I grew up in the 60s and 70s in a market town halfway between London and Oxford. My father ran a smallish furniture factory that still produced quality hand-made furniture, one of the many such factories that had brought the town some of its prosperity. By the time I left, at the end of the 70s it had become something of a commuter dormitory, a satellite of London. From our house up on the hill I could take the dog, Tammy, along the path at the bottom of our garden and within ten minutes be in open fields and woods. Ten minutes the other way at the bottom of the hill is the train station, 40 minutes or so out of Marylebone.
I always headed towards the fields and woods, and very rarely went the other way into the grey sleeping giant of the capital. I recall a few trips up with my parents, to the Natural History Museum to see the dinosaurs, and so on, and I remember being dragged up to Oxford Street by my first girlfriend, which I hated (- it was like being dragged round shops by my mother to buy school clothes). The highlight of this experience for me was running back late into Marylebone, jumping on the wrong train and ending up hitching a lift back home through a bumpy backlane short-cut in the back of an old van driven by what we called at the time a 'freak' (hippy). (We were probably about 15 - the freak was maybe 19).
London for me was a monstrous, polluted, noisy, pompous mess where people ran round in circles chasing money and falling over themselves to be fashionably superior to each other. I rejected it completely, and spent the next two decades trying to avoid it as much as possible - by heading off west (to Exeter), north (to Birmingham and Bradford) and east (to my surrogate hometown of Norwich). Later I went off to Turkey, Spain, Italy, and now Japan; looking for something else, something exotic or real or natural - whatever it was, I felt I wouldn't find it in London - it was elsewhere, a long way away - it was 'other'.
In my 30s I worked for a few years in Libya and the Middle East, which meant passing through London regularly on my way to shortish stints in the desert, and I developed the habit of spending a few hours every couple of months in museums and art galleries on the way to the airport, to top up on a bit of culture en route. [To be fair, this had long been a part of my life - wherever I was living, I would spend more time than most in art galleries, although I never understood why I was there or what I was looking at]. So gradually I came to appreciate the better side of London - and to overlook the ugliness, the 'vanity of the streets'.
Now here I am in my 40s and I finally worked out a whole lot of stuff. For starters, I realised that my whole life I have been trying to run away from people and society:
... more like a man
Flying from something that he dreads, than one
Who sought the thing he loved
(Wordsworth: Tintern Abbey)
And of course, wherever you run to, you will always find yourself in society. And you will never escape from yourself.
Perhaps a big turning point for me was a couple of years ago when I decided to do an MA in order to get a job at a university in Japan. Ideally, from the job point of view, I should have taken a course in applied linguistics (the study of language in order to put it to some practical use - like language teaching), but as luck would have it, the university where I was teaching could only offer a course in sociolinguistics: language, culture and society. Stuff like how is the language of women different from that of men; how do politicians manipulate language; how are accents and non-standard varieties used to establish group identity, and justify discrimination; what are the links between language and culture - if you speak a certain language, does that mean you are a different person - you see the world in a different way, and so on and on.
I learnt a lot from this! One is that I am very interested in language, always have been, so I'm probably in the right job, which is reassuring (how many people are in jobs they don't particularly like?). Second, is that through reading relatively a lot (for me) I came to understand a few more things about being human: principally is the understanding that we are all the same - none of us is any better, intrinsically, than anybody else. No language or way of speaking is 'better' than any other - everything you want to say in standard English you can say equally well in colloquial Japanese or Kuwaiti Arabic or Black Vernacular American English or whatever it is. The superficial differences are of course endlessly fascinating and tell us a lot about the various cultures and so on of the people that speak them - endlessly fascinating.
I am often reminded of the parable of the blind men and the elephant: Six blind men are presented with an elephant, and each of them approaches it to find out what it is like. One touches the leg, another the body, another the tail, another the tusk, another the trunk, and the last the ear. Of course they all get a completely different idea of what an elephant is - but they are all right, up to a point.
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Well - this isn't coming out so easily - the other morning in the early hours, it all came flooding, word-perfect. I think I heard that writers tend to be most productive in the early morning.
Anyway - the upshot is that I now see London as an endlessly fascinating place - a confluential congregation of the people of the world, old and new, containing some of the best as well as the worst examples of humanity. And as such, if I had to choose one place to spend the rest of my life, it would probably be there. It feels like my home base.
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The point, or one of them, that I'm trying to make is that having spent a great part of my life running away, one way or another, I'm starting to feel like I'm coming home. Whereas I was once mostly interested in the far-flung, exotic, and peripheral, I am now more concerned with the core: our common humanity.
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I am now reminded of a description of a haiku I heard the other day - something along the lines of a beautifully simple poem being like a star, which is a window opening onto the light of the universe beyond.
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Paintings by Atkinson Grimshaw and Turner; photos of the Tate Modern, and Borg winning his 5th straight Wimbledon singles title in 1980. Installation: one of Louise Bourgeois' I do, I undo, I redo towers at the opening of the Tate Modern, 2001 (?), when she was well into her 80s.
