Summer is here and at times the thunder is alarming. I pass the jubilee in a bewildered haze. I buy chocolate lollipops from Marks and Spencer, covered in flag style tinfoil and I wonder where I come from. When I was six or seven at school, we where shown a film about the Alps and I felt a painful surge of longing for this mountainous place. I always wanted to come from somewhere else and was delighted in later life, to find an Irish Grandaddy in amongst the ruins of a lost family.
I am not patriotic, but I have started to appreciate some things about the UK. After living in a small village in the Czech Republic for three years, I miss the small displays of eccentricity I grew used to in my homeland. Back where I used to live, on any given day you might see a man doing a drunken breakdance or a very manly looking man dressed as a lady. I laughed inside at the time. Now, faced by an overwhelming force of conformity, these public displays of oddness seem less like madness and a more akin to a wonderful display of freedom.
It is evident that the UK has benefited a lot from the different kinds of people that live there. Nowadays, itseems that a man can dress in ladies clothes on a weekday and not get seven shades of hell kicked out of him. Who says they are women's clothes anyway? Looking back, I have a new respect for people like this, for not giving a flying foo foo what anyone else thinks.
The need to conform here seems greater than that in the UK. In a village of tracksuits, it is not difficult to stand out. In a funny way, in a very conventional village where many people like to think that rules on 'what you should do' are fixed, I represent a world of unconformity, of disorder, where social norms and rules are unclear. In my world, men cook, marriage is not a necessity, people of other races are not to be feared, difference is something to be welcomed, not threatened by.
The window pane that is my life is sometimes clouded and smeared by rigid social expectations and the hostility of negative people. Sometimes it is difficult to see clearly. It is possible to miss the whole picture.
I see a woman in the supermarket. There is something shiny about her and the confident way she twirls her child around and smiles with happiness and love. She smiles at me and I smile back and somehow I remember that not everybody is angry at what they don't have. It is a happy moment, something passes between us. It is an understanding, a shared acknowledgement that life is good, that love is real. There is an openness about her and a joy in life, a lack of suspicion and perhaps just a simple desire to smile at others and have them smile back.
The lady at the counter for the cinema is smiley and friendly and I wonder if something about my appearance on a particular day makes people respond to me in a positive way. Or perhaps it is just the simple alchemy of a day that goes well.
The film starts with a humanesque form spilling droplets of his DNA onto a landscape that resembles earth. Throughout the film I imagine myself lost on another planet, unable to get home.
Later, I am sitting in the garden of my boyfriend's Uncle. The sun is shining and I look up at the grapes growing over my head and in this moment there is nowehere I would rather be. Sometimes I feel a peculiar jolt in my stomach, as if I am on a train that has set off, but suddenly lurches back to the staion, as if something is terribly wrong. I sometimes feel that I took the wrong path completely.
Yet on this day, I know that the negative people are wrong, that the hostile people that churlishly mutter that I don't speak enough of their language, that this is 'their¨country, are mistaken. Yes, I am still slowly learnign the language here, but that is really not what matters to me. I know now that they are wrong. The parameters of what a home is are far wider than they will ever imagine and this is my home now as much as theirs.
So as I sit, under the grapes, with kind and caring relatives around me, I realise that this is a happy ending. This is home for now and there are good people here. People have the power to make you feel truly dreadful about yourself, if you let them. They also have the power to make you feel good.
