Rootlessness

Hello Beautiful People, 

Rootlessness: The lack of roots or ties to a particular place or community

Whenever people ask me where I’m from I always give the same reply “Kendal. Cumbria.”

This usually elicits one of the following responses:

1) The Mintcake Debacle

“Oh, like the Mintcake!”

“Yeah, like the Mintcake”

“What exactly is Mintcake?”

“Disgusting, artery clogging poison, now can we please stop saying Mintcake?”

2) The Chirpy Tourist

“I’ve been there, it’s lovely isn’t it.”

“I guess.”

“We went to a really nice café, you might know it, it had some weird cake”

Cue lengthy discussion about cake in attempt to discover which of the 50 million cafes of Kendal they went to that one time, before they realise it wasn’t Kendal and wasn’t even cake…it was Grasmere ginger bread (again, disgusting why does nobody ever talk to me about nice things, like Cartmel Stickly Toffee pudding)

3) The Geographically Ignorant Timewaster (typically a Southerner)

 “Sorry, where.”

“You know the Lake District?”            

“No?”

“Lancaster?”

“No.”

“Beatrix Potter.”

“No.”

“Really?”

“Is it near Manchester?”

“IT NORTH, ITS REALLY REALLY NORTH.”

“You mean Scotland?”

Cue me banging me head against the nearest wall

4)  The Existential Crisis Inducing Exchange

“You don’t sound Cumbrian.”

Sigh

“You don’t even sound Northern.”

Desperately looks for nearest exit

“You sound like you’re from Oxford or something.”

This forth response is the worst, because they’re right, I don’t sound Cumbrian. That’s because when I say I’m from Cumbria, I’m technically lying, but saying I’m from Kendal is easier that giving the honest response, because the honest response is I’m not really sure where I’m from and telling people that really confuses them.

It also really confuses me, but then I am easily confused.

It leaves me feeling a bit rootless, like I don’t really belong anywhere, like I’m just drifting from place to place.

I start questioning whether it’s possible to not be from anywhere.

When people guess at Oxford, they’re pretty close. I was born in the West Midlands, Warwickshire if you want to be precise (You say West Midlands to people and they look at you in confusion, bemused by your lack of Brummie accent, NOT EVERYONE IN THE WHOLE OF THE MIDLANDS SOUNDS LIKE THEIR FROM BIRMINGHAM OK!). I spent the first 7 years on my life in a wee Midlands’ village of before moving up North and spending several years flitting about between the wee villages of the Lancashire/Cumbria/Yorkshire borders.  

I might have been born in the Midlands, but I never feel like I’m from there.

If anything my parents and their accents and to some extent the lack of definable accent, further complicates the situation. I’m not really sure any of us are from anywhere. My Mum’s the simplest, an Anglo-Welsh borders girl, with a dose of the Midlands and the North. My Dad is more complicated. A Dubliner, educated in 1950s Essex (with the addition of elocution to confuse his accent even more), who then moved the Midlands before ending up in Cumbria, his accent can jump between counties and even countries within the space of a single sentence; well-spoken with a undercurrent of a drawn-out otherness. Put him in front of a rugby match and you get the bellows of a true Irishman but give him too much wine and you get the chatter of an English public school boy (a fact he profusely denies but is a fact nonetheless).

All things considered, it’s not really surprising my own voice gets confused.

My Mum stays pretty constant, only occasionally slipping into a more northern twang, but my Dad and I are chameleons. We subconsciously drift into the vernacular of whoever we’re with, an unintentional effort to fit in.

Put me in a room with my privately-educated-all-girls-school friends and within the first five minutes I’ll become heavily self-conscious of every time I drop my ‘t’s and by the time ten minutes has passed I’ll be talking like I’m the latest addition to the cast of Made In Chelsea.

Put me in the middle of a gathering of all my Dad’s old friends from Southend and I pick up an Essex accent, despite it being my first time in Essex.

Put me in a pub with a girl with an Irish accent and I’ll accidentally, drunkenly talk at her in a Belfast accent for a solid fifteen minutes, before I realise what I’m doing and by then it’s too late to stop and can’t remember how to talk in my normal voice because I’ve lost all sense of what my normal voice sounds like.

I end up thinking in different accents to the point that sometimes, I open my mouth and I don’t know what voice is going to come out.

The Irish question (not to be confused with the Irish question from the 19^th century Britain in regards to Irish independence, ooh look me throwing the history facts at you) is the other question I’m forever answering when people learn my name, after they’ve asked me to spell it out for them a dozen times and told me what an odd spelling it is, like I’m not already aware of that because I haven’t been spelling it out for people since I learnt to spell it myself! (Deep breaths, calm down)

“Ooh, that’s an interesting name. Is that Irish?”

 Usually followed by:

Are you Irish? Have you got any Irish in you? Where abouts in Ireland are you from? North or South? Ooh look at your hair you can tell you’ve got Irish blood.  Etc. Etc. Etc. 

To which I have to regurgitate the answers: Half Irish on my Dad’s side. From Dublin but we had family in the North and yes I am aware my hair is bright orange but thank you for being so observant.

So, a second generation Irish immigrant, neither fully English or fully Irish.

Irish enough to be kicked out the country by the BNP and UKIP, but too blatantly English for the Irish. 

I’m left sitting in my Irish rugby shirt feeling even more confused.

(Don’t even get me started on other people’s opinions on whether I should support Ireland or England. I’m an Ireland supporter. Deal with it.)

When Isabel Allende spoke out about her exile from Chile she said:

“I discovered that roots are not in a landscape, or a country, or a people; they’re usually inside yourself.”

And I think she’s right, I might really be from Warwickshire but I feel like I’m from Cumbria. I might sometimes feel like I’m drifting from place to place consumed by a sense of rootlessness, but when I think about it I know where I’m from really. I know I don’t sound Cumbrian and I know there’s always going to be a part of me that’s jumping up and down waving a tricolour furiously because that drop of Irish is apparently here for good, and I know that my accent can chop and change in the space of minutes and maybe that means I’m not a proper northerner, but when I think of home I think of Kendal and the Lakes and that’s good enough for me.

Just for God’s sake (and your own), please don’t ask me where I’m from.

Love

S

xxx