Hi!
Hello! I was playing Cult of the Lamb the other day - tremendous game, recommend it - and found myself having to catch some fish, and it made me realise that somehow every other game wants you to go fishing. I’ve gone fishing in Zelda games and I’ve gone fishing in Hades; Mario games have fishing in them now and so do, apparently, games about being a little lamb running a cult. Why is that?
I searched far and wide for an answer but couldn’t find a truly satisfactory one, which happens sometimes, I guess. Still, I did stumble upon this essay, which was good and translated from its original French, meaning that it’s occasionally quite pleasantly poncy. Hon to the hon to the honhonhon.
On which note:
A column
There’s an unofficial rule to living in Venice which I think I wrote about somewhere at some point, who knows where, who knows when. Anyway, it was something I called the rule of three, and it went like this:
The first time you go to a shop or a bar in Venice, they will act like you don’t fully exist, or are not fully human.
The second time you go to a shop or a bar in Venice, they will act like you don’t fully exist, or are not fully human.
The third time you go to a shop or a bar in Venice, they will look up, maybe even make some genuine eye contact, and consider treating you like a bona fide human being.
It isn’t especially welcoming, as a custom, but it is understandable. A lot of people come and go in Venice. There is probably little point in being sincerely friendly to every single person who walks in through the door. You’d end up going mad.
The rule of three served me well in my two months but there was one place I could never quite crack. Every weekday morning I went to the little bistro next to my flat and worked on my laptop for around two hours, with a coffee and sometimes breakfast. A few times a week I would have lunch at home then return to the bistro, for maybe another hour or two.
Weeks came and went and the staff seemingly never warmed to me. There were two women there and they always seemed to see me as an inconvenience. It didn’t matter that I could broadly go through all our exchanges in mostly comprehensible Italian. They just never treated me like part of the furniture. It annoyed me more than I’d care to admit.
On my last day, as I was about to leave, I muttered to one of the women, in English, that I’d be returning to London over the weekend. I’m not sure why I felt the need to mention it; I just really liked that bistro, I guess, even if the bistro didn’t like me back.
I bid goodbye to the waitress and, to my complete and utter surprise, she let out quite a visceral “noooo!”, and said that she would miss me, and hoped I would come back to visit. I was, again, more touched than I’d care to admit.
I am in New York now, two years later to the month, and my slice of Brooklyn is disappointingly light on charming little bistros. Still, there are a few bars and cornershops I have been to a few times over the past two weeks, and can tell that the people who work there now recognise me.
We’ve not quite reached the stage of exchanging pleasantries as I buy whatever it is I came in to get yet but I can tell that, if I keep it up, I’ll get there before leaving in a few weeks. That thought makes me happy.
It also makes me rage, again, at the “citizens of nowhere” speech, and all those screeds about “somewheres and anywheres”. I know it’s been years and I know I should probably just move on but I can’t. They’ve been lodged in my throat for all these years, unwilling to get dislodged.
Why am I struggling to get over them? It’s a good question. For a while I went for the most obvious explanation, which is that I felt I was being personally attacked, and no one likes being targeted. I’m a first and second generation immigrant. My parents met in a country neither of them were born in. My mother is a first generation immigrant. My father and brother lived abroad for some time. The latter may leave France again at some point.
It isn’t just that I’m footloose; I come from a long line of people who are. Only one of my four grandparents stayed in the same city their whole life. Only one of my six cousins is yet to leave their hometown at least for a few years, and she’s only 22. They didn’t just come for me, but for my whole clan. That really stuck in my craw, probably quite ironically, given that my main feature is apparently that I don’t meaningfully belong anywhere.
I thought about it some more recently, as I once again found myself in a new place with bright eyes and heavy suitcases, and realised that I’d got it wrong, and the problem is that they, too, have got it wrong. I am, according to all good definitions, a citizen of nowhere and an Anywhere, but I just don’t recognise myself in the way that they talk about my kind.
There is an assumption always hiding in plain sight with those monikers, and it is that we don’t care for communities, preferring instead to focus on ourselves and our very immediate circles, all of whom sound and think like us. We can and do move around a lot because, fundamentally, our lives are as big as they are small. We’re white collar, very online individualists; every man an island. We’ll belong anywhere because, on a base level, we don’t care about whether we actually belong.
Somewheres, on the other hand, rely on the people around them. They love their neighbours and the small shops they go to every week and all the people they see when they walk around their local streets. They wouldn’t make sense out of context, because context is what made them. They are, needless to say, the superior kind, according to this way of thinking.
What got and still gets under my skin, I’ve come to realise, is that I definitely identify with those Somewheres. I’ve had a solid relationship with the people owning the small businesses of every neighbourhood I’ve ever lived in. I’ve always made an effort to meet my neighbours, even befriending some of them. I usually get to know all the dogs who live near me, and in doing so I often get to know their owners, even if our friendship extends to a firm nod when we walk past each other.
Shallow bonds aren’t lesser just because they are time-limited. I doubt that seeing the same person in a supermarket for three decades would make you more likely to have them over for dinner than seeing them there for only two years. It is possible to derive joy from seeing loose acquaintances even if you did not go to school near them.
Perhaps most importantly, “roots” can mean different things to different people. Some trees will have few of them but they will burrow deep into the soil to find what they need. Others will stay near the surface but spread and spread. Everyone does what they can, and as they must, in order to keep going.
Insinuating that people who have moved around a lot have less interest in sincere human connection and the places they live in is both offensive and missing the mark entirely. I couldn’t pretend to speak for everyone whose life has been similar to mine, of course, but I’d argue it’s the opposite.
What living in Nantes and London and Venice and New York has taught me is that my love of people is universal. I could probably be dropped just about anywhere and, assuming the language barrier wasn’t too much of an issue, turn that place into a home in a handful of weeks. People are just people, wherever they are, and what a comforting thought that is!
They’ll all have their quirks and customs and ways of doing things which may seem puzzling at first, but that’s just part of the fun. Birds build nests from whatever they can find in cities and those nests get blown away by the wind and off they go again, trying to find bits of trash and bits of treasure and building shelter again. They adapt endlessly and so do we.
Somewheres supposedly build their identity around the people and places around them, but I just don’t see how you could argue that it isn’t what my people aren’t doing either. Moving around means forcing yourself to become more malleable and, in the process, realising the extent to which you are where you live, and who you talk to. The only difference is that some of us can and will gladly repeat that process over and over again, and others would rather not. How we feel about those around us does not, and should not be part of the equation.
If anything, creating this cleavage means sowing division and mistrust where there should be understanding instead. It should be heartening that we are all defined by our homes - whether we were born in them or chose to adopt them shouldn’t really matter at all.
Nicely put. Which is why Teresa May's criticism of citizens of nowhere was so offensive and narrow minded
YES. Thank you. I hate this citizens of nowhere as much as I hate the linked insult thrown during Brexit at those of us who dared to have left the UK and marry a EU citizen: stop moaning and just f off and get a new nationality since you obviously hate Britain. First, it's not that easy because there are rules and laws and secondly, it's not that easy because what happens if I move every 5 years as I get promoted or a work opportunity, am I supposed to collect nationalities like packing boxes? And thirdly, is not that easy because even after half of my life in France I don't feel very French (sorry Marie but after 25y there are still so many things that annoy me daily about France, everything except the maturity of the press and lyrics vs the British clown show), and after marrying a German I feel slightly more confortable with the idea of being German but they won't let me keep my British nationality. These political insults just show the paucity of imagination of vision of a much more interesting world.