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October 21 - October 21, 2019
“Typical, making jokes again. The English curse. You use jokes as a shield to not feel things. You know that, right?”
I remembered an article I’d recently read that said whatever first attracted you to a partner was always the thing you resented most at the end.
Ants never suffer identity crises.
I think you’re afraid to really try because as long as you never do, you can’t fail. You confuse freedom with having no responsibilities. But that’s not freedom. That’s just selfishness.”
Exclusion zones do wonders for reducing road traffic.
We liked Ivan already. He played fast and loose with our health and safety.
We found mildewed, faded, and ripped posters on doors and walls advertising the planned festivities.
The wrong group gets too certain about themselves, their beliefs, and their rights. They pull society’s levers and inflict the repercussions upon everyone else. History is what happens when ego meets happenstance.
You don’t just get to create your own country, surely? Yet away from the scrutiny and glare of popular culture, people are doing just that. Micronations, they’re usually called. Nations like Sealand (an oil rig off the coast of England), The Republic of New Atlantis (which was a bamboo-raft nation founded by Ernest Hemingway’s brother), and the Kingdom of North Sudan (created so that the founder’s seven-year-old daughter could become a princess. Disney has bought the movie rights). Much closer to my home (Wittenberg, to be precise) is Germany’s Königreich Deutschland. Its eccentric founder,
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“Hitler was also democratically elected. There is no virtue in democracy.”
I’d always assumed democracy was, as Winston Churchill had once quipped, “the worst form of government, except for all other others.”
Any nation is only as strong as the people who believe in it.
‘Croatia is also just in your head. It’s just an imagination.’
People aren’t really called Boris. Characters in movies are called Boris. They’re either good with IT, or they’re hitmen.
I’d prided myself on liking nearly everybody. Sometimes it took some creative mental accounting, and moral-flaw overlooking, but everyone had at least one redeeming feature.
Every country that now exists began in just the same way as Liberland, with a group of radicals chasing something other people said was impossible. Creating something out of nothing. Countries might feel sacred or as if they’ve always been there and yet they’re created; divided; reunited. They change their names; have their borders drawn and redrawn; change their capitals; change currencies; and elect new governments all the time.
countries really are collective fictions.
They’re also right about the potential of new technology to change those fictions, to create better, fairer stories. It’s already happening. Look around next time you’re in a bar or restaurant or on the subway. How many people are checking out of that physical place and into a virtual one, a digital no-man’s land. Physical location is just not as important as it used to be. Long gone are the days where we are damned to grow up, work, find a partner, raise children, and then die within a hundred kilometres of where we are born. As an immigrant, I’ve experienced the benefits of free movement
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It’s a weird thing to admit that you’ve become bored of yourself.
That was what travel was for. The unfamiliarity of being where you don’t belong frees you from any expectations about how things there are supposed to work, and, in turn, how you will react to them. A childlike naivety takes over.
Daily life is kind of boring, I realised, standing at the sink, wiping soup from a bowl. It’s full of obligations to be met, bills to be paid, and washing up to be… washed(?), and if that’s not bad enough, if you do just one teeny tiny little inconsequential thing wrong—like, oh, I don’t know, forget to pay a few years of tax—they put you in prison. It’s not to be recommended, really, any of it. Unlike running away. Running away is great. It lets you escape from the prison of routine.
not unfriendly or hostile to outsiders, just confused by their existence.
Boredom is a luxury good. This simple statement dug its claws into me and didn’t let go. Of course. I’d lost sight of the extraordinary privilege inherent within boredom. Most people in the world don’t get to decide whether or not to engage in politics. Don’t feel so safe and secure and bored that they actively go out looking for danger, just to feel more alive.
People who aren’t self-reflective in their everyday lives don’t magically uncover new modes of thought or hidden depths of understanding just because they swap Home for Rome or Gloucester for Gabon.
It looked as if he’d recently teleported into this body and wasn’t sure yet how to operate it.
Thetford is part of East Anglia, a large, possibly tumorous lump sticking out on England’s hip. Thetford is cloaked tightly in forest, as if someone is trying to hide it. Having lived there for the first eighteen years of my life, I don’t rule the possibility out. The only reputation it had in the local area was for being “a bit rough,” which is like describing a kangaroo as “a bit jumpy.”
The Sun, England’s most popular daily waste of tree,
By this point the Schengen Area had encouraged ten thousand mostly Portuguese and Polish immigrants to come work in the town’s factories, increasing the town’s population by 50 percent and its xenophobia by 1000 percent.
I bristled as a group of teenagers passed me, forgetting that because of my age, all that petty tribalism and bullying I’d had to endure in my youth didn’t apply anymore. I was anonymous to them now, just another boring adult.
Families are like icebergs: there’s always way more going on under the surface.
I realised how much of it I did, too. I guess we all do—recast ourselves in the stories of our lives, giving ourselves starring roles in our successes and minimising the role we play in our failures, working back from our actions to justifications, not the other way round. In
I hadn’t realised then that the only way you know that something has value is if you find yourself willing to make sacrifices for it. That’s what elevates it, helps you separate life’s noise from its signal. Just as monogamy gives a relationship one sacred act you agree to do with each other and no one else.
An obligation-less life is a selfish life.
We teased each other in that uniquely English way that is simultaneously offensive and affectionate
Because all places are strange places, I was coming to realise. Strange because people are, fundamentally, strange. We’re odd ramshackle collections of confusions, delusions, hopes, dreams, neuroses, unrequited loves, repressed traumas, magical thinking, denial, honesty, humour, earnestness, and kindness.
For some reason, I’d thought that because the people here had chosen to live in the same place in which they were born, resisting the urge to flee to some big, anonymous, polluted city, their stories were uninteresting. That had been stupid. In the end, the only thing that had really stopped me from coming here was me. I’d had a story about Thetford, and I’d told that story so often I’d started to believe it was true.
Travel is wonderful. A near-perfect state of surprise, wonder, and excitement. A chance to challenge your assumptions, defeat your prejudices, and write a new story for yourself. As a traveller. An exile. An adventurer. An explorer. As someone with great stories of struggle, survival, curiosity, courage, and reinvention. But the pursuit of those narratives can be harmful, too.
We tended to treat our relationship like a toaster we’d won in a prize draw we couldn’t remember entering—not necessarily what we’d been looking for, but now that it was here, well, a toaster could certainly be useful. It wasn’t a normal approach to a relationship, to not think you’d always be together, to not have that as a goal even, but it worked for us. Took the pressure off having to chase Happy Ever After.
“I like that you’re wired for novelty. You have been since I met you—you just lost it there somehow. That curiosity is what makes it interesting to be in a relationship with you. Every time you read a book you suddenly have a whole new world view, even if you forget it after a week.”
It was like travelling with a real-life Google that you could also hug.
“on-the-spot guidance.”
Most striking to me in this showpiece city was the complete absence of graffiti.
Part of me wants to go and drop a wrapper just to see what happens.”
I have no doubt that they have doubts about the regime but that the cost of expressing these is simply too high. They aren’t brainless zombies. It would have been easier to stomach if they were.
They were seriously needy, those two. Forty thousand statues?
