I was reading Cornish Dreamer this morning, and after reading her post, left a too-long comment on her site. I'm posting it here too, not so more people read it, but so that I can try to be more thoughtful about it, and perhaps go back and edit some of it. It is something I care about, and I want to talk about it. The issue are not irrelevant in the US either --- if we lived in a less economically depressed region than we do, it is probably the case that we'd have a harder time finding a nice house than we did here. And the same is true of Canada too.
As someone with an English accent living abroad, I'm often asked whether I'm "going to go home", i.e. will I return to live in the UK: and after I explain that to me, I will always try and appreciate wherever I am as home, I generally launch into a tirade against the UK: because I love it, and because I know that I can never afford to go back. I see house prices (my parents live outside London near the M25 -- imagine what the prices are like there!) go through the roof and higher, and even though academic salaries have increased in Britain over the past few years, they haven 't gone up enough to afford to live as nicely as here. By a long way.
In Cornwall, it seems, you have the extra pressure of being low-wage, but it is not just that: you have the pressure of being one of the most beautiful areas in the country, so that people with lots of money want to have second or third homes there, which just feeds the resentment.
It is easy, and not necessarily incorrect, to blame this all on an economic system which has fostered and nurtured the growth of inequities in society. This is not, however a prescription for making it better. Would that there was an easy way to fix this!
Sadly enough, I was thinking yesterday of the old "Not the Nine O'clock News" fake ad (I think that it was theirs): with the tag line "Come home to a real fire. Buy a cottage in Wales".
Yours, in absentia,
N.
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2 comments:
Thank you for mentioning my blog again!
I didn't realise that it wasn't just a british phenomenon. It's good to have the attitude that wherever you are is home, but sad that you couldn't afford to come back to the UK if you wanted.
There was a comedy series a while back, Dawn French as the lead, based in an imaginery cornish town. The first episode joked about burning second homes. The Cornish don't seem to have a sense of humour though, and I don't think they ever made another series.
Any time! Your blog is one of the first that I turn to when I start reading blogs in the morning!
The biggest problem with not being in the UK is that the little ones don't get to see their grandparents very often -- more than a year for my parents, and almost a year for LOML's.
N.
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