So yesterday, I took the train from Glasgow to Oban, up the West Highland line. I make this journey probably three or more times a year, and it really is one of the most stunning little journeys you can take - setting out from dreich and dingy Glasgow for three hours of snaking through mountains and along lochsides with perilous drops to the sides of the rails.
And it’s not a glamourous train - it’s a rather pedestrian diesel sprinter, with four carriages when it sets out from Glasgow, dividing in two at Crianlarich with the front half heading off to Tyndrum Lower, Loch Awe and onward to Oban, and the rear portion heading off across Rannoch Moor towards Fort William and Mallaig.
Every time I take that train, I want to get off - at Arrocher and Tarbert, Crianlarich, somewhere in the middle of nowhere, and just wander off into the wilderness with my camera. But I don’t, because I’m always rushing to catch a ferry at the other end of the line. One day, though, maybe.
On the train, you can start to guess where people are headed. You can spot those who are stopping in Oban, and those who will be heading over to Mull and the islands. You start to guess who’ll be rushing with you to the ferry from the station, and who’ll be boarding the island bus on the other side. Who’s an islander, and who’s a visitor? Who belongs?
Belonging is a funny thing, and whenever I come up this way I’m reminded of it.
I don’t belong here, on Mull, though my mum lives here and has done for years. I’ve lived here myself, and worked several summer seasons on Mull and Iona, back in student days. I’ve been coming up twice a year or more for nearly 15 years. I recognise faces, and places, and customs and the patterns of weather. I’m comfortable here, and I even drive like a local, haring down single-track roads strewn with potholes, mud and sheep.
I’ve spent more time here than many of the more recent incomers, but I’m not a local, and they’ll never quite let me forget that. I think that’s got more to do with them asserting their sense of community identity than specifically trying to exclude anyone, to be honest, but it still smarts a bit.
But I’m not from here. I don’t belong here.
In Gaelic, the way to say you’re from somewhere carries a sense of belonging to a place - it’s more than just where you live, but it’s more than that.
The thing is, I’m not really from anywhere. I don’t really belong anywhere, specific.
I was born in Nigeria, of Geordie and Lancashire lineage, and grew up in central west London. Since 16, I’ve studied and lived in a bunch of places for long stints - Canada, Edinburgh, Liverpool, Aberdeen, Spain, Bolivia, Manchester, Derbyshire - and since 1998, I’ve been based in London again. But my family have kept on moving, too - Finchley, Luton, Harpenden, Birmingham, Shropshire, Derbyshire, Iona, the West Bank, Roehampton, Mull (and that’s just my parents) - so that I haven’t had a permanent home (you know, the family homestead, where all my stuff lives) since I was about 16 and left to live in Canada. I’m a product of all over the place, really. I belong wherever I am.
Where are you from? Where do you belong?
I consider Wallingford, Oxon as ‘where I’m from’; despite not being born there, nor moving there until I was 3, it holds my earliest memories. Having said that, I’ve moved all over the UK and have managed to make each new place feel like home and am even becoming quite fond of where my mum lives on the Kintyre peninsula.
Speaking of which, when you have the time to do it, I’d thoroughly recommend hiring a car in Glasgow and making the trip to Oban that way if you haven’t already. Driving past Loch Lomond in the very early morning, arriving at Rest and Be Thankful just in time for first light and a bacon butty from the chuck wagon is amazing.
I suppose, ultimately, I’m from a small town called Ilminster, in Somerset. That’s where I lived for the first eighteen years of my life. The thing is, however, that in the (almost) eighteen years since then I have moved from east London to Hull to east London again, to north London, to Hemel Hempstead, a year or so in Bristol, then to west London and finally south-west London. Yet I don’t feel like I’m from London either, and I haven’t so much as set foot in Somerset since I left it.
