Home sweet home

Home: [1] The place where someone lives. [2] Where the heart is. To me, home has always firmly been the former, but with all the plans currently ruling my life, I’ve lately been thinking a lot about what ‘home’ really means to me. As a foreigner, I’m regularly asked questions like ‘Where is home?’, ‘When are you going back home?’, and I never quite know how to answer. It’s tempting to just say ‘east London, and I plan to go back just as soon as I finish my shopping’, even though I know perfectly well what they mean. Not because I’m in any way ashamed or embarrassed about my nationality, but because each time I return, I feel more like a foreigner in the city I was born in. Of course, the city – like all cities – changes, and familiar features disappear, but more because it seems that increasingly, my character simply doesn’t match the environment anymore. I suppose this may have always been somewhat the case considering I wanted to move abroad even when I was very young, but it’s undeniable that living elsewhere has changed my views, my interests, my hopes and dreams. I’d never say never, but I can’t imagine ever moving back permanently.

Quite a lot of people appear to think it’s a bit ‘sad’ that I don’t have anywhere I consider home in the second sense. When I tell them that in fact, I’m perfectly happy moving around, starting life afresh and meeting new people, they tell me I have friends who will miss me and who I will miss, that I’m throwing away opportunities and a range of other wishes and desires they seem to want to project onto me. But I have friends I regularly speak to in a dozen countries; some I’ve lived near, others I hope to live near one day. In a world where you can travel to the other side of the planet in a single day, where the internet puts friends just a second away regardless of distance and where medical knowledge has advanced to a stage where most people in the developed world can expect to live well past 70, happiness to me is experiencing new cultures to a depth that a holiday would never afford you; getting to know people and their ways and cultures; and knowing that good friends are the ones you stay in contact with even when they don’t happen to live conveniently nearby.

I’ve just seen my parents for the first time in ten months. We had a fantastic weekend, full of catching up over excellent food and lots of wine, but I can’t imagine doing that more than once every few months. I love them deeply and I know they love me too, but the idea of hanging out with them every week just seems a bit… excessive. Possibly my favourite moment of the weekend was the point at which my dad told me he’d never want to live around the corner from me – I guess we may be slightly unusual as a family, but it works: every time we see each other it’s in the form of a holiday for either me or my parents, so due to the lack of time we concentrate on all the fun stuff and leave very little time for arguing, and considering my dad and I are fairly prone to lively disagreement this arrangement is more pleasant for all involved.

As preparations continue, more than anything I’m looking forward to calling Greece my home for a month in 2014. Afterwards, whether I end up in Italy, Russia or Brazil, I can’t wait to meet new friends, knowing that if a place doesn’t suit me, there are thousands of other places to try out. That, to me, is happiness – and to those who think that’s a little insane: no one’s asking you to do the same. That’s the beauty of individuality and choice.

The times they are a-changin'...

Changes are afoot.

It’s long overdue; I feel like my life has been rather static lately, but finally I’ve found the right gear and now it’s a matter of accelerating until I’m up to the right speed so that all I’ll have to do is make sure I don’t crash into a tree or lamp-post. Having been ‘told off’ for making my blog sound like I’m a benefit scrounger (which was certainly not my intention; I was only having a dig at the contradictive nature of my favourite newspaper), and in light of the fact that soon I will no longer be part of this country’s alleged job-stealing scrounger community anyway, I’ve decided it was time for a change here too.

The last few weeks have been emotional, educational and transformational. Having spent several months feeling increasingly trapped in a life considered by many to be, while maybe not perfect, certainly enviable, it took a minor mental breakdown for me to realise I’ve spent years building up a life I have no real interest in living. Almost two weeks have passed since that moment, and I feel happier and more at ease than I have in a long time, for I have Plans! As the years passed, making a break for it seemed like an increasingly bold step to take, but now that things have been set in motion, I can hardly believe how easy everything is turning out to be. Sure, I’m leaving a secure job for a future that may or may not work out, but as my mum (who seemed decidedly unsurprised when I told her I’d decided to turn my life upside down yet again) pointed out: some people need security in their lives – I seem to need the opposite.

All these decisions are teaching me some important lessons. Firstly, I need to be more confident about my abilities. A career as a rocket scientist was never going to be an option thanks to a chronic lack of discipline (or, as I prefer to think about it, an excess of interest in far too many different things), but there are things I’m good at that don’t require years of study and a lengthy list of qualifications, and I can trust in those, not to make me rich, but at least to help me accomplish the things I really want from life. Admittedly, it probably helps I have pretty modest goals. Secondly, the apparent lack of surprise from my parents and some of my closest friends at my announcement that I’m planning to leave suggests that not only do they know me better than I thought, they may know me better than I know myself, because I’d succeeded pretty well in convincing myself I’d ‘grown up’ and was ready to settle down, and for once finish my education.

