walks along the channel

i've spent the last two summers in england, working as a bartender and generally avoiding trouble. it's quite nice here, this place called west sussex, on the english channel and one of the sunniest spots in britain, though that isn't saying much. about an hour south of london on the train, it's where the old pensioners who can't afford spain come to retire, and for that reason most of the kids born here can't wait to leave. england's middle florida, i guess, but without the ihops.



my flat is about a block from the pebble beach that forms the south coast of the island, and a £30 ferry ride from the north of france. i walk in-land to get to work, but the route to the grocery store takes me along the beach's promenade, and even when it is rainy it is quite nice, in a masochistic kind of way. i grew up in the middle of north america, so being near any large body of water is a thrill.



the best pier and boardwalk on the channel coast is probably in brighton, thirty minutes east of here, but the city itself is very hip and cool, two attributes i'm trying to avoid. bognor regis, the village i live in, would probably be the type of place i'd generally shy away from back in the states, but one of the joys of living in another country is that everything mundane, banal, and boring becomes instantly exciting.



a lot of travelers, i think, frantically hoping to distinguish themselves from the "tourist" archetype, go to the opposite extreme, imagining that they can only really learn about another place by engaging in its most extreme practices and in its craziest places. i was this way when i lived in south africa, but i think i got tired of it, or it got weary of me, and, at any rate, it's not how the people who actually live there go about their business anyway. tourist attractions are great, and so are the uber-chic underground shows too, but i've found i prefer going grocery shopping at morrison's, or buying stamps from the royal mail, or reading the "sunday times" in a pub to either.



my accent, while not being overly, comic-ly american (like a southern drawl), is pretty much instantly recognizable, and i get a lot of "what are you doing here?" looks when i tell people where i'm from. the english seem to assume that any american coming here would want to live in london, or at least brighton or one of the major midlands cities like manchester or birmingham. it's a natural reaction, i guess, like how any american would assume that a briton moving stateside would reside in new york or los angeles.



part of the appeal of a place like bognor regis, west sussex, for me, at least, is that it isn't london or brighton, or manchester or birmingham, and that it's unknown to nearly everyone except those who know about it. it's "real britain," in the same way the mid-west is "real america," save for most of the backward conservatism that implies. this is a place where you're either dying to leave or coming to die, and where many of those living today as the former, by luck or inertia, will soon become the latter. for every small town american kid who wants to make it big on the coasts, but doesn't, and wiles away their life in quiet desperation, in a shit job with no future, on and on until the day they die - their english counterparts live here.