I end up calling my four walls and roof ‘home’, but outside those borders I have always felt a little … rootless.
born in boston, ma (usa), raised in caracas, venezuela. studied in milano, worked and lived around europe for 4-5 years, went back to caracas to feel it as a foreign city, moving to london in the coming days.
i have this very new weird but growing idea that belonging has to do or can be represented as being able to have a dialogue, a conversation with the place, and some intimate feeling of comradery with the surroundings. like when you can go back to a place and say “hi [place]” in a very friendly, intimate way to it and feel welcomed back. or like in movies, when you can walk on a place and have a voice over with your thoughts not about that place, but told to that place as in a conversation, then that’s a sign of, if not belonging, of being accepted, having something settled, or just being a part of it. (crazy ideas they hunt me, this might be just one of them).
used to travel a lot (work and pleasure) and for a while the place that felt more like home, that known place where everything is where it is supposed to be, was the tempo class seat on an air france plane.
Well, I was born in Rustington - and I keep meeting other people who were born in the same maternity unit as me, which I shouldn’t find as surprising as I do.
I was brought up in Yapton. Best forgotten. Then moved to Barnham, where my parents still live. It is a place that I know very well, though it isn’t home. Then I lived in Chichester, which still has a home feeling although I find it has changed a little more each time I go back and I no longer bump into someone I know every time I walk along East Street (just every other time).
Now I live in High Hurstwood. But my house is more like home than the village itself, much as I like it. I don’t see us staying here for long, maybe another couple of years.
I *feel* at home in Maastricht. In spite of only having been a few times, it fits like a glove. We’re seriously looking at property there and that may be the next move. But, then again, it may not - who knows?
Home is so much about the people around you. and if you don’t get out much, that might just be your family or the cat. I feel that roots are over-rated, but I’m still close to mine. I have a friend, born in Cambodia, evacuated as a boat perosn, who lived in Chichester, then London and then Rouen. In the UK, he is a foreigner, viewed by many as a threat. In France, he is in a minority that tends to keep itself to itself and he doesn’t feel comfortable or integrated with the wider community. Back “home”, in Cambodia, he is viewed as a westerner, different - he speaks strangely, dresses differently, acts oddly, has money (although he is very poor by European standards). He tells me that he has no home.
Nice post. I was born in Cheshire of parents from Liverpool and Portsmouth who lived in New Zealand and Singapore respectively for a deal of their lives.
I moved south within a year, then to Pennsylvania, then Nice, and moved from home to Surrey, then studied and worked in Manchester and New Orleans. I moved to London, and now live on the Berkshire/Buckinghamshire border though I work in London.
I don’t consider myself a Londoner for a minute, and though I visit the places I have lived fairly often, I’m not one of the local and with them the conversation always turns to the other places I have lived rather than a common background.
So I feel the same, like I’m from no particular place rather than several.
I could have wrote this post.
I am a military brat. I was born in Landstuhl Germany, but lived there for less than a year. I’ve lived all over the US–Boston and Westfield, Massachusettes (opposite ends of the state), Ramstein, GR, Washington DC, Flagstaff, Arizona, San Antonio and Austin Texas, Albuquerque, New Mexico.
One the first days of University everyone asked where everyone’s from. I’d always say no where and everywhere. I have no hometown. Heck even my name feels alien and unfamiliar–which is why I use Birdy. My given name doesn’t feel like it’s really my name.
I would give my knitting needles for a sense of belonging.
Oooh, interesting post. I’m from Merseyside originally; lived there from 0 to just before my 11th birthday. From there we moved to Warrington, and my parents are still there, and a lot of my stuff that they really should just throw away now. I’ve moved around somewhat, but never strayed away from the transpennine express train line. Which is a shame, because it’s crap these days.
Where do I feel I belong? THe north east, where I live these days. It’s not home, even though I find myself picking up little bits of geordie speak and my football allegience switching from Liverpool to Newcastle. But it’s getting more and more that way.
My husband gets upset that I still call my parents’ house home. But it is! The flat I share with him is my main home, but I lived in the house my parents are in for 12 years. It’s still home. It’s funny that he’s only recently noticed me doing it though; I’ve always called it home. It makes for some confusion conversations along the lines of ‘I won’t be home next weekend cause I’m going home’.
It’s fun to confuse people :)
Great post, Meg. It seems to have struck several chords.
