Escaping Southern England and Moving to Galloway
The Decision to flee "the South"
One spring day, sitting outside in the garden we made the decision that we should move back to Scotland. The sun was shinning, the birds were signing and summer was on the way after another hard winter.
For me, it felt like a weight had been lifted from my shoulders, and that was a brilliant feeling tinged with some fear.
For a long while I had been feeling that England was not my home anymore. The reasons are complex, but mainly it was a gut instinct that southern England was coming out of kilter with our values.
We decided on the small town of Dumfries, in the South West of Scotland. Dumfries is also home to Robert Burns.
Robert Burns is Scotland's favourite poet and he wrote in a form of English called "lowland Scots" which is very similar to English, but it is not english.
After making the decision, we handed a notice to our semi-feudal landlords of the local country estate and began the process of finding another rental property and new feudal landlords.
Being a naive fool, I thought that we find a new place easy-peasy, get another great rental, and that would be that.
However, it appears, that because Scotland has reasonable house prices, there is not a large rental market.
The reason: people on ordinary salaries appear to be able to own a home. The horror! Those barbarian Scots not paying ten- to fourteen times their salary for damp-infested rat holes.
After much looking, we did indeed find a place and the mad dash to find movers, dump our unwanted stuff and pack up eight years of southern living in a few weeks began.
In between all this, I had a wonderful leaving drink in which some great friends gave me a great send-off (you know who you are!).
I will not go into much detail about the arguments, love, disagreements, laughter, and (as with everything involving the English lettings market) legalised highway robbery that went into this process. Needless to say, got there in the end.
We got packed up and shipped our stuff up north and headed towards Basingstoke train station through typical English summer weather (it was raining).
While waiting for the train, I was slightly overcome with a lack of emotion and an overwhelming feeling that my upper lip should stay stiff.
It was like the English in me was unable to comprehend leaving again.
Was it like my upper lip was saying "But you love the casual racism", "you love the snobbery" and "You really, really love the disgusting intergenerational crime that is the English housing market"?
My upper lip just could not let go of the place.
Trains and Maroon Football Shirts
Luckily the rest of the body was in charge of my legs, and along with Cathrine, we headed to the platform and boarded the wonder of the 1950s that is the British rail network and headed north via changes at Birmingham, Manchester and Carlisle.
Now exciting things when travelling up on the rail network, for instance, I notice interesting things like these two significant things:
The view and infrastructure demonstrate the social-political-economic framework of the nation and the communities within it.
You get to see a broader range of football kits across the country. Now we all know that the UK has a massive imbalance between what London gets, what the South receives, and what the North does not get.
We could go into enormous detail about this, but basically, platforms 13 and 14 in Manchester station really do sum this up.
Platform 13 and 14 of Manchester station are so busy that if this was London, there already would have been:
- Two public enquiries.
- Headlines on the news at ten.
- A panorama special report with Jeremy Paxman
- And of course, the Daily Mail would have had a special edition dedicated to it (blaming it on the EU).
- However, these platforms are in the north of England, so no one cares – except those buggers using it.
This overcapacity has led to the mad system of a holding area before you go onto the platform to ensure (I presume) that no one is forced off the platform and into the oncoming path of a refurbished 1970s train.
Although this sounds like a smart idea, it shows how the UK has been ignoring "the regions" for far too long.
However, more interesting to most humans is the diverse football shirts that you see while travelling and for some reason on this trip up, I noticed a lot of purplish shirts.
As you are in and leaving Basingstoke and the south generally you see West Ham shirts.
As you approach Birmingham you start seeing the colours of the once-mighty Aston Villa.
Then as you are getting nearer to Manchester you start seeing Burnley shirts.
And finally, as you get closer to Scotland, sometimes you will see Hearts shirts.
It is a heartening (see what I did there) sight in a way to see shirts that are still geolocated. It shows some people still support clubs close to home. Instead of global brands far away like Arsenal, Spurs or Real Madrid.
Which of course now means as I am going to be living in Dumfries shortly, I am going to have to become a Queen of the South fan.
Which is an excellent way to think about starting a new life in a new town.