About places

“There are places I’ll remember,
All my life, though some have changed,
Some forever, not for better,
Some have gone and some remain”

In a way this “About being here” is about being there. However, our present is infomed by our past. We are what we were; the sum total of our experience. Our experience is conditioned by place, time and circumstances. Place is a shorthand for this, but in a very temporal sense. Places are not eternal as we so often discover: the great places of our childhood which turn out to be much smaller when revisited; the special places of our adulthood which turn out to be quite ordinary. We can revisit the locations of our past, but we cannot actually revisit our past. Nor do we need to, the most important parts of our past we carry with us anyway, for better or for worse, in our present.
I’d like to write about a few places where I have lived.

Halifax:
I was born in Halifax. Halifax is an archetypal Northern England 19th century industrial town of stone-built terraces climbing up hillsides away from mill chimneys. Yorkshiremen used to pray to be saved from Hull, Hell and Halifax. I guess that’s why my parents got out of there as soon as possible. But my grandmother and aunt and uncle stayed. So Halifax was a place where we went to visit “family”. It was a good hour by car and clearly had the feeling of going to another world, an older and materially poorer one, from which we had miraculously escaped. It’s a long time since I’ve been back to Halifax.

Ilkley:
I grew up in Ilkley, in every way a well-to-do genteel Yorkshire town, nestling under the moors by the lovely river Wharfe.. However, since I went to secondary school in another town, I really don’t know anyone there apart from my parents. I still go to visit them twice a year, but they no longer live in the house in which I grew up, which further distances me from the place. Ilkley really is a “place” to me in a very impersonal way, familiar but strangely remote. The best thing about Ilkley is going for walks on the Moor or in nearby Wharfedale. There I can experience the English landscape that we English so fondly associate with our country, though it never was the actual backdrop of our experience of growing up English.

Bradford:
I went to secondary school in Bradford. So this was the place where I went out with classmates on Saturday evenings for underage drinking in pubs. I tried to find the Vaults Bar a few years ago; it has been demolished and there’s a car park there. I did find Tony Kingham at Bradford Grammar School though. He was one of my first French teachers. He started at BGS at the same time as I did as a schoolboy. He showed me over the place. A lot had changed, we reminisced together about characters who had occupied spaces now used for something else. Bradford is an even more down-at-heel city than in the ‘70s, grimy, formerly industrial, fallen on hard times. The shared aspiration of most of us at school was to get away from it. Thank God we did.

l’Isle-Jourdain:
L’Isle-Jourdain is a small village in the South West of France about 30 km from Toulouse. This is where I first lived by myself away from my parents. That was in itself a liberating experience, but it was compounded by the fact that the French countryside was a very different place to Yorkshire. There was a lot of good eating and copious drinking with endless conversation, all unshackled from the constraints of a middle-class boys-only English upbringing. I returned with a strong twangy SW French accent and numerous other affectations which seemed to go well with Bohemian student life. South West France was my first love affair with a place, and it continued through my student years with frequent stays culminating in a year in Toulouse. I don’t go back that way very often now, but when I do the way of life and accent come easily.

Oxford:
I went to university in Oxford, at Christ Church. I found it at first a somewhat intimidating place but with time it came to feel like home. I made some of my best friends at university; it was a stimulating and happy time, there was so much close to hand for the taking. Each generation of students makes up its own Oxford. So mine is gone, but the decor is unchanged. The architecture is wonderful, the stone warm, the centre bustling with people from both university and town. It’s a manageable size with always something going on and greenery never far away. If I had to live in England, I’d probably make it there - it was actually the last place I lived in England. Since my daughter studies there now, I go back regularly.

Kamen:
Kamen is a small town in North West Germany where the first two Autobahnen crossed each other; the Kamener-Kreuz still features on German traffic news. I ended up there in my year out during my modern languages degree. At the time it had the most easterly coal-mine of the Ruhr (since closed down), workers’ houses painted grey, its own Turkish ghetto and a non-descript modern shopping precinct. In short, post-war Germany in miniature. Once a man who had given me a lift in a big BMW said, “This is not real Germany, you should go to Bavaria”; but the point is, it was real Germany. The school I worked in was an “experimental” comprehensive. Teachers volunteered to work there, so its staff, my colleagues were very left-wing and “alternativ” - like many people in the Ruhr they were friendly and down to earth. Living there was an experience that educated me politically. Needless to say, I never go back there.

Brussels:
I came to Brussels in 1982, which means I have now lived here half of my life. It’s certainly the place I have lived longest. This is where I have made my home, raised my family and found a circle of friends and acquaintances. Brussels is a truly cosmopolitan city (even for Belgians it is officially bi-lingual) where you don’t feel out of place as a foreigner. Brussels is not the capital of a single language community: that falls to Paris for the French and Amsterdam for the Dutch speakers. But we can accept its claim to being the capital of Europe, at least administratively. Brussels has the advantages of a capital city with plenty to see and do, access to many different cultures, lots of entertainment, restaurants and shops, and easy links to other capitals. But it doesn’t have many of the disadvantages in that it’s not too large, you can get about it easily, you can get into places without booking weeks in advance, you can get out of it fast when you want to, to the forest and countryside, and on a reasonable salary you can still afford to live in the centre in a house with a garden. In short, if you don’t mind the weather (which I don’t, being English) Brussels has a lot going for it and over the years it has really grown on me. It’s important to recognize, wherever you are, when being here is good, and to realize that it’s pointless to aspire to being somewhere else. Brussels is home to me.

Monfalcone:
Monfalcone is a ship-building town in North East Italy where my wife was born and grew up. When she first took me there, over twenty years ago, I wasn’t impressed. Nearly every town in Italy has a wonderful beautiful historic centre. Monfalcone doesn’t, it’s not old enough. Admittedly they have improved it recently by getting rid of cars from certain streets and the main square and repainting some buildings. But it’s never going to be on the list of 100 must-see towns in Italy. In fact, it’s just typical small town Italy - which is what makes it good. Italy is such a pleasant place to live that most of its population don’t bother moving away from where they were born: just being here is fine with them. So Monfalcone is full of my wife’s family, friends and acquaintances. In fact, it’s just the opposite of Ilkley, which is picturesque but where I know nobody. Monfalcone is actually at the northernmost point of the Mediterranean, which for us from further north can’t be bad. The sea offers some excellent swimming. It also turns out that Monfalcone is only a short drive from the much under-rated Julian Alps. So, although not initially impressed, I now see its good points. We own a flat there, so I spend more time there in a year than in England.

These are most of the places I have lived, as opposed to merely visited. I shall write about some of those another time.
I think it emerges from my descriptions that the most important aspect of a place is the people who are there. At BGS Founders’ Day, they always quoted the Greek: “The men make the city not the walls”. Without the people places seem curiously hollow. We return to them sometimes only to find ghosts. It’s better to be here now.