Weekend in the Homeland, or, Hitsville UK

(I originally wrote this on Sunday, April 11, 2010 at 10:07 p.m.)

I’m on a train between London and Paris so this post will not be in realtime. I’m listening to “Johnny Appleseed” by Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros, and I already miss England. My Eurostar ticket was my birthday present from my parents, and it’s probably the best birthday present I have ever received. I arrived Friday night in London, found a bus to Oxford (I actually miss long bus rides!), and met up with one of my friends from Smith who’s doing a master’s there. We found dinner (quesadillas!) in a pub, and then on Saturday we walked all over Oxford (There are tiny sculptures of baby dragons! And rowboats on the Isis, which is part of the Thames! There is a mound no one is allowed to climb on! There is a college called Jesus! There is a college called Magdalen, but it’s pronounced Maudlin! I thought that was pretty funny…) then spent very little money on a lot of clothing at Primark, which is like Forever 21 with H&M styling and Wal-Mart prices. And it’s British. In other words, the holy grail for those of us who make our living (ha) teaching English to French kids, or are working on postgraduate degrees in very expensive England but still like clothing. I finally got a blazer so I can look like every other girl in Paris, and a purse for 3 pounds. I am not kidding. It was kind of a madhouse, but it was worth it.

We capped off the day with a walk into North Oxford and half-pints at a pub in a meadow that had everything in common with the site of Bilbo Baggins’s eleventy-first birthday except for fireworks and actual hobbits. We sat outside and watched cows bob across the field, surrounded by babies tugging prayer flags and chasing each other with toy guns while their parents drank some pints and a hen party (bachelorette party) raged in the background. The women in attendance wore fuzzy pink antennae. It was a good look. A bluegrass band played CCR covers. “Bad Moon Rising” never sounded so good. 

We then made our way to a new pub for half pints of cider and veggie burgers stacked with pickles and curry mayo with baskets of fries. We sat under walls decorated with records by the Smiths and the Sex Pistols and They Might Be Giants beside armchairs, wood furniture, and bookshelves and talked about the Clash and life after Smith and that particularly scary prospect that it is the future. Especially for me, MFA school reject. But things are looking okay, actually. I have my job at 826 and a place to live in Seattle and friends I am really excited to see pretty soon actually. I’m going to spend a year writing, working, earning and saving money, and figuring things out. I’m actually excited for it. And I might reapply to schools in the fall if that’s what I want to do. We’ll see. I like the openness of it all. For once, I feel like I’m not on anyone else’s clearly-defined track to such nebulous concepts as fulfillment and success. And that feels kinda nice. Okay, when I’m honest with myself, a lot nice.

So back to Oxford. We ended up eating Ben & Jerry’s (MY FELLOW COUNTRYMEN HOW I HAVE MISSED THEE) Phish Food and watching “Taking Woodstock,” which featured upstate New York heavily, which is none too far from the old alma mater, aka the piece of my heart I left in Massachusetts. Back at the Jesus College house, I listened to “Sandinista!” and read Kavalier & Clay as the sounds of the university and locals out at pubs rustled in through the half-open window.

It was a good day.

Sunday was London. After picking up coffee at an honest to God real coffee shop (France! Look what England can do! You can do it too!) and Marks and Spencer sandwiches, we hopped back on the Oxford Tube, had a picnic in Hyde Park (full of daffodils!), saw Westminster Abbey from the outside, rifled through the goods on display at an outdoor book market (I am not kidding—I found a volume of Alan Bennett’s diaries and was filled with giddy glee and nostalgia for my seminar on him that I took in my last year at Smith.), and then went to the Tate Modern, where I saw a collection of interesting photos taken by Bruce Davidson in the New York subway. It was interesting because I often think of how cool it would be to photograph people on the Paris Metro. It’s such a strangely public, somewhat threatening everyday place where everyone is thrown together out of what is essentially necessity. So cool to see it documented in his photographs. The photos were the highlight. Seeing Andy Warhol stuff for real was cool too. They also had some Pierre Bonnard paintings, which I love as well. It was a quick visit, but we did a lot and we had a lot of fun.

And I was really struck by how quickly at home I felt in England. No language barrier, people are friendly, and there are just a lot of small things about it that I am completely enchanted by. For example, almost obsessively detailed signage (example: Please put your dogs on leashes in this area, because otherwise there is a chance they may disturb the waterfowl, which include pelicans—only a little exaggerated, en fait). It was such a comfortable place. Different enough to feel like a different country, similar enough to feel right. There’s a lot of square-ish architecture which reminded me of Smith, real coffeeshops, video stores, highways that look like the ones at home, cheap lip balm at Boots (does not exist in Paris)…and then there are the bookstores, the Oxford University colleges, the history, the literature. I mean, it should be no surprise that I love England. I was an English major. My favorite authors are British. English literature has been known to make me cry/shiver/salivate. I like things like clever wordplay and absurdly detailed signs. I actually laugh at these things. I love Virginia Woolf and Alan Bennett and I’ve been a fan of Jane Austen since I was fourteen. The Clash is my favorite band. So of course I like England. There’s also that whole thing where it’s the homeland.

Still, I wasn’t really expecting to get so excited by just seeing things like the Victoria line to Brixton—“Brixton! Like ‘The Guns of Brixton’! I need to take a picture! On a subway platform!”

This is probably what I get for waiting until the age of 22 to go to England.

I even liked the tube. It’s way cleaner and smaller than the metro. So, after, visiting a whole slew of European countries, I think Germany and England are the winners. And England is my favorite. I can’t wait to go back. I don’t want to go back to work tomorrow, but it’s the beginning of my last week of work, and then just a little while before I come back to the US. With a trip to Normandy with my parents and maybe a chance to see one of my cousins and do Paris things like see movies and hang out with my friends before heading home.

But I don’t want to be leaving England. Well, they do have an MFA in creative writing at Oxford. And I have a couple more Clash songs to get through. So I think I’ll just bask in my good weekend for a little while.

My friend said something funny to me while we were at the pub the first night I was there. After I’d talked to her a little bit about living in Senegal vs. living in Paris. Something to the effect of, “When you have kids someday, they’re going to think you’re really cool.”

And I don’t know about the kids part. Because I’m only almost 23 (Friday) and I don’t always love the kids I work with. But I like the idea of someday showing some hypothetical children my passport from the past couple of years, with all of its stamps and visas, and saying, “That was when I lived in Senegal and Paris. This is what it’s all about. Collecting stamps on your passport. Where do you want to go?”

My friend Michelle has this wonderful theory that the meaning of life is nothing more than puppies and babies, and sometimes I think she’s onto something. But I would adjust it a little bit. I would add in passport stamps. Because I think that they’re pretty wonderful too. My passport is my biography. My passport stamps are evidence of everywhere I’ve been. My visas are evidence of the places I’ve lived, the times I’ve changed my address and had to survive in a different language, the times I’ve met people who have given me so much that I know that returning it in kind is impossible. My Senegal visa reminds me of being twenty and learning abruptly how to live in the present moment. It reminds me of dust and heat and one dollar rice and fish and eating dinner every night with my host mom and sister with the door open and the Spanish telenovelas on. My France visa reminds me of coming to Paris this year with a set of expectations and having to completely remake them. But mostly, my passport stamps remind me of where I come from, what I’ve made it through, what’s been hard and what’s been fucking transcendent. I know the next stamp is coming from the US border patrol when I go through customs to go home, and after that, the ever-present question returns. Where’s the next one gonna come from? Where do you want to go?

I’m still deciding.