haligoing, haligone
In three weeks’ time I will no longer live in England. This was an abstract concept until about a day ago, at which point I booked my move-out clean and put 90% of my books into a huge IKEA bag destined for a local charity shop. Now it is unexpectedly large, and I am not sure where to put it. What else is a newsletter for?
Let me give you the spiel. Back in 2019, in a fever pitch of Brexit panic (remember when Brexit was the most we had to dread?), I spent a slightly mad afternoon applying for a Canadian working holiday visa. The idea was that I would move to Canada for the allotted two years, support myself as a writer, maybe sell a book, and hopefully never have to come home. I didn’t quite expect to be offered an entry permit. I certainly didn’t expect the pandemic to blow up all my plans, book sale included, and leave me even more stuck in England than I had previously been.
It’s not very exciting, as stories go. Two years and eight increasingly frantic entry permit renewal attempts later, I was told I had until December 2022. Use it or lose it. It is soon to be May 2022 and I am finally, finally getting ready to leave.
The first time I left the country without my parents I was in my mid-teens, and I was on a school trip to Italy. I saw the Colosseum and Pompeii, both of which were secondary to the girl I was desperately, childishly into at the time. She and I slept in adjoining beds in a nunnery right in the centre of Rome, and there would be a poem in that, if I were a different sort of writer.
She was homesick in a way that really did feel physical. Our first day in Rome, she could barely get out of bed with it. I did my best to sympathise, but I was very young, and the feeling was quite beyond me. I hadn’t hesitated for a moment to get on the pre-dawn coach to the airport. I was so excited to see a new country that I almost lost my passport in Departures at Luton. Did I spend a lot of time flummoxed by, say, the process of crossing the road without being mowed down by a motorcycle? Absolutely! I was fourteen and autistic and perfectly, cosmically baffled! But goddamn it, I felt alive.
I didn’t call home that whole week. They didn’t ask me if I’d missed them when they picked me up at school. I studied every language I could get my hands on, and I announced over dinner that one day I was going to live abroad. With hindsight, I don’t know how anyone in my family has ever tolerated me.
The thing about England is. The thing is.
It has ideas about itself, well above its current global station. Its panicking is getting increasingly, embarrassingly blatant. What about England’s ideas? Don’t you still want to hear them? It is old and maybe once it was glorious, or maybe it was simply genocidal. Maybe once people simply had to listen. I am living in a country that has long since forgotten how to talk to anyone but itself, no longer assured of an audience. I am itself, nominally. This country thinks it is talking to me, or perhaps it has decided I am a part of itself no longer worth the work of conversation. Maybe I am just lucky not to have been forgotten entirely. Either way. I don’t know the answer. I don’t believe in utopia. I am tired of trying to believe in better places, no matter how imperfect, only to be shouted down for my childish and impractical idealism. What else is the function of England’s ideas these days? Of course we don’t believe in the magic money tree, not for you, and certainly not for them. We made our commitments, our awful small-minded red-white-and-blue commitments, and now we have to deliver. Yes we do. Who are you to disagree? Where did you come from? Nowhere? You must have come from nowhere after all.
I’m going to Halifax, first and foremost. I have friends there, and friends nearby. Once I’ve had some time to settle, my boyfriend is coming out to see me. I’m excited! I do not write any of this to downplay how excited I am. There is so much possibility waiting for me on the other side of the Atlantic, and I am beyond fortunate to have this opportunity to go and seek it out.
But right now I have three weeks to pack up my whole life and put it in an aeroplane hold. I’m coming off my meds, and every time I move, Satan tasers my brain. I have too much stuff. I don’t have enough stuff. I’ve quit my very good and stable job to write for money (LOL!!), and I’m trying to plan a future that won’t leave me functionally unable to eat. I finished a manuscript yesterday. It wasn’t the manuscript I hoped I was going to sell. I wrote 51,000 words over three months and I’m exhausted, and there is still, somehow, so much more I need to figure out.
England is an animal that’s been kicked at once too often. It has settled into a grim complacency about what’s possible, what’s fair, what’s allowed. It will bite you if you hold out a hand, because at least a kick is familiar; it doesn’t carry a risk of new, worse pain down the road. I am self-aware enough to know that I need to go somewhere new. I am worn-down enough that I am eyeing up the prospect of the future with tired, suspicious eyes, and just a hint of teeth.
Is that homesickness? Probably not. I would call it complacency, if I weren’t doing everything in my power to push back against it.
This (posts about leaving England and living in Canada) is going to be a series. I have promised enough people updates on my comings and goings that it made sense to do the whole thing via newsletter. If it feels impersonal, I am sorry; I am doing the best I can with what I have, and ‘what I have’ is currently a very temperamental central nervous system.
Lastly: the title is because if you live in Halifax, you are a Haligonian. I am Haligoing. I am soon to be Haligone. You may now boo me resoundingly offstage.
W