The first words I heard when I landed back on Irish soil came from a lady sitting behind me on the plane. “I’ve told Nuala to put on the spuds,” she said.

If the impossibly green landscape I’d just flown over hadn’t been enough to convince me that I was finally back home, Nuala making spuds was. I was delighted.

Terminal 2 makes Berlin Schoenefeld look like it’s stuck in the dark ages. Although a new airport is due to open in Berlin soon, an unexpected delay of several months was announced to much controversy just a week in advance of its proposed opening. The new date is amusingly, St Patrick’s Day 2013.

Terminal 2 features walls of photographs of Irish people, some prominent figures, some not. I noticed Enda beaming at me to my left and a chiselled, greying Pierce Brosnan to my right.

Some of you will have noticed my appalling attendance in the Blogosphere in the past while. Rest assured that I have been collecting Blog Fodder along the way. LSB and I spent the last two weeks in my mother’s hometown of Regensburg. I blogged about it before, when we visited my grandmother and the Christmas markets two years ago.

Regensburg

This time, my whole family was together, which is sadly a very rare occasion since my sister and I emigrated. Familienfest 2012 was a momentous occasion, which deserves (but might not get) a whole series of posts to itself. It was my mother’s and two aunt’s 60th birthday, my Great Uncle’s 90th and an uncle’s 50th. The combined age was 320, so the celebration was suitably large.

The Ferguson sisters pulled together from Philadelphia, Vienna and Dublin in an attempt to entertain the scores of guests with a presentation about our mother’s life. It featured cameo roles from my cousins, who re-enacted scenes from my mother and father’s courtship and a special appearance of the “Christkind” (the German version of Santa Claus), who lavished my mother with gifts.

The last while has also seen a return of my Quarter Life Crisis, so those of you nostalgic for more uncertain days will be relieved to know that they are not behind me yet. After much indecision and emotional turmoil, I decided to move back to Berlin. More on that when it happens, in two weeks’ time.

For now, I’m sitting in my suitably messy room under three quilts and a heavy blanket, delighted to be home. I found a little spider in my wardrobe and wondered how long he’d been there. Last night I had to turn on the immersion before I showered. The fridge is empty so I’m off to buy milk and organic eggs and Dairy Milk chocolate and potatoes and soda bread. There’s no place like home.