Emigrating

I am sure many people consider leaving this muddy isle for good at times. Turn ones back on the inbred, class ridden pit. I have been dragged away from my hometown. I should be more honest, from as old as I could I tried to get away. The South  West was where we went for our holidays so it appeared to make sense to move there.

After a while you meet someone, fall in love, find work there and the past drifts away.

I nostalgically consider returning home. Outsiders never fully understand a place they weren't born. The language, the accent and don't be fooled, accent is not just the shape of your vowels but language itself. A geordie thinks in Geordie, a Glaswegian in Glaswegian. Many things will not translate.

The tacit knowledge, the inbuilt understsanding of subtleties in seasonal change peculiar to each inch of land is hardwired in to our make up.

Though I live in the South West there are a myriad details that are beyond me.

Sadly, when I go back home time has moved on. The incremental developement of my city of birth has shifted. No longer can I find my feet there.

I am lost. A stranger at home and abroad. The routes others have I don't. No anchor holds me safe.

Within our hotch potch multicultural society all is eddy and flux. All is in shift and growth. Tribal allegiance shifts and flowers often for the briefest shared moment in a bus shelter. A comment with a stranger and a second of eye contact then you are gone, swept off in to societies river. Perhaps coalescing in football fandom at the game or a mutual love of art in a gallery.

Yet these moments of tribal communality can not hold up to the ties the town folk feel here. I can feel the rock solid fixtures of their foundations. Their children run among each other in play.

I am an outsider.

But then I always was an outsider, even when young.