Solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays

So as I start to write this, it's currently windy and piddling on down and I've just finished my breakfast of beans and cheese on toast (followed by 2 crackers to get rid of the last little dregs of cheddar with a bonus jaffa cake since chocolate and cheese is always Nice). And so it goes on a sedate trip like this one: food and the environment ("Tut, tut... looks like rain") become the main concerns. The main concern isn't what I tend to think of as the main vacation concern of What Will Be Seen since neither of us are really here to see things (even if tomorrow myself, my Mum and my cousin will all go in to London for all 3 of us to visit the British Museum for the First Time Ever). My Mum is here to visit her sister and I just went along with her because I wanted a Real Goddamned Break (my last "break" was last May on the 'wedding cruise' of my friend, which is a real stretch to call a break in the circumstances of last year).

Being here works fairly well as a break because of food and the environment (though as I write this every last member of my family currently here -- Aunt, Uncle and Mum -- have bitched about the weather as they emerge from their beds and continue to repeatedly bitch about it as they change rooms and encounter each other). Every single time I come back here it's like instantly being enveloped in a soft blanket as I see the patchwork green appear from the plane window. All the valleys of green and grey we pass to drive down to the house, which is in a throughly seaside-y town, feel like settling deeper into the sort of comfort that comes from positive associations in childhood. Positive associations within the town I grew up in (which otherwise doesn't have much going for it and can have the other half of what it was like aptly summed here) involve family and food: cups of tea by the fireplace at one grandparent's, butterbean soup at Sunday Dinner at the other (which I wrote A Silly Post about over a decade ago). Positive associations with the UK in general have more to do with moments outside of the town: in the green, in the forest, on the hills, on the lakes, and by the sea.

When we immigrated to Canada I resented it intensely. We moved to a suburb of Toronto and other than being pleasantly surprised by how clean (it was staggeringly clean to our eyes) and sunny it was the main thought was along the lines that there was zero surprise in Rush writing a song like Subdivisions about it all. I'd never seen anything like it: blocks of houses all basically the same on blocks, on blocks, stacked, ordered, perfect (so of course they make it into the video for that song). The place we first rented was miles off of any lakes or forests and about the closest you got to any expanse of green at all was the school field. Inside the houses on those blocks after blocks were (to my eyes) Very Fancy Stuff: multiple televisions (my grandparents still used a black and white), cable channels, exercise equipment, kitchen gadgets, home gaming systems, central heating and air conditioning etc. etc. And then, half because of my accent and half because of being sort of generally weird, the alienation of the environment was doubled down in my alienation from most of the other kids. So now I feel like I have wound up somewhere Rich and Ordered and Strange.

We'd drive those suburbs (and, oh, yes, everyone owned multiple cars) since there was hardly any other way to get around and it would be more of the same: expanses of highway with blocks on blocks, malls and stripmalls all accompanied by these patchy little blocks of grass each with single serving of Tree.

I preferred being in the city which felt more chaotic and less ordered. There really was something in the order of the suburbs that was actually unnerving to me.

Here things are more naturally chaotic. The streets wind and collide, go up and down, and outside of the major city centres you're never really out of walking distance from green (at least where I've managed to end up staying on visits). So here I walk the green and the seashore and feel glad for this sort of comfortable blanket but it's not a blanket I can keep on for good.

The other thing that's a sort of comfort here are things like jaffa cakes for breakfast. It's all the ridiculous little bits of food and flavours you can't easily get. So for the past week I've been eating piles of the absolute crap I used to have affection for (marshmallow teacakes, digestives, snowballs, cheese and onion potato chips/crisps, etc.) while regularly thinking about picking up additional varieties of crap (dolly mixture, wispa bars, quavers) and chasing after those idiosyncratically British flavours of things (pear yogurt, elderflower everything, ginger beer / ginger wine / ginger rhubarb tea, etc. etc.).

The last thing I've accidentally been consuming a lot of is pop culture but that I'll save for its own post since it'll be a big enough thing on its own. The indicator of how that's going to go is easily illustrated by what my Uncle and Mum are currently watching on the TV (I have headphones on): a variety show in honour of VE Day taped earlier this month. If being here I feel like I'm retreating back to the green, back to the flavours of childhood, it's also easy to feel like I'm going back in time culturally as well with ridiculous ease.