Culture Here and Culture There
It kind of suddenly clicked that England is not all doom and gloom like the news, and your miserable peers project it to be, when me and Pablo were watching T.V. There was a picture of the English coastline (the Seven Sisters, near Eastborne). It was simple Pablo, originally from Mexico, said it was beautiful. I wasn’t artificially altered in any way, but I still had that kind of hippy revelation – ‘yeah man, yeah they are’. Anyway, this started off this chain off thought:
More of that winning crap-talk in my proposal is coming true. Being in Japan for an extended period has given the places I have seen in England a value to be compared against. Just as the difference in culture is giving me something to gauge ‘Englishness’ against, the difference in aesthetic is proving the same story. Talking to Japanese people about England, well London mostly, has been very insightful.
For me England has always just been, you know, ‘there’. Maybe because I have been very few places in England, but I have always definitely taken it for granted that everything is very exclusively English. Those Georgian buildings made out of Bath stone in my home town, Bath, have always to my mind just ‘been’, and existed. Here in Japan all the houses don’t have a ‘period’ they are just sort of erected when needed. Houses here are very rarely over One Hundred and the building materials are extremely varied. The result is something very interesting, but different. This sort of difference in everything becomes even more fascinating when you discover the whys, wherefores, and then the consequences. Subsequently, I am unhappy about a lot of what is England, but I am much happier with other areas, but most importantly I am beginning to understand why it is. Perhaps it would pay to be a tourist in your home country sometime?
I have an idea. Why not, instead of national service like other countries have, send people away for a year or two to another country to help out? It’s not a completely radical concept – send people away to make them realise what they have, that’s all. Maybe they could teach, learn, and grow up a bit. Maybe it would even make the world a better place. I mean, as I’ve said before, isn’t all about relative values? I didn’t realise before coming to Brighton what a big favour my parents did for me by being ‘different’ to all the other parents out there. I saw them as an annoyance at best because they wouldn’t let me be like the other kids (you know, not letting me have all those toys I wanted), but I couldn’t see the favour because all I knew was Bath and my friends within Bath. But the anguish I experienced there was just as real as any other part of the world it was just I had a very narrow field of experience to gauge certain events with. Now coming to Brighton, not exactly a massive cultural leap, I realise there are people who have struggled ten times more than me to get where they are. I also realise there are people who are quite frankly idiots, who would definitely benefit from any kind of non self-infatuated experience.
More of that winning crap-talk in my proposal is coming true. Being in Japan for an extended period has given the places I have seen in England a value to be compared against. Just as the difference in culture is giving me something to gauge ‘Englishness’ against, the difference in aesthetic is proving the same story. Talking to Japanese people about England, well London mostly, has been very insightful.
For me England has always just been, you know, ‘there’. Maybe because I have been very few places in England, but I have always definitely taken it for granted that everything is very exclusively English. Those Georgian buildings made out of Bath stone in my home town, Bath, have always to my mind just ‘been’, and existed. Here in Japan all the houses don’t have a ‘period’ they are just sort of erected when needed. Houses here are very rarely over One Hundred and the building materials are extremely varied. The result is something very interesting, but different. This sort of difference in everything becomes even more fascinating when you discover the whys, wherefores, and then the consequences. Subsequently, I am unhappy about a lot of what is England, but I am much happier with other areas, but most importantly I am beginning to understand why it is. Perhaps it would pay to be a tourist in your home country sometime?
I have an idea. Why not, instead of national service like other countries have, send people away for a year or two to another country to help out? It’s not a completely radical concept – send people away to make them realise what they have, that’s all. Maybe they could teach, learn, and grow up a bit. Maybe it would even make the world a better place. I mean, as I’ve said before, isn’t all about relative values? I didn’t realise before coming to Brighton what a big favour my parents did for me by being ‘different’ to all the other parents out there. I saw them as an annoyance at best because they wouldn’t let me be like the other kids (you know, not letting me have all those toys I wanted), but I couldn’t see the favour because all I knew was Bath and my friends within Bath. But the anguish I experienced there was just as real as any other part of the world it was just I had a very narrow field of experience to gauge certain events with. Now coming to Brighton, not exactly a massive cultural leap, I realise there are people who have struggled ten times more than me to get where they are. I also realise there are people who are quite frankly idiots, who would definitely benefit from any kind of non self-infatuated experience.
posted by Shaun at 08:03
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