There was a time a few years ago when I would’ve given anything, traded every possession, bartered my mind, sold my soul, just so I could scrape together enough money to study at Oxford. Life has moved on since, but all of last week, there I was, nearly four years on, back at what would’ve been the beginning of my other life. Still, now doesn’t seem wrong somehow, doesn’t feel like a terrible mistake or a lost chance or wasted years. Instead, merely the purest affirmation of the fact that somehow it was always meant to be this way, in this time, in these shoes, with those greys in our heads, with all those twisted, frenetic, madly zigzagging years tailing behind. There’s an intangible, wordless, delicious perfection in the way we all collided once more, like it was the most natural, most logical thing to have ever existed on this earth. So far away from the place we used to call home, in the bitter cold of Brighton, in the pouring rain, along a cobbled beach, under blazing, shimmering, fiery lights, along rows of rows and rows of multi-hued mini-‘houses’, by the platinum lagoon, white, bright, light, a warm car, swirling steam, shivering hesitantly from a cup of acrid coffee, gravestones and freezing toes, duvet daze, radio heads, joined at the head, all halves. Blankets of fragile dreams, our own home, our own precious world. I have always, always walked that road. We all have, and we always will, together. I could walk forever.
A shibboleth, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is ‘a word used as a test for detecting people from another district or country by their pronunciation; a word or sound very difficult for foreigners to pronounce correctly.’ A way of separating one people from another.
There was a time a few years ago when I would’ve given anything, traded every possession, bartered my mind, sold my soul, just so I could scrape together enough money to study at Oxford. Life has moved on since, but all of last week, there I was, nearly four years on, back at what would’ve been the beginning of my other life. Still, now doesn’t seem wrong somehow, doesn’t feel like a terrible mistake or a lost chance or wasted years. Instead, merely the purest affirmation of the fact that somehow it was always meant to be this way, in this time, in these shoes, with those greys in our heads, with all those twisted, frenetic, madly zigzagging years tailing behind. There’s an intangible, wordless, delicious perfection in the way we all collided once more, like it was the most natural, most logical thing to have ever existed on this earth. So far away from the place we used to call home, in the bitter cold of Brighton, in the pouring rain, along a cobbled beach, under blazing, shimmering, fiery lights, along rows of rows and rows of multi-hued mini-‘houses’, by the platinum lagoon, white, bright, light, a warm car, swirling steam, shivering hesitantly from a cup of acrid coffee, gravestones and freezing toes, duvet daze, radio heads, joined at the head, all halves. Blankets of fragile dreams, our own home, our own precious world. I have always, always walked that road. We all have, and we always will, together. I could walk forever.
