This One

“What’s your favourite country?” she asked.

“This one,” I said.

She did not believe me.

Nobody does.

A favourite country is supposed to be somewhere else. Somewhere warmer. Somewhere reached by aircraft rather than by train from Glasgow Central.

The question expects travel.

My answer sounds like a misunderstanding.

Many of the people I meet here have wanderlust. They tell me where they have been, where they are going and where they might live if the opportunity comes. They want to see the world.

I understand that. I’ve had the privilege of seeing much of it myself.

But if you have passed the same shoreline every morning for thirty years, eventually it becomes the route to work. If you grow up with hills on the horizon, they stop announcing themselves. If you live beside the Firth, you probably do not feel compelled to film every ferry that crosses it.

Then someone like me arrives with his phone in the air.

They live in Scotland.

I am still astonished by it.

But the disbelief beneath my answer feels older than familiarity.

Scotland is a country that knows how to leave.

Its people have crossed oceans for work, opportunity, necessity and survival. They built lives elsewhere and carried Scotland with them in names, accents, songs, faith, football and the peculiar conviction that wherever they happened to be, England should still lose.

My family left when I was a baby.

Canada became the country where my life happened. Scotland became the country I was taught to remember.

Now I have crossed back.

That does not make me more Scottish than the people who stayed. It certainly does not make me an authority on Gaelic or Scots. I am still learning the trains, the towns and how quickly the weather can change its mind. I also enjoy walking through what I call mist and everyone else calls a downpour.

But when someone asks my favourite country, the answer is not difficult.

This one.

I did not say Scotland was perfect.

Favourite is not a ranking.

It is a relationship.

I do not need to diminish Canada to choose Scotland. I do not need to pretend this country is without poverty, neglect, division or disappointment. Love that requires dishonesty is only propaganda with better music.

I see the problems.

I choose Scotland anyway.

The modern world gives leaving a better vocabulary than returning. Leaving is adventure, independence and ambition. Coming home can sound sentimental—as though the person returning has confused memory with direction.

But not every journey away is freedom.

Not every return is retreat.

I did not come back because I had run out of world.

I came back because I no longer wanted the place I loved most to exist mainly as inheritance. I wanted to know it as weather, work, inconvenience, community and ordinary life.

Not only the view.

The place.

Perhaps that is why my answer sounds unbelievable.

They think I am describing a feeling.

I am describing a decision.

“What’s your favourite country?” she asked.

“This one,” I said.

So many people here want to see the world.

I hope they do.

I have. I am better for it.

But in the end, I just want to come home.

Giff on the Way Home.