“Ach! When are they going to do something about this road? These potholes are a pure scandal!”
Those were the first words I heard Mary utter, as I was walking home along my unsealed street that morning (I live in the hills of Melbourne’s outer east), groceries fetched, coffee guzzled and mind turning towards the tasks of the day.
The voice was big and bellicose, strikingly so, as its owner was a tiny old lady. Big, bellicose and very Scottish, that voice - how could I resist joining in with it, and having a chat?
So I paused on my way to carp for a bit about the weather and the council.
“Ach!” she bellowed, barely halfway through my spiel, “you’re English!”
Mary, it turned out, was delivering the local paper (“to keep myself from getting frail and useless”) was 84 years old, and very keen to educate me on what a bunch of bastards the English have always been. I knew better than to argue.
You’re English!
Before long, talk turned to Brexit.
For three years now, whenever I’ve been in the company of a fellow Brit, talk has turned to Brexit. I’ve been a permanent resident of Australia for over a decade, but these days my thoughts are never far from that brouhaha back there.
It’s been car-crash compelling, this stuff. From the jaw-drop shock of the referendum result to the slapstick fiasco of last minute U-turns pulled, deadlines blown and the mother of parliaments in Monty Python mode.
And now, talking of sketch comedy, here’s Boris Johnson, who seems more of a character from Little Britain, maybe one left on the cutting-room floor for being too outlandish, than an actual, real-life politician.
Only he really is Prime Minister now. And he keeps saying he means it, the whole leaving the EU on October 31 thing, deal or not, “no ifs, no buts”, no tricks and, surely, no treats.
Mary and me were soon shaking our heads and tskkking as one on the subject, ruing tempestuous times.
There’s a weird dread we feel, as migrants, wherever we came from, however long we’ve been here, when our former homeland is going through a indentity crisis
Because there’s a weird dread we feel, as migrants, wherever we came from, however long we’ve been here, when our former homeland is going through an identity crisis, when the place that formed us is changing radically and irreversibly in our absence.
In the 12 years since I left the UK, I’ve been lucky enough to have returned a handful of times. Each time I brace myself for things having moved on, friends and loved ones grown a bit older, another cluster of futuristic edifices slotted into my beloved London skyline since our last visit. But, until three years ago, the place still felt essentially the same as it ever was, which sort of meant it always would be, didn’t it?
I went back this year and it didn’t feel that way. Something has shifted and is still shifting, something deep and inexorable. And it feels weird and upsetting that a place I need to be fixed and certain, isn’t, and doesn’t look like being again, at least not any time soon.
And talking to Mary that morning, I sensed she was going through a version of this same strange homesickness, a malaise that mingles a bittersweet ‘phew, I’m glad I’m out of that scene’ survivors’ guilt with a twist of masochists’ FOMO.
I’ve been sensing it in others of late, people who live here but count other places as home, too, places that used to have a solidity, a durability and soundness, but which have somehow turned into someplace else, but no place like home.
The place that formed us is changing radically and irreversibly in our absence.
The owner of my local bar, from California, looks haunted and bilious these days when the US comes up in conversation.
At a barbecue last Sunday, another friends’ eyes watered as she told us she was sure everything would be settling down back in Hong Kong, really, really soon, and I don’t think it was just the chilly wind.
Multiply by 10 or a hundred this sort of helpless foreboding, this vague sense of a homeland drifting away on history’s heedless tide. Then we might approach the trauma felt by those who have left Iran, Somalia, Syria or Myanmar.
That morning with Mary, I relished the chance to chew it over with a chatty stranger.
“Ach, if that man’s rise means the end of the union, then you just watch Scotland go! There’ll be no stopping her, I’m telling you.”
There’s nothing like a shot of perspective. As I farewell a cackling Mary, and continue on my way, I vow to take a leaf from this dauntless octogenarian’s book, to accentuate the positive and find silver linings in the gathering clouds.
If I can’t contemplate the budding break-up of the United Kingdom with quite the same zeal as Mary, at least I can appreciate the rare treat of an impassioned natter with a stranger. Of a sudden, random connection with a fellow human.
And if instability is the new global norm (rampant inequality and climate emergency, anyone?), doesn’t that level the playing field, and bring us closer together?
From way out here, it looks like choppy waters in almost every direction. We’re going to need to build some bridges out of empathy and compassion. And on a good morning, like this one, I can just about believe we’re up to it.
