The Extreme Of Settling Down
Until I was nineteen, I had not lived in one country for a stretch longer than six years. That has its benefits on an upbringing: my horizons are broad, I’m open minded and although I’ve often felt like the outsider or the new guy, I’m pretty flexible.
So while I’m not quick to trust people, I’m not easily phased, and that’s got to be good for my poker game.
I have lived where I live now for about ten years, and I am only just earning what I missed out on while growing up because I’ve now got the kind of home life I had only previously seen in others.
It’s funny when I catch the really ordinary stuff come creeping into my previously extraordinary life.
Like last Sunday when I was filling up the car with petrol and I noticed someone I knew alongside me doing the same. We shot the breeze, talked about the England (football) match, which I had missed the day before. He was round at my house in the summer when England got kicked out of the World Cup and that’s always a bonding experience. That’s the great thing about being English: divided we stand, united we fall.
We talked about our kids’ school, stood in the queue, we had a little look at the papers before he got to the till first and was comfortable enough to say goodbye and walk out of the petrol station and drive away without waiting for me because I was still paying.
And that’s cool. If you haven’t had those experiences very often, it can be nice when you do. Familiarity is great when it’s a novelty.
Sometimes instead of talking it’s good to just shoot the breeze. I’m a lousy shot, though, so I tend to take the scattergun approach to small talk, in the hope that something connects.
“Hey, is that one of those thing things? Yeah? I heard they explode. No? Oh, so how’s that new place near you? Tried the stuffed peppers?”
OK, so I’m not a natural.
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“You don’t understand your power over the common man,” said Alistair Campbell.
The words seemed to echo endlessly around their cell. Digging a tunnel had proved fruitless and oddly phallic. Finding a vein had been the laborious task ahead, but they opted to forge ahead while singing “We Are The Champions”.
It wasn’t until they stopped singing that they realised they were never going to see Gdansk. In the
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