Look who's Alone Now

I’ve had the novelty of returning home to familiar places, my lovely family and my friends. I’ve also had the novelty of starting work again in the UK for a sporting charitable trust full of distant memories, past youth and old friends. And now? Now the novelties are wearing off. I feel that it is just me and me and me in this big, miserable, exciting, scary, beautiful, ugly, ambivalent, make of it what you will world. My family of course, have been a great support in all ways and so have a few, select number of friends. But I feel the rest have let me down; so caught up in their own lives, they enjoy the novelty of looking at me after three years, listening to the odd accent I’ve picked up and generally comparing themselves to me or vice versa which I don’t feel is the most productive way to catch up with old friends. Some are too busy for me. Some are too cool for me. So they think! Some have just drifted away as people do. Some just don’t care. Most cannot fathom my life in recent years, most cannot understand the adjustment period I’m having in this country and most therefore don’t know what to say to me which makes for either stilted conversations or silence on their part. And then there’s the people I met on my travels. People who I really connected with for that short period in the same time and place; people who I bared my soul to, people who bared their soul to me and then on occasions, these self same people who turn their back. So all I can say to my old friends, my new friends and all the others inbetween on my email list; where are you now?

Novelties

Spending time with my family, being back in my childhood home, walking down the high road, catching up with friends, people understanding English humour without any explanation needed, going to the pub, going to a wine/cocktail bar, eating a curry, eating pretty much any choice of cuisine from anywhere in the world I choose, television, hi-fi’s, easy and more or less free internet access, shopping in the supermarket (slightly overwhelmed with the choice!), not living out of a bag, living in a house, leaving my toothbrush and shower stuff in the bathroom without fear of it being nicked, going for a drink by the river, riding on the tube, chip and pin payments, choice and number of shops to shop in, clothes everywhere(!), Earl Grey tea, home cooked roast dinners, volume of people and traffic, not using a padlock to secure my belongings, a bath, my bed and pillow, not being intimate with airports, speaking English rather than pidgin-English and lots of sign language, "wrong leaves on the line", working like eveyone else, wearing shoes and lots more... anything normal inEngland is a rediscovered new for me!

The Gulf

And no I don’t mean the geographical Gulf, I mean the gulf that three years abroad can create between you and your friends. For some reason I didn’t think it would be as big as it is But it is. So now I have to deal with it. A price to pay perhaps?