This United Kingdom
Kat's observation: everything - but *everything* - is plastic wrapped. In manageably-sized portions. Everything is a product, and everything seems glossy and new. Seeing an old-looking car is an exciting event.
Susan's observation: it's really hard to buy clothing that feels like it has any substance to it. Everything seems to be along the glitzy-but-flimsy lines. Even in winter, you're just supposed to slip on a few layers of polyester then bundle up in a huge coat.
Meg's observation: this is all most peculiarly incongruous with the rough-hewn beauty of the thousands upon thousands of OLD (by NZ standards) houses in which everyone seems to live.
Kat: there's something very pleasing about the irregular lines of the sagging tiled rooves and bizarrely-curving cobbled streets. Even the mass-produced state housing in London looks more earthy than at home. There aren't the great bland slabs of uniform colour. 'Praise God for dappled things.'
Meg: there's something very pleasing about the fact that each town has its own colour pallette, because they were all built from local materials. But on the top of that is slapped this uniform plastic fairyland life that everyone's leading. As a foreigner, you wonder if the locals still notice the beauty of their homes. Maybe they do. Hard to tell.
Susan: it always seems like, wherever you turn, wherever you might want to go, there's someone else - or two people, or five - already there. It's not exactly that it feels crowded, like being in a constant crowd. But walking down the street, reaching for something on a supermarket shelf, getting on a bus, there's always somebody in the way.
Meg: driving across the country it's the same. Everywhere you look, there's a village. You've just come out of one and you're already coming into the next. There's billboards or houses or buses obscuring every view.
Susan: and it's the same on the roads themselves. The roads are too small for the cars, or the cars are too big for the roads, or both, because they were never built to be used this way, and there's never room for anybody. As for the buses, they are just madness.
Kat: and, unavoidably, one has to get used to the fact that one is part of all this, and is in the way for someone else. There is no way to be here without being part of this. I guess everyone here knows it. That if ever they catch themselves thinking that anyone else is in the way, or should never have come to this country, or that everyone's having too many babies and only looking out for themselves... well, there can be very few people who would be exempt from applying the same thing to themselves.
Susan: everyone here is obsessed with car insurance, and convinced that they're getting ripped off, and that somewhere round the corner there's a better deal. They don't know they're obsessed, but everyone is.
Kat: the 'locals' are, as yet, largely a mystery. From what we can tell at a glance, old people are *exactly* the same as they are at home. Are there global fashion magazines for old people? Teenagers and tarty clubbing types are much the same only more so. Yuppies ditto. Middle aged people... hm... well I overheard a conversation in a bank that included the sentence "well cauliflower with cheese sauce is very interesting". But I'm sure that lady doesn't speak for everyone. Susan has some wonderfully British and wonderfully fun middle aged friends.
Susan: speaking of overheard conversation fragments that make the mind boggle, try this one: "...and, seventhly..."
Kat: BUT there's this wonderful-yet-maddening looming sense that something terribly exciting is happening somewhere, in places I don't know how to get to, among people I'd like to meet but have no idea how. And since I'm only in London for another week, it seems unlikely that I shall.
It is less frustrating being on farms, because you can get absorbed in that lifestyle, and not feel like you're on the fringe of things. We were living much better, in the countryside. There are fewer temptations at hand there to distract us from our goals, and I have come to enjoy the way in which, when there's so little to do of an evening, it's so much easier to actually get on with the things one intended to do - like read the books I brought, knit, learn to spin, plan, and enjoy one another's company. Meg and I seem to get on much better in the country than in town, I think. I guess because we want to do the same kinds of things when we're there, and when we're in the city our differences come out.
* * *
In short, the north is calling to us. To me and Meg at least, that is. Open spaces. Real people. Real earth. Real weather.
Susan's observation: it's really hard to buy clothing that feels like it has any substance to it. Everything seems to be along the glitzy-but-flimsy lines. Even in winter, you're just supposed to slip on a few layers of polyester then bundle up in a huge coat.
Meg's observation: this is all most peculiarly incongruous with the rough-hewn beauty of the thousands upon thousands of OLD (by NZ standards) houses in which everyone seems to live.
Kat: there's something very pleasing about the irregular lines of the sagging tiled rooves and bizarrely-curving cobbled streets. Even the mass-produced state housing in London looks more earthy than at home. There aren't the great bland slabs of uniform colour. 'Praise God for dappled things.'
Meg: there's something very pleasing about the fact that each town has its own colour pallette, because they were all built from local materials. But on the top of that is slapped this uniform plastic fairyland life that everyone's leading. As a foreigner, you wonder if the locals still notice the beauty of their homes. Maybe they do. Hard to tell.
Susan: it always seems like, wherever you turn, wherever you might want to go, there's someone else - or two people, or five - already there. It's not exactly that it feels crowded, like being in a constant crowd. But walking down the street, reaching for something on a supermarket shelf, getting on a bus, there's always somebody in the way.
Meg: driving across the country it's the same. Everywhere you look, there's a village. You've just come out of one and you're already coming into the next. There's billboards or houses or buses obscuring every view.
Susan: and it's the same on the roads themselves. The roads are too small for the cars, or the cars are too big for the roads, or both, because they were never built to be used this way, and there's never room for anybody. As for the buses, they are just madness.
Kat: and, unavoidably, one has to get used to the fact that one is part of all this, and is in the way for someone else. There is no way to be here without being part of this. I guess everyone here knows it. That if ever they catch themselves thinking that anyone else is in the way, or should never have come to this country, or that everyone's having too many babies and only looking out for themselves... well, there can be very few people who would be exempt from applying the same thing to themselves.
Susan: everyone here is obsessed with car insurance, and convinced that they're getting ripped off, and that somewhere round the corner there's a better deal. They don't know they're obsessed, but everyone is.
Kat: the 'locals' are, as yet, largely a mystery. From what we can tell at a glance, old people are *exactly* the same as they are at home. Are there global fashion magazines for old people? Teenagers and tarty clubbing types are much the same only more so. Yuppies ditto. Middle aged people... hm... well I overheard a conversation in a bank that included the sentence "well cauliflower with cheese sauce is very interesting". But I'm sure that lady doesn't speak for everyone. Susan has some wonderfully British and wonderfully fun middle aged friends.
Susan: speaking of overheard conversation fragments that make the mind boggle, try this one: "...and, seventhly..."
Kat: BUT there's this wonderful-yet-maddening looming sense that something terribly exciting is happening somewhere, in places I don't know how to get to, among people I'd like to meet but have no idea how. And since I'm only in London for another week, it seems unlikely that I shall.
It is less frustrating being on farms, because you can get absorbed in that lifestyle, and not feel like you're on the fringe of things. We were living much better, in the countryside. There are fewer temptations at hand there to distract us from our goals, and I have come to enjoy the way in which, when there's so little to do of an evening, it's so much easier to actually get on with the things one intended to do - like read the books I brought, knit, learn to spin, plan, and enjoy one another's company. Meg and I seem to get on much better in the country than in town, I think. I guess because we want to do the same kinds of things when we're there, and when we're in the city our differences come out.
* * *
In short, the north is calling to us. To me and Meg at least, that is. Open spaces. Real people. Real earth. Real weather.
posted by Kat | 8/01/2009 07:06:00 am
1 Comments:
Oh, and by 'the north' I of course mean Scotland and Scandinavia. Not the north of England. Yuck.
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