I stared to write this in the car, in traffic, stopped on the autoroute in England. With planes are passing above us, through the car roof we could see them. This must’ve meant we were close to Heathrow and therefore London, which explained why we were dead stopped on the autoroute. Crossing back over brought back a lot of memories. We arrived at the port at Dover. I thought it would be fun to take the ferry when actually it was the worst idea. It ended up being a stormy day and the waves were horrendous. Some poor soul fell over while walking on the boat, and everyone stared and stared at him. My motion sickness was triggered and I felt it for days. After docking, we then passed through Dover, a sad little seaside town with its Victorian and Georgian Facades tell that tell it was once more than an ugly port town, dirty and decimated by the eight lanes of highway. There are still nicer cars in front of one forlorn address which makes me wonder what kind of shady, profitable business is done there, just over the border control.

Passing through I remember how I would feel when visiting any new place in London, or any village outside of the city, or anywhere really. As a complete outsider, even the roads are different with the cars on the other side, I would wonder what it would be like to live there, or more so what it was like to to be from there, to grow up there, and to perhaps never leave there. What was it like to be a part of the fabric of a place, not simply transient? I seemed to always gravitate towards places that are transient, or that at least that welcome transients, like me. When I say like me, I mean the nice kind of immigrant, there to be part of something new, to take advantage of the cheap-er rents, the new-er culture. The gentrifiers – to make genteel. To make nice more sanitised, to improve. I say this with my tongue in my cheek, with an awareness that I have probably more than once been part of the pusher-outers… infringing on the margins of cultures that have fought, at times really fought, and with tooth and nail to create a culture, a place of their own, only to be let down by the governments, the agencies to which they pay their taxes, if not all then at least some, enough, to expect basic series and protections, aid, and assistance or at the very least, assurance that they will have basic rights ands stabilities protected. These communities, speaking very generally here, are not built from the outside in, no, as most communities are, they are built by the people and businesses that have been there, came before in numbers, settled or resettled, or born from generations of folks that have been there for work, for family, for life. My generation, and only a few before, we have come in waves to discover ourselves, in search of a sense of belonging, we have encroached on those communities that have earned their place, through either hard work or inheritance. Feeling part of a living system, if only through patronisation, of shops, cafes, dry cleaners. Cheap-er rents than what we might expect to pay ifs we stayed with the folks that raised us and for what, strip malls and  franchises? Outposts of culture instead of living systems of community built by those that were originally outsiders and unwelcome. 

Passing through Dover I think of this occupation of mine, this hobby of mine that would inevitably occupy my mind on every double decker bus ride through London neighbourhoods that I would never know, never understand, never belong in. I would think of all of the villagers , their residents that had been there for a long time, perhaps being pushed out by others like me who had arrived a few years before me to take up spaces, new places, some necessary, some not, that would make the rents just a bit higher and attract those that could afford to live their own dreams out, the early adapters, or the ones after that, the hipsters. 

I’ve been always looking for a sense of belonging, it seems.