Two years ago, I started my UK adventure in the small town of Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk. It’s the sort of middle of the field town where public transportation consists of trains one every hour to larger centres like Ipswich, and otherwise, you really need a car.
I managed well enough though, still getting used to not only teaching, but teaching in the UK. I started taking day trips to nearby areas as I grew more confident with travelling out of my comfort zone. Both in a literal and figurative sense.
One Monday, the Assistant Head of the English Department asked me what I’ve been doing during my non-school time. I told him I had been up to Great Yarmouth that weekend.
I received a grimace and a sound of disgust.
“That place is a horrible beach town. If you want a beach come to Norwich. Or even Lowestoft is better!”
I shrugged, trying to play off my faux-pas, “well it was last minute and the closest beach I came up with.”
That was where the conversation ended.
Visiting Mundanity
After then I started questioning the “wise” use of my “time” in the UK. After all, I had gone there to experience England and see Europe. By that point I had seen the regular English towns, between Cambridge and London. The stuff locals would consider about the level of Kelowna or here in British Columbia. In short, yes there are nice bits but nothing that stands out as different from much else.
A street in Great Yarmouth
Just a pub in Great Yarmouth
Or at least, that’s if you’re a local. If all the castles, the moors, the seascapes, the brick building materials are just part of your backyard. All you have then is a backyard.
Did My Life Change in Bury St Edmunds?
Well, the same goes when you move somewhere else to live. Yes, it is somewhere else. Yes, it is new and exciting and different. Yes, I walked in a state of awe. Yes, I snapped photos of silly things like bread, chocolate and train platforms.
But then I went back to living. Which meant numerous trips to the grocery store because things never last as long as I hoped and I had little space. It also meant work and the eight hours plus per day spent doing whatever comes in that package.
Like ridiculous meetings when people argue silly things and others check the clock. Never wanting to get out of bed in the morning. Then on the weekends when time was mine, I’d plan for “worth it” things or, unable to sleep, be out of bed and joining retirees at the market.
No matter where you go in the world, eventually, all you have is a backyard.
Storytelling Makes Everything Worth It
So I found an audience through which to blab about the wonders and I still blab about them. Thank you. But this storytelling allows you to noticed rows of quaint garages down that back alley. All painted varying shades of primary colours. Or the nonsense names of pubs like The Barking Smack, in Great Yarmouth. Even The Nutshell, which is Suffolk’s tiniest pub. It can only fit a maximum six people and resides in Bury St Edmunds, isn’t half as odd.
After two years abroad, castles and stones circles, ruins and wondrous nature all turned rather mundane. Travel was life. The key is appreciating it. Loving it. Since moving back to Canada, I am far more aware of the gorgeous country I live in. The gorgeous city and the wonderful people. I am fortunate and I only realised this by going away for a time. That, my friends is far more valuable than seeing all the wonders of the world.
An old favourite author of mine, known for retelling faerie tales and myths, once said this in a novel of hers:
“Home is people. Not a place. If you go back there after the people are gone, then all you can see is what is not there anymore.”
-Robin Hobb, Fool’s Fate
Home can be anywhere we want it to be. Home is where we feel safe. I used to get anxious at the end of a day’s travel as the train rumbled closer and closer. Anxious to be back in the warmth wafting from the radiator’s heat by the arched windows. Happy to see my landlady’s excitable dog, Bruno come panting up to me or Sophie, the quiet cat, who wanted pets at 6am as I trundled downstairs to grab breakfast. Then I’d dart out the door, coat half on and direct a quick “good morning” to another tenant. It’s a place where I’d get a text inviting me downstairs to the landlady’s rooms where the sunlight shone brighter.
Home is finding a postcard from a relative on the floor of the hallway. Home is eating almost all the 300 gram jar of peanut butter over the space of four days. It tastes of that home an ocean and country away. Home is sitting at the seaside on a sand dune and remembering every beach visited on every summer holiday. Except those beaches had driftwood.
Home is the smile that cracks a tired face at the permanent decoration of the ICT classroom door to look like the TARDIS door.
Home is made of mundane things and each varies from person to person.
What are your ideas of home?
They probably change day by day and year by year. Mostly.
I wanted to travel to experience life. I experienced it then and I experience it now. After all, life is just a series of mundane events which occasionally happen in peculiar orders. Though mostly they occur in clock tick tidiness . That means you don’t really want Monday to come because your Sunday dribbled its entire litre down the drain without you realising it because each moment which built it came in the packaged form of something small and expected.
Enjoying the mundane things of living.
Moony.
