In the Garden of England

I wrote this first paragraph sitting in the car from Heathrow:

24/08/07

My word I love this England!! The depressed grey skies, steadfast and determined; the trees decked in their summer finery, crowded with rich green leaves that each clamber for a touch of the slivers of sunlight that march across the countryside from time to time; the rows of town houses, a coverlet of moss on each roof and many windowed so that the occupants (like the trees) can catch whatever sunlight beams; and the flat, low-rise city of London, without need for brash skyscraper developments (though they are growing in number), whose legend and majesty comes from the long trodden earth.

Back to the future:

That little passage doesn't really have a point, but I like the way it manifests my thoughts about England as I 'hit the ground', so to speak. I always get that feeling when I arrive here. It's like coming home, even the first time I arrived here I felt that strange skipping of the heart, the keen intake of breath, the instinctive deep love of the land. But I can't really discover why without retreating to some anachronistic notion of 'mother country', at least for that first instance.

Now, however, I feel like there is a relationship. I have inhabited this land, and now it inhabits me. And maybe that's how it is for many of the places we visit, or at least those we fall in love with. There is a bond, an almost physical bond with the heart. When we do feel a love for a place we never leave, and it never leaves us. I remember sitting in the aircraft climbing out of Delhi and having the same sense of physical loss or sadness - I felt I was leaving a part of myself behind. But it was also a pain of distance, of absence. I suppose that's why the destruction of a place (through war, economy, drought, or tourism) can be so traumatic for those who have only visited, as well as for the inhabitants. Their's is the pain of a small heartstring riven.

So when I come back here I am, in quite an emotional sense, coming home - at least to a part of me. It is an emotional home because I get it, I understand it in ways that I can't describe (and that I don't really understand, if that makes any sense). But also, because England inhabits me, the relationship is two way. It is a home because it gets me. In some small, incomprehensible way England understands me.

Of course, you can't really escape the fact that this is simply a beautiful country. Cobbled roadways winding through a monopoly board of street names and emerging onto green fields filled with natives out to catch the fleeting rays. The many armed tube, double-decker busses, and 'the knowledge'. Jellied eels, cheshire cheese, and beer served without extraneous carbon dioxide... oh I love this England.

But I think I might defer to Kipling to close (from The Glory of the Garden):

Our England is a garden that is full of stately views,

Of borders, beds and shrubberies and lawns and avenues,

With statues on the terraces and peacocks strutting by,

But the Glory of the Garden lies in more than meets the eye.