Angus-Peter Campbell

Homelessness is a terrible crime... diminishing sacred personal space we all ought to have making our private lives public property.

WHEN I go back to South Uist the older generation tend to ask me: “Dè cho fad ‘s a tha thu aig an taigh?” (“How long are you home for?”), despite the fact that I left “home” almost 50 years ago, and have not lived permanently on the island since 1975.

For home is where we are remembered. It’s the place where we created the world, or where the world was created for us, and as time and memory enshrine that shape and form, the less malleable it becomes; even those parts we’ve retrospectively imagined or invented.

For there is no firmer truth than the fiction of our lives.

I was born into and brought up in a pre-electric world, where the hissing sound of the tilley-lamp framed our times.

My happiest memory is lying on the floor by the stove reading The Beano while the shadows of my parents and siblings moved around the edges of the light.

Outside it was dark – real proper dark, unspoilt by any form of artificial glow. And when you went out there on a clear frosty night you could see every star in the firmament. We tried to count them.

And language too was home, and especially the people who spoke that language: the older women who breathed in as they recited the rosary, the men scything the hay down on the machair, the boys being Denis Law as they played football, the girls singing as they skipped with the rope at the end of the school canteen.

And they’ve all gone, though I sometimes wake at night thinking that I can step out there and join again in their song.

As Sorley Maclean put it: the dead have been seen alive.

It’s one of these linguistic joys that the word home makes up most of Homer’s name, for the Greek poet established the template for homesickness in Western civilization.

Cianalas we call it in Gaelic, which is a shadow that accompanies every Gael I know wherever she or he goes.

There you are walking down Rue du Départ in Montparnasse and you hear someone playing the accordion and immediately you wish you were back in the old Creagorry Hotel listening to Iain MacLachlan playing Donald MacLean’s Farewell to Oban.

As the London Irishman said sitting in the

‘‘ It’s one of these linguistic joys that the word home makes up most of Homer’s name, for the Greek poet established the template for homesickness

bar in Dublin: “I wish I was back in the Old Kent Road wishing I was here.” Back to the future.The great French-Czech writer Milan Kundera lays the blame for this magnetic nostalgia squarely at the feet of Odysseus.

He who would walk more than 500 miles to fall down at Penelope’s door, although Eden and the book of Genesis got there before.

Home was always behind, as with the exodus to Egypt and the prodigal son, until Christ clearly established it in the future.

So we live in a kind of transitory exile: removed from God, the womb, the cradle, the first home, the first street, the first nation ... and finding or erecting shelters for ourselves wherever we may be.

We surround ourselves with the familiar: photographs of loved ones, books that we value, little treasures that guard the future with the gladnesses of the past. Home thoughts from abroad. This is why homelessness is such a terrible crime against humanity.

It diminishes the sacred personal space we all ought to have, making our private lives public property.

In that context, few of us can really appreciate what refugees and forced migrants throughout the world are suffering as we watch.

From the horrors of Syria to the crisis at Calais, what we have are men, women and children who have been torn from their roots on a scale that makes our infamous Highland Clearances almost benign by comparison.

What does home mean in those circumstances, and how can we as individuals and as nations provide a dachaigh, or refuge, for the displaced? Certainly not by branding them as marauders.

It’s a practical question for us all: how to get a roof over our heads. If the Scottish Government is serious about tackling homelessness, the lack of social housing available to the poorest in society provides little evidence of progress.

As house prices escalate everywhere –you can hardly buy a hen house now in Skye for less than a quarter of a million pounds – the first challenge is simply to find somewhere to stay in a land richly decorated with holiday homes. The alternative is magic, mind over matter. As William Faulkner put it: “How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.”