The prospect of new adventures, though still some months away, fills me with so much excitement I get a little concerned I seem positively happy to leave my friends behind. That’s certainly not the case – quite the opposite in fact; it hasn’t always been easy making friends here, so I cherish the ones I have now all the more. Similarly, I wouldn’t want to give the impression that London has treated me badly. However, our relationship feels similar to the one you sometimes encounter with other people; we both do our best to get along while trying to make the most of the situation we’re faced with, but our characters are just not compatible enough to enable us to become good friends. Having said that, I’ve been here more than seven years – more than long enough to have lived, laughed, cried, learned some important lessons, and grown as a person, so surely this city will always be a small part of me.

Stranger in London

I remember the first time I visited London; a 15-year-old high school student born and bred in Rotterdam who disliked school but loved fashion and pop music, who had just spent 15 hours on a coach and a ferry together with 150 other teenagers, all excited as much by the thought of seeing a city around 10 times the size of our own and full of excitement as by the prospect of sneakily getting drunk and maybe hooking up with that guy/girl we’d had our eye on for the entire year. And then our first impressions: the backpackers’ hostel, filthy and full of potentially slightly creepy guys; the food, as bad if not worse than in the Netherlands, and even more expensive! The architecture… Well, most of us did not come from the type of social environment where one pays a great deal of attention to architecture. But the moment we first set out into the city, I knew that I loved the place. I wanted to live in a city as metropolitan as London! In comparison, Rotterdam had never seemed as bland and boring. When it turned out I’d failed the school year and would have to repeat it (a peculiarity of the Dutch education system that appears utterly baffling to every Brit I’ve ever attempted to explain it to), I begged my parents to let me take the trip again and, happily, succeeded, turning me immediately into a bit of an ‘expert’ to my new classmates.

The third time I visited the city came years later, while on a visit home from my new life in Australia. An Australian friend of mine had just moved here, so together we spent a few days exploring the city, although after two years in the land of roos the most remarkable thing about London was the free sale of all types of alcohol in the supermarket… And after a few days in the rain and cold and a brief stop on my way to say goodbye to my parents, I returned Down Under and forgot all about London. Of course, someone with a little more foresight would have realised returning on a tourist visa (not that I had any other options) was never going to be a long-term plan, so a year later I found myself in a situation: I’d just been told I’d been granted my final tourist visa, and immediately afterwards I started receiving (missed) calls from the taxman, who presumably didn’t appreciate the money that kept appearing in my bank account despite me supposedly not having a job. But I didn’t want to return to the Netherlands, so where could I go? The US, I concluded. Unfortunately, although I’d found a way to obtain a working visa, the process was slow and expensive so I needed somewhere to ‘hang out’ while I waited for it to be arranged. A friend suggested Birmingham, UK as a good place to both live and work, so off to England I went. Needless to say (and sorry Brummies), but the girl in question and I are no longer friends, and six weeks later I arrived in London for the fourth time, but this time to live.

By this point, it had become clear the US visa was not going to materialise, so a new plan was needed. The preceding 18 months had changed my outlook on life, and the city no longer seemed as magical as it had those first times I visited years earlier. My new impressions centred around grime, impossible crowds, awful weather and a culture where no one had time for anyone else – least of all strangers – and everyone was permanently in a rush. Such a change from hot, humid, laid-back Brisbane, Queensland! At the time, I felt that surely I’d get used to this change of pace soon enough and I’d settle in and be happy, but even while in relationships I never seemed to manage to stop plotting my escape, all the while feeling homesick for a country in which I hadn’t even grown up, where I’d spent only three years and which had unceremoniously kicked me out. Nevertheless, ‘a couple of months’ turned into years, and the longer I stayed, the more difficult it seemed to become to leave the security of a stable job for the unknown of another country.

London is a love-it-or-hate-it kind of place. The sheer size of the city and the high cost of living mean that especially for those of us who weren’t born here – around one in three of us – friends tend to live all over the place and rarely in very easy each. In addition to the fact that people often live far away and are forced to work A LOT it feels like Londoners tend to keep strangers at a distance, and this has made it difficult to make close friends, as maintaining new friendships here often requires a lot of work; years had passed before I first started feeling like I had friends who I wouldn’t have to contact regularly myself if I wanted to stay in contact. To some, this isolation is a major attraction. A friend of mine recently told me he loves the feeling of being able to walk down the street in complete anonymity, knowing how unlikely it is he will encounter anyone he knows. To me, it’s only served to make me realise I’m nowhere near as antisocial as I used to think I was – as it turns out, I actually enjoy the company of people and the knowledge of being able to find someone to go out or meet up with even on the same day, and this is something I really miss here, where generally things need to be planned well in advance to fit around work and other commitments. As far as I’m concerned, even the glut of museums, galleries, shows and other cultural gems don’t make up for this. London might be great, but it’s not for everyone.

Lately, I seem to keep coming across the Samuel Johnson quote ‘when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life’. Maybe this is true for some, but personally, all I’m tired of is life in London. Thinking of all the things that could go wrong if (when?) I finally go ahead and leave for an uncertain future almost scares me enough to make me stay. But I’ve done it before – and with an extra decade of knowledge and experience, surely I can do it as well, if not better, than last time. So I remind myself that just because something is the wise choice, that doesn’t mean it’s the right one. Some people may – and will – tell me I’m being stubborn, immature and stupid, but even if they turn out to be right, these are my mistakes to make and I’m making the choice to make them.