Those of us who take up
residence in far flung and sometimes obscure places in what remains of the
British Empire and beyond undoubtedly all too often leave our fractured hearts
back in Nottingham, Bristol or Brighton or in my case Central London. We are
therefore apt to bore others with endless comments concerning the benefits and
virtues of life back in the Old Country under Wilson, Thatcher or Blair and
others equally notorious from the past.
And we fail to notice the lack of interest in the eyes of patient and
less than patient listeners.
And analogous with
various characters in stories by W Somerset Maugham despite the hankering to
return to the places of our birth many ex-citizens of the UK opt somewhat strangely
to stay on in the suburbs of foreign countries for far longer than we need to
or expected that we would. This in
itself irks those of our acquaintance who so frequently comment one to another
that there was nothing to stop us from buggering off back to Birmingham years
ago if we really wanted to. These are
comments of which we were invariably blissfully unaware.
It all adds up to a syndrome that those who
lived their lives in India prior to 1947 would immediately recognise. Essentially we stay put because life in our
adopted country is frequently more comfortable than the lives we left
behind. We understand how everything
works for example and we really appreciate little things like the Winter Energy
Supplement when the Government chips in to help pay our power bills during the
coldest months of the year. We are
grateful that we can generally access an appointment with our local doctor,
often on the very same day that we apply, often at the time of our choice and
we are thankful that half price taxi fares are on offer to those over sixty
five who for some reason cannot manage the buses and have long since stopped
driving. So we put the Returning Home
decision on the back burner for yet another year or two.
Then there comes a time
when we begin to examine those choices more closely, observing that whilst the
current residents of London, Leeds and Cardiff are loudly proclaiming that
their weekly trip to the supermarket is costing far too much, we feel and have
just commented in texts to friends and acquaintances that groceries seem
astonishingly cheap compared to the prices we have become accustomed to in our adopted
corner of the globe. On the other hand petrol
appears to be jarringly costly and some hardy souls who dare to air their
opinions on talk radio allege that it now costs very nearly one hundred pounds
to fill the family car. We decide they
must be exaggerating on a grand scale and are thankful for the more moderate
fuel prices in Sydney, Auckland or Papua New Guinea. We note that people discuss the fate of
those who fail to pay their television licence fee, are told that occasionally
this criminality might involve a prison term – and we make little comment but
wonder if that information is totally accurate.
Prison sentences in
general seem far more punitive than those we have so effortlessly become accustomed
to so it is easy to imagine a monstrous fate awaits the unfortunate pensioner
reduced to pilfering at an Ecco shoe sale or using inter-city trains without a
ticket on a return journey to the Old Country. Perhaps the streets of London
and Liverpool are not paved with gold after all.
Noel Coward might have inadvertently uncovered
the germ of the consequences of staying in foreign climes for decades. It is never a good idea and undoubtedly clouds
the judgement to spend too much time in the Midday Sun. The Return Home requires more thought than we might have imagined.
