summer holidays. Back to England for Autumn Term, Louisiana for Christmas holidays, England for Winter Term, Louisiana for Easter holidays, England for Spring Term, then the US for good. At the time, for good meant a couple of years, couple more years of school, and then probably back the England for University.

If there's one thing I've realized in the past fifteen years, it's that your probablies probably won't turn out the way you expect. The couple of years away from England have turned into half my life. It's not over yet, but I probably won't move back to live in England permanently again. When you travel, when you move, it isn't so very hard to retrace your steps, and go back in geography; the steps you can't retrace are the steps in time. I'll never be the boy who was excited, lucky, to be going to the US for a little while. A friend in school, Robin, had lived in California for a little while and we all thought he was the coolest guy ever. I thought I'd end up like him, but in retrospect it was him being him, not him having lived in LA for a while, that made him cool.

England will always be home. It'll always be where I'm from, regardless of my being born in Germany, or leaving at fifteen. I'm planning a trip home in April. But home has grown to mean, in the time I've been away, the whole country. More than that, it means Britain. while I'm there, I'll see friends in London, In Ireland, as well as Salisbury. I never spent much time in either place (I never went to Ireland until after I'd moved away). If I have time, I'll go to Scotland for a couple of days, maybe Cornwall. Those places that are now half a lifetime away, and always with me, in my soul.

That's the cynic in me. In my soul. I'm still not willing to accept anything as in my heart, except blood and maybe the beginnings of arterial plaque. But I carry these places in my soul. The hills around Salisbury that have been inhabited and farmed and fought over and loved for thousands of years. The comfortable, depressing grey of London as it lurks under rain clouds. The sound and smell of the Cornish coast, so similar to every coast in the world, yet special to me. After fifteen years of being an ex-pat, I think they mean more to me than had I stayed in England. After fifteen years I've found that while I may not love where I've been since, I don't have to choose between any of them. I don't have to cut out parts to make room for more. The Cornish coast hasn't been replaced by the Oregonian, or any of them I came to know from my time at Sea. The drizzle of home hasn't been replaced by the drizzle of Portland, or the downpours of Louisiana, or the warm showers of Hawai'i. You just expand the place, build an extension, open up the basement and the attic. There isn't a finite amount of room. You don't have to knock it down, replace the old with the new, and maybe that's one of the things I find uncomfortable about living in Vegas. Every couple of years, things have to be reinvented. A gift shop becomes a tattoo parlour/lounge. An old hotel gets blown up and built bigger, shinier. A club gets remodelled and renamed three times in the space of five years.

That's why people are better than real estate. Infinite capacity, and an ability to grow slowly over the years, without having to start all over again. So when I leave here (and that's not a probably, but a definitely), I won't erase all traces of Vegas, or Oregon, or Baton Rouge. I won't erase any of it, but keep adding, and end up with another half a lifetime of experiences to bullshit about.