Graham Norton’s latest novel ‘blends dark humour and emotional weight with ease’, says the Radio Times. That may well be, but it was the title that struck me: Forever Home.
It seems to me a childish phrase, heard in the imagination in a high-pitched American accent, as perhaps in Boys Town (1938), which was Ronnie Kray’s favourite film.
Forever home is all over the place. Ant Anstead, a television presenter, has, according to the Sun, ‘bought a 500-year-old farmhouse in Bedford for his parents and will transform it into their forever home’. Nothing lasts forever, and if my husband pegs out (which could happen any time, the way he goes at it), then my current forever home will one day be sold to fund my ‘care’ in some dreadful but not forever home.
The OED does not recognise forever home as a distinct nominal phrase, but quotes examples of forever used as an adjective (instead of an adverb, its normal function). Thus the collocation forever home was to be found in the Christian Science Monitor in 1910 in the phrase ‘Heaven, his forever home’.
What we’re interested in is the kind of forever home that dogs’ homes cannot be. A newspaper in Santa Fe wrote in 2005 about portraits of adoptable kids made with ‘the goal of helping fulfil their most deeply held dream, that of a “forever home”’. The quotation marks seem to indicate a fixed phrase.
Before Norton, there was a series of half a dozen books about doggies and pussy cats: ‘In this series, Forever Homes, Grace and Jack have a plan – to find purrfect homes for purrfect pets from cats to dogs and everything in between!’ Suitable for five plus.
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