A few days after graduating from my Austrian high school, I took plane to England and stayed there for most of the next twelve years. There’s much I owe to the country. My biggest debt is my entire tertiary education, paid by the British taxpayer.
Twelve years is plenty of time to get to know a country. Places have facts associated with them, but what you’ll remember in the long run is the feelings they evoke. For many who live there, England is not a nice place. I’d rather be working class anywhere else in Europe or in America. It’s not just that working class neighborhoods are ugly, it’s the general sense that no-one deserves better. I miss English pubs, but I don’t miss them being the only place to go to on a Friday night. I don’t miss the rain. I don’t miss having rocks thrown at me by teenagers while cycling through a particularly deprived neighborhood. And while England has some beautiful landscapes, there isn’t any wilderness.
Looking back, it took me some years to realize what England has going for it. At Cambridge, I got to know a more attractive version of the country. I got invited to summer parties on the lawn of some grand old house. Those events evoke another feeling altogether, and it’s the feeling of a bygone era.
The guests dress up. Someone will be wearing a white linen suit with an elegant straw hat. The long tables have dazzling white cloths on them, and on the table cloths are bowls full of strawberries and clotted cream. On one side of the lawn, there’s a string quartet. The older women and men sit in wicker chairs that have been arranged in the shade, and there’s at least one man in his sixties with an alarmingly red face who can’t take the combination of heat and Pimm’s.
I don’t only know what England feels like, but what it must’ve felt like in the past. The British Empire exported its garden parties, its architecture, and a certain way of behaving all around the world, and I’ve encountered it in places halfway round the world, like Kolkata.
I also have a sense of what the Austrian Empire must’ve felt like, but that’s a topic for another blog post.
Nehaveigur 