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A place for where you have a particular interest or passion that may seem remarkably dull to others, but remarkable to you.
Unsolidified plans
I'm thinking that maybe... just maybe... I'll make a trip to my homeland of England during this summer holiday. There's a few reasons for this
Homesick
As some may have read in one of my recent posts, I'm suddenly feeling a LOT of nostalgia for my home. But upon further introspection, it's not sudden at all. It's been creeping up on me for a long time. To my wife, it's obvious. To me, it was only crystal clear in the last few weeks when I started getting genuinely emotional towards unexpected things. But before then, there were certainly a plethora of signs.
I'm not homesick for a house home, as I don't have one. There's nowhere I can go to enjoy a big Christmas dinner around a big table with a big turkey, no fireplace by the TV where time stood still and everything seems to go right back to how things were when one was a child. I have none of that, it's all gone.
But I still feel something towards the land itself. Living in a megacity all these years - ever since adulthood, basically - it's impossible to get any access to any genuine nature, there's no connection to the human soul for maybe a thousand miles. Every park and 'forest' is 100% artificial and regulated. You will never find a mushroom growing at the bass of a tree, anywhere. That tells me a lot.
Suffice it to say, my soul feels like it's dying, and I don't even believe in souls.
There is a wonderful song created by Jean Sibelius, set to the melody of Finlandia (A finnish national song), with lyrics set by the poet Lloyd Stone. In short, it's a piece called 'This is my song (Finlandia)'.
It is a song that celebrates the patriotism of other nations and it just really hits the spot when it comes to my yearning for home. England isn't the prettiest or most majestic, but it's a gentle landscape and I was raised in it, so it has an inexplicable hold on me.
My country’s skies are bluer than the ocean,
and sunlight beams on cloverleaf and pine;
but other lands have sunlight too, and clover,
and skies are everywhere as blue as mine
It doesn't take much for my brain to do some gymnastics to replace Finnish key details like Pine with other English elements.
And although England is a depressing shithole in the towns, and although its countryside is among the most nature depleted lands on earth (fun fact), it still holds incredible, gentle, untouched beauty that can surprise people! I mean look at these pics taken years ago, some as far back as 2014:
Coldplay
It seems to be the cool thing to hate coldplay, but I do like them. I can't stand NUMEROUS songs. Anything they attempt to do with K-pop bands is utter garbage, to say the least, and I think they lost a lot of their appeal when they went all anthemic. But even so, throughout the years they have consistently churned out bangers and ballads that are memorable and powerful. My wife absolutely adores them.
IF we can snag some tickets, they're performing in August in either London or HULL of all places. A shitty left-behind fishing village up north pretty much. But it might be the last chance we'd ever get as they've been hinting at ending things for good for a while now. Besides, they're getting on a bit.
Unfinished London
I've been to London a handful of times, but usually it's just to get my passport sorted out. I've seen a bunch of it, the parks, the museums, but frustratingly I've never managed to actually go to the things I genuinely seriously want to go to! I've no idea why, they always just seem to slip by me.
- Kew Gardens
...one of the most extensive and important botanical gardens in the world.
- Westminster Abbey
A THOUSAND years old (well, mostly 'only' 700 years old)
- Tower of London
Bizarrely, I kind of embarrassingly didn't know what this was until just a couple of years ago. I thought it was the towers on Tower Bridge.
- West End
I've only seen one thing - Phantom of the Opera - in London. I want to see a LOT more.
- Buckingham Palace
Never been inside!
- House of Parliament
Again, never been inside!
The more I look, the more ridiculous it seems that I've basically not seen or done anything in my own capital city. Clearly I won't have time to see them all unless I spend way more time getting stabbed than I'd like.
Family
Sigh. This one's rough. But long story short I should make some kind of effort to sort things out here or at the very least visit my mum and spend a few days with her. She learnt to drive and is now eligible to rent cars and have people tag along! So this could be very fun indeed XD
Friends
I actually don't plan on meeting them this time and to be honest it's never been high priority. I always want to keep our friendships alive, I consider them lifelong and more meaningful than any other friends I've made since. BUt they have lives and jobs and families and I feel like I'm a huge burden on them taking time off to see me, and they never manage to get the same dates off so it's always a bit fragmented. Better to just keep that as a nice surprise if we can make it happen on the fly.
House Hunting
I think it would be nice to look at some realistic and also entirely unrealistic options of housing just to get a feel for the land for when we do eventually move permanently. I want to visit, say, Hampstead where all the millionaires live and just gawk together with my wife at all the mansions, maybe see some rich seaside properties.
Scotland
Probably not likely this time around but damn I am yearning those empty, desolate highlands so much.
Canal Boats
Another fancy thing I've never had the pleasure of doing which I think is a quintessential English experience. The canals were built to transport stuff like coal and very narrow boats were once pulled along by horses on the sidelines. To get up and down hills, locks were constructed to create horizontal dam-like ladders of water to raise and lower boats by filling and emptying each section.
Nowadays you can rent the boats and travel pretty much anywhere. I'm talking cross-country, through cities and beyond. It's amazing. A weekend doing that would be awesome. You don't need a license and you can go adventure all by yourself, stopping wherever for a nice pub meal and whatever else. It's extremely peaceful. I'd often walk along the locks but to be on a boat... ahhhh
Harry Potter
My wife is a huge fan and so naturally we have to get a lot of the related sights sorted, including the Harry Potter Studios we've wanted to go to for years! I wouldn't say I'm personally a fan of any kind but... the movies were cool.
Other English 'Outstanding Beauty'
An official category. Places like:
- Yorkshire Dales, peak & lake districts, and similar countryside
- Jurassic Coast
- Bath
- Cotswolds (Clarkson's Farm!)
- Isles of Scilly
And so many more. The more I think about it, the more overwhelming the number of experiences I want to have which I never had the chance to due to me, well, never actually being there.
Avoid the shithole towns
This, I do not miss:
There's a lot more depressing examples of towns up and down the country, boarded up, destitution, anti-social behaviour, 150 stabbings a day now.
But all I need to do is strategically avoid that and I'll be golden!
This is pretty solid advice for anybody planning on visiting the UK.
Stay out of pretty much all the populated areas of the UK. For London, just stick to the middle bit with all the tourism and history. ALL the residential areas are gang-controlled shitholes, full of vape shops and turkish barbers, cookie cutter council housing and god knows what else you just don't want to see.
England shines when you're seeing its natural beauty, and this is what calls to me more than anything else in the world.
So yeah. I MIGHT go. Depends on my wife's visa, dates (coldplay concert kinda overlaps when I go back to work...) costs (flights are like 900 quid per person nowadays! Jeeze) and other factors (can my mum get the right time off? who knows)
Either way it's fun to dream about.