I was born in Wolverhampton of parents who were also from Wolverhampton (although my maternal grandfather is Irish). We moved to Dundee when I was 4, then to Aberdeen when I was 5 or 6.
I lived in Aberdeen until I was 29, when I moved to London.
I’m not Londoner. Although I spent most of my life in Aberdeen, my accent will never allow me to be fully accepted as “one of them”. My parents and sister still live there, but none of them in a house where I’ve lived.
Although I was born in Wolverhampton and have a few family members there or thereabouts, I hardly ever go there and certainly don’t feel at home when I do.
So yeah. Another nowhere girl, I think. Shit.
Maybe we should all get together in some sort of virtual land and call that home. Again, shit.
Great post, and a great railway line.
I was born and raised in Gloucestershire and spent much of my married life there with an imported Scot. The Scot and the nature of my work made me me seem like an incomer, and in some ways I was. I’d been born 10 miles away, after all.
Once, in the pub in the village, someone asked me where I was from.
“Oh” I said. “I’m not local”
So where are you from, they said.
“Not from here” I said.
But where?
“I was born the other side of Painswick and raised the other side of Cirencester”, I said. Bitch that I was at the time.
Now I am an incomer in another part of the country entirely, and I find bliss in the ignorance of not knowing the history and not minding the changes.
Interesting post.
Aphra.
I’m a Londoner. My first time living away from my folks was London, which covered most of my 20s which is where I became independent which is why I feel I am a Londoner.
Of course I am a South African Londoner of Jewish Lithuanian decent. Although born and bred in Johannesburg as were my folks so the Lithuanian angle is a bit of a stretch.
I do like being a Londoner, although it’s a transient city that everyone keeps leaving.
I’m from Manchester, with parents from Portland in Dorset. Moved to Stockport when I was 10, then off to Durham to university, then on to London (Hampstead, Islington, Bromley) before moving to Scotland, first commuting from Stirling to Glasgow, and now in Edinburgh. Same house now for nearly twenty years (save a four-month interval in Delhi). So going back to a lot of places feels like a homecoming, as I rediscover things I dimly remember. Portland has the strange quality that I’m related to some huge fraction of its population. Manchester is where I was born. Durham is where I was a student, and I love it to bits. But I feel very settled in Edinburgh.
Jamaica
Great writing from Meg.
Part of me thinks “it’s not where you’re from, it’s where you’re going”.
But on reflection I do think that belonging, as meaning some sense (or senses?) of origin is important, but it need not be limited to where you were born or grew up. This can give rise to good things - report on Newsnight yesterday that Opra Winfrey has paid £40m of her dosh on a school for girls in Africa.
Me- I was born in Brighton, but grew up in Salisbury. Completely unremarkable. But ancestors were east european jews who fled Russia and ended up in South Africa. Valuable to just occasionally ponder what their lives were like, and what they would think of mine.
i don’t belong anywhere. and nowhere belongs to me. my ties to anywhere are so brief and tenuous that i could never rightly claim to be of a place.
my lineage stems at various times in recent history from smugglers in Bristol, a Scottish clan near Kingussie, teachers in Brighton and a Norwegian great grandmother who dwarfed my great grandfather. my dad, like his dad before him, is a Geordie. my mum was born somewhere near a goldmine in India and lived in London, Wales, Cumbria, Tynemouth and probably a fair few other places i’ve missed.
i was born in Durham and after five weeks transferred to Yorkshire. my longest stint has been 10 years in Lancashire, from where i went to university in west London, plus a couple of stints in Italy (Turin and Milan). i lived in London for a good while, then back to Italy for a year and now i’m in Yorkshire again.
i can’t imagine settling anywhere, but sometimes i think it would do me good.
I live in Perth Australia. I don’t belong here but have lived in this city for most of my adult life. My parents are Italian and migrated to oz in the 50’s.
I have never felt at home here. I have a sense of connection to Italy when I go there for visits but at the same time it’s like I don’t belong there either. People come up to me and say ‘you speak Italian with a really strange accent where are you from?”
Its also a bit strange living in a country which has still failed to properly reconcile with the original inhabitants so to speak. So it always feels like you are living on someone else’s patch anyway.