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On this week's episode, Patrick McGuinness reads his diary from our 6th of June issue

about his family's hometown of Bouillon in Belgium.

He reflects on the linguistic and national barriers he crossed to return there each year,

on the changes wrought on the town by the end of the industrial era,

and on the ways that history and global politics can shape a locality beyond recognition.

Back to Bouillon.

I was made in the small industrial town of Bouillon, in the Belgian Ardennes, where my mother came from and most of the family still lived.

One aunt and uncle lived opposite, another lived 40 kilometres

away on the Luxembourg border, and our cousins lived next door. My mother was the only one of her

siblings or close relatives to leave, but when she did, she went far enough away to make up for all

their staying.

Having met my father in Lijijes, where she was a student and he an English language teaching assistant,

she moved to England. They then embarked on what became a life of travel, uprooting and re-routing

every few years after he joined the British Council. They went to Congo, just after independence,

then Tunisia, where I was born, then Venezuela, Turkey, Iran, during the revolution,

and Romania, just before the revolution. My mother left Bouillon, but she always came back.

We returned three times a year, and during the summer we'd stay for as long

as three months, in ways that gave my sister and me the sense of being woven into the place,

of having something so deep and so full that it felt like an extra life, not a holiday or vacation,

but a different way of being ourselves, not least in French, because we always

become someone different when we speak another language.

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