This doesn’t happen to me in London.
I know full well that I would easily adjust to living in London. It’s such a melting pot city that the idea of not adjusting is simply ludicrous.
No, when I’m in London, I never wonder about how it would feel to adjust to the place. I wonder about how it would feel to belong to the place.
A few of the thoughts that came to my mind while I was walking in London this past weekend:
I wish I could walk into a Pub and not feel giggly or giddy. I wish I was not even aware of walking into a pub, but that instead it came to me as naturally as coming home or going to the corner store.
I wish I could look at a painting from the Victorian times or read a Jane Austen novel and be genuinely entitled to imagine that my great grandmother was the woman on which the main character in Emma was inspired.
I wish Sunday Roast didn’t mean boiled meat and mushy side dish for me and instead brought back a whole array of recollections of Sundays that had nothing to do with food in the first place but instead was all about memories spent in the company of friends or family.
I wish I could legitimately be entitled to have an interest in gossip about the Royal Family.
I wish that words like “Cricket” and “Royal Ascot” and “Wimbledon” and “The Sun tabloid” and “Commonwealth” were engrained in my DNA regardless of how I felt about the actual item/issue itself.
I wish I could walk along the post-war rebuilt buildings and streets of London and wonder what it must have been like for my ancestors to live in those freighting times, experiencing bombs falling all around them and to witness the reconstruction of the city that came afterwards, watching it become the wondrous place it is now.
I wish I didn’t find the British accent so refined or posh or endearing or anything. I wish I didn’t notice the accent at all. I wish it would just seem to me the normal way people speak.
(sigh)... I realize all these things are so impossibly cliché I must sound like a complete airhead. I am aware that a lot of British people probably don't fit this description either.
But walking in London last weekend, more than once, I wished I didn't have to wish for them.
Fned.
3 comments:
There is no legitimate reason needed to be interested in Royal gossip :-p They exist today almost exclusively for the gossip potential!
traveler's itch! you gotta scratch it!! well, no... if only it was as easy as it sounds... but there must be some middle ground, a way to spend say a year or so working for your company (any company?) to taste and feel how it is like... and then, be able to go back to work. If only it was that easy... *sigh* I still dream too...
Saludos Fned!
The wish is because you can almost see yourself in that life, even though your own life may have made you into someone quite different. It's the curiosity, the desire to know what it would really be like... I've had that wish many times, and it isn't necessarily limited to countries - it can follow you from city to city too! Maybe it's simply a desire to "fit in", which is something that always haunts you when you are a newcomer. But look at this and tell me if it's true: Even when you go somewhere and live for decades, and 'adjust' to life there, even if others in that place assure you that you really do 'belong' to that place, you will always know that your experience is not theirs, and that experience has shaped your thoughts and ideas to a certain extent in a way it couldn't have shaped theirs, so you will never be convinced that you truly do 'belong' to that place - unless you can erase your past each time you go somewhere different... and that would be like cutting off your nose to spite your face!
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