Forever to be a tourist
Malvern is the land modernity forgot. England in her unassuming beauty.
Malvern is the land modernity forgot. Her priory is pristine, and the stonework was being detailed and repaired during my short stay. This is what first caught my eye: how in these parts, the work of yesterday's mason was not left to ruin, or abandoned to rust. Rather it is nurtured, like a centuries old infant, rocked and cradled by a mother born centuries later.
My own mother lives here. She was raised on the footsteps of the Malvern Hills, and returned home some forty years later, having lived in the South East for long enough to never desire such a life again. I'm still there, scornfully plotting my eventual escape. Perhaps when I am married, with children on the way. I'd rather raise them here.
The streets are clean, the people friendly, the greenery common and the views sublime. I'm up in the hills, and my calves ache from walking the steep inclines. My smoker's lungs wheeze and whimper from the exertion. And yet I am not bothered, not in the slightest. For I feel truly at home. It's as if I have woken from a long sleep, and the true particulars of my youth - that is the solemn knowledge that it all took place in the wrong time and the wrong place - had all been but a bad dream. If ancestral memory is to be believed, and the memories of my forebears are as good as my own; then I have returned home. The voyage is over; cyclops slain, syren bested, lotus refused, and Odysseus walks, once more, on Ithaca sands.
In a more grounded sense, this is England in its truest, most lasting form. The immortal architecture, cared for, diligently, by an army of polite, well-spoken guardians. It is the butcher shop, the parish church, the oak tree, and the untouched hills. It is the well-wishing of strangers, the conversations of home- both new and old. It is the bookshop with rare Waugh collections, and the diaries of Elgar. It is the crisp, spring water, that oozes from wells dotted throughout. It is the safety, the trust, the familiarity. It is the cenotaph, the obelisk, the abbey, and the river. England is I and I am England. And in this union, neither of us shall ever truly die; England in her unassuming beauty, and myself in what I hope shall be words that live on.
Soon, I shall return home. Home to grim stories in the local news, panic attacks on public transport, to looking over my shoulders and locking my front door twice. Home to drunken brawls witnessed from afar, and grey, dull urbanity. To Primark, McDonalds, and the still-empty Topshop. Home to a nine-to-five job, that brings me no joy, and plenty of the opposite. It is in these little escapes that I see the world beyond what I have come to know as normal, though it is anything but. I see this world, and I know that it is within my grasp. I share an island with this world, my mother lives here and I shall always have a bed to sleep in. And yet, it never feels further away than when I am in its midst. For the pull of home is far too great. I have become that which I fought, so bitterly, to never be. Alas, I fear I am trapped; trapped in the cycle of wake up, go to work, go home, go to bed. wake up, go to work, go home, go to bed. wake up, go to work, go home, go to bed. wake up, go to work, go home, go to bed. Die.
Perhaps my creative endeavours shall save me. Perhaps I will become a successful writer; a novelist, poet, dramatist, all that I have ever wished to be. Perhaps one day, long after I'm gone, I'll be studied in schools, and become the mortal enemy of schoolboys all across the land. Perhaps not. Perhaps I am simply doomed to forever be a tourist.
