Caroline O’Donoghue: Five reasons to love where you live

I'm a little obsessed with travel. Not in a healthy way. I emigrated quite young, and so didn’t spend my early 20s globe-trotting as much as many of my peers did, leaving me with a constant sense that I have been nowhere, seen nothing, and have nothing to show for it.

It’s silly, of course, but I can’t help it. I am repeatedly fooled into thinking that the only way to live your life fully is to wander around a night market in a foreign country, getting overcharged for a rubbery crepe.

I love going to new places, and am willing to tolerate a lot of discomfort in order to get there, but I also make the mistake in thinking that I will be a new person once I arrive. I will feel mysterious, and never lonely.

I will write my best work at Parisian cafes, and only become distracted when strangers come to compliment my beauty. I will exude such charm that language will never be an issue.

I will have fascinating experiences where beautifully dressed old men show me their piano and tell me about the night the Bolsheviks stormed the palace.

That would make him well over 150 you say? It doesn’t matter. That’s how powerful and magical my travel experiences are.

I need to get out of this habit of thinking that only magical things will happen if I leave the country, a habit we all need to curb if we’re going to try to save the earth by flying less.

So this morning, I decided to count the magical things in my own neighbourhood. The things I see every day, and are every bit as enchanting as an impossibly old soldier’s piano. If you’re feeling a bit low and like you are years away from your next holiday, I suggest you do the same.

Keep a list of the things that, if you saw them while travelling, you would take a picture.

1. The Cat Grotto

My flat is on a big block of flats on a main road. Nothing magical happens on this road, but if you cross the road and follow a footpath there is a small red-brick council house with a front garden. The garden is a cat grotto. It is filled with car-boot sale junk: old doll houses, gnomes, ceramic owls, vintage signs for Coca Cola.

I don’t know if the intention for this place was to attract the neighbourhood’s stray cats, but that’s exactly what it has done.

At any given moment, eight to 10 cats are perched in the grotto, casually licking the hair off a mannequin’s head.

2. Sister Stabs Brother In Back

For several years now, I have passed the same corner shop every day.

It’s the kind of shop that stays in business despite there being no real reason for it to carry on. It mostly sells out-of-date chocolate bars and the cheap kind of tennis ball that your dog destroys in two catches.

About a year ago, a sign appeared in the shop, notifying the community that after 20 years, the shop was closing. A week later, another sign appeared to say that it was not closing.

These signs swapped around for months. I asked around. It turned out that the building was owned by two siblings, and they were in constant debate over whether to keep it open.

Eventually, the shop did close, and a new sign appeared in the window. “SISTER STABS BROTHER IN BACK.” It’s still there.

3. “Fire!”

Several times a day, a Rastafarian man in his 60s walks down the street and shouts “FIRE” with absolutely no sense of urgency. For the first few years, I was worried.

Where’s the fire?

Nowhere, and I suppose, everywhere. There’s a fire somewhere, isn’t there?

He is the metronome of the street, keeping us all upright and on time. Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I lie in bed and listen out for him. Just as I’m drifting off, when I’ve given up on him entirely, that’s when he comes. FIRE. FIRE. FIRE.

4. The Market

The market is on three days a week and, to borrow a phrase from my friend Ella, is the only place on earth where you can buy a fresh fish, a bowl of rice, a child’s guitar, and a photograph of your own grandmother.

It is the great junk market at the end of the world, where the last piss-soaked boxes of an estate sale comes to dry in the sun.

You can get a set of matching stools for £10, and a broken door handle for £20.

5 The parakeets

There’s a park near my house and it has parakeets. Nobody knows why.

There’s a rumour that Jimi Hendrix bought them and let them loose over Covent Garden, and they eventually settled in various parks around London.

It might be the deadest, coldest month of winter, and there might be no leaves on the trees, but at the very least, a bare tree means I can see the parakeets better.

And sometimes, on a lashing grey Wednesday like the one I’m writing this column on, all you need is a few green feathers to remind you that spring is on its way.