Sorry, who am I supposed to be again?

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the concept of being a global citizen. I suppose it makes sense that I would do, given that I’m currently living in a country that’s not my own, and I haven’t been an active citizen in my homeland for 17 months now.

When I left the UK, I didn’t know how long I’d be going for. Not really. I didn’t know what was going to happen, what I was going to find, or how I was going to feel, about anything. I was (still am) very closely attached to the people I love, and I think if I had not had someone influencing me to do it (my partner) I might never have left the UK for longer than a holiday. But I would have always retained this sense of, ‘well, I would like to travel.’ It was that intangible feeling which helped me to decide to go in the end. This curiosity about what was outside of my door; the idea that life could be lived very differently to how I was living it. Not that I had a problem with how I was living it, not at all, but I also didn’t feel driven to do any of the things the people around me were doing (getting married, having children, buying homes, having the faintest idea what kind of career they were pursuing, that kind of thing) so the lack of any other direction to aim toward pretty much left me with a bottom line of, ‘well, why not this?’

May you walk in Fields of Gold.

I remember when Mr Cummings first arrived at our primary school, in that little half-a-horse village where I grew up. I remember that for the few months (at least) before he was taken on as headmaster, our school had been a bit chaotically run. We had one interim leader who decided that for a week we would have themed days, one day we could come in wearing our pyjamas, another we could bring in teddies, and so on, culminating in a big disco at the end of the week. Which was quite cool, obviously, as a kid, but even I, at 7 or 8 years old, could sense the randomness of it all, and see the anxious face that dude perpetually had. Not to mention the fact that he wasn’t there very long, which in adult world I now obviously understand meant that something was amiss. The long and short of it was that things felt a bit directionless, and the idea of school had become a bit of a joke.