Don’tcha just love a cliché? Well, even if you don’t, I do.

Tonight, as I crossed the Tamar and found myself once again in this perfect place that is now and hopefully always will be my home, I whispered ‘beep beep’ as has been a tradition ever since meeting a wonderful lady back in January who told me that it is a tradition in her family that they ‘beep beep’ to say goodbye as they leave and ‘beep beep’ to say we’re home as they return. She was a revelation to me, an incomer like me but one who came in forty-odd years ago. She was amazing and she still feels the same today as she did then. Cool. I have taken this burning torch of their family’s tradition and wound it around my own heart.

I whispered my ‘beep beep’ because yelling it out on a packed train, especially from ‘the quiet carriage’ would have been decidedly un-British and definitely ‘not done’. So, if you are ever on a train to Cornwall and you see a middle-aged woman whisper ‘beep beep’ then promptly burst into tears, you will know you have seen me returning home. I know of nowhere that is a finer place to call home and I’m pretty sure I never will find anything better. I’m not sure if the crying with happiness/relief/wonder at being able to call this special place home will ever wear off.

So, my photo is a true cliché, both in the literary (she says with her tongue planted firmly in her cheek) sense and in the photographic sense too – it says ‘my cup is running over’. Despite the traumas and challenges of the last year, I CAN now see some light. I can see a glimmer.

Many, many shots of liquid flowing into glasses have featured here on pbase, both in the PAD meta-gallery and elsewhere. You know and I know this is by no means the finest…..nor, I doubt will it be the last. I have even done it myself, even though my last one was a raw egg dropping into a broken glass – now if that one wasn’t technically accomplished, it was certainly unique. This one is ‘just another shot’ but it does tell the story of my journey and my homecoming and that’s what this is all about for me. My story in words and pictures. Dull and uninteresting as both surely are.

Last year I was mithering about the presence of some unknown person's pubic hair in my bath.