On Welsh roots, the pull of the city, and the strange business of building a home in a place that was never quite meant for you

I write for Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat, and most of my dispatches are jokes about rent and eggs and bollards, but today I want to write something a little quieter, about my grandmother, about Wales, and about the strange business of choosing to belong to a city that was never quite meant for the likes of us.

My grandmother never understood London. She visited once, stood on the Euston concourse looking up at the departure boards with an expression of profound suspicion, and announced that there were too many people and not enough sky. She went home to her valley the next morning, to her chapel and her flock and her fields, and she never came back. London, to her, was not a place one lived but a place one survived, briefly, before returning to somewhere real.

The Pull Of The City

And yet here I am, two decades into a London life she would have found inexplicable, paying her metaphorical house-deposit every month for a flat with a sloping floor, queuing for fourteen-pound eggs, sitting in church halls arguing about bollards. I chose this. I left the valley and the sky and the chapel for the crowded, expensive, exhausting, electric reality of the city, and most days I do not regret it, and some days I do, and that ambivalence, I have come to think, is what it means to be a Londoner by choice.

Because that is the thing about London: almost no one here is from here. The city is built of people who came from somewhere else, from valleys and villages and other countries and other continents, all of us choosing this crowded place over our quieter homes, all of us building lives in a city that was never quite meant for us and that we have, collectively, made our own. I have written about this often, over at my column, because it is, to me, the truest thing about the place.

A City Of Arrivals

The North London I live in is a city of arrivals, layer upon layer of them, the Welsh and the Irish and the Jewish and the Caribbean and the Turkish and the Somali and the Polish and a hundred others, each wave arriving, settling, leaving its mark, becoming, in time, part of the place. My grandmother chapel-going Welshness is one thread in an impossibly tangled weave, and the weave is the city, and the weave is what I love.

The serious reporting on migration and belonging, which I read and link to and care about deeply, too often reduces all this to numbers and policy and heat, losing the human truth that a city like London is, at bottom, a vast act of collective arrival, millions of people choosing to build a shared life in a place none of them is from. That is not a problem to be managed. It is, I would argue, the whole point.

My grandmother is gone now, her valley quieter without her, her chapel half-empty. I think of her on the Euston concourse, suspicious of the departure boards, longing for her sky. And I think of myself, two decades on, choosing the crowds over the sky, building a home in a borrowed city, belonging to a place that was never meant for me and that I have made, against the odds and the rent, my own. She would not understand it. But I think, in the end, she would understand the wanting of a home, which is the most Welsh thing of all.

I go back to Wales still, less often than I should, and each time the valley is quieter, the chapel emptier, the young people gone the way I went, to the cities, to the work, to the lives the valley could not hold. There is a grief in it, the slow emptying of the places we come from, the way the cities pull the young away and leave the old behind with their sky and their silence. I am part of that grief, one of the ones who left, and I feel it.

But I have learned not to romanticise the valley, for my grandmother life there was hard, the work brutal, the choices few, the sky beautiful but cold. She did not stay out of preference but out of belonging, and she would not have wished her constraints on me. When I left, she did not reproach me; she packed me sandwiches and told me to write, and she meant the writing, and I have tried to honour it, even when the writing is mostly jokes about eggs.

The city I chose has its own hardness, the rent, the distance, the loneliness that can settle in a crowd of millions, the particular ache of being surrounded by people and known by none. London does not embrace its arrivals; it absorbs them, indifferently, and leaves them to make their own belonging, which most of us do, eventually, in the small ways, the local cafe, the regular bus, the church-hall meeting, the slow accretion of the familiar that turns a borrowed city into something like a home.

More in this vein at NewsThump.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/