Or, England was never my home either
Sometimes I miss England. Not the people I knew (though I think of some of them fondly) nor the places I lived and worked in - with one exception, the City of Hull and its University - but the light, the weather, the landscapes I knew. I was born in a small steel town called Scunthorpe, on the north east coast. I remember driving with a friend through the dereliction that had overtaken the majority of the town's steel production facilities (universally known as 'the Works') at the height of the depradations of that vile hag, Thatcher. She single-handedly killed my town; it never recovered from the cutbacks in domestic steel production her government oversaw.
But her decisions gave birth to a certain kind of beauty - no compensation to redundant steelworkers and their families - that didn't exist before. I've always loved industrial architecture and driving through the Works early in one winter's morning, watching the steel and rust transform beneath a silver sun, made so by fog, was peaceful and satisfying.
England's skies are supposed to be grey - but grey is too coarse a term for their color. The skies of England are pearl in Autumn; In Winter they can be the color of slate; in Summer and Spring they vary between shades of eggshell blue, magenta, violet; to a blue that there aren't words to describe. You have to be inside a room lit by only a dim light, late in the evening before nightfall proper and looking out of a window with the light at your back, to see it.
What I miss most are wind through the trees in evening in Winter, and the rain battering the windows, and the sounds of Rooks and Ravens and Crows. I miss the drive I used to take from Hull up to Whitby Bay with my first wife, up to the Yorkshire Moors and their boulders and gullies and ferns, and wandering sheep, the deep grey of granite and the purple, green and orange of ferns and heather, and silence. I miss that silence a lot.
One day I'm going to go back to Boggle Hole and Robin Hood's Bay, to go looking for jet along the rough beaches, and sit by rock pools and watch little things living their lives in them. And I'm going to go back to Hull, to houses that lean in crazy directions and have to be supported by huge wooden props because the city is, very slowly, sinking into the mud of the River Humber. Once there I shall go back to Spurn Point, if it hasn't been entirely washed away (it vanishes once every hundred years or so, and then is rebuilt by tidal eddies distributing silt and shingle). There are countless birds there, that never stop crying and the sky is usually a flat gunmetal grey, and the wind is always cold even in Summer. Stand at the end of the Point and you feel like you're standing at the end of the world - there's no way left to go except back, or forward into the sea.
And the sea is always the color of chocolate close to land, because the entire east coast is collapsing into it. Houses disappear, fields vanish, some times taking livestock, buildings, equipment and, occasionally, people with them.
I miss the drive up over Scarborough across the Moors and then down to Whitby Bay, where Bram Stoker had Dracula first come to land in England. They hold a Goth Festival in Whitby every year, and dozens of Draculas can be seen wandering the streets, and the Abbey at the foot of which Stoker has Dracula bite Lucy westenra, his first English victim. If you go up to the graveyard at the top of the town, just by the Abbey, you can see grave stones that the sea winds have chewed down into illegibility. They look like the stone they're made of is rotting, and the weathering process has rendered all their colors in the tones of corruption.
You can look down from there into the town and watch the traffic in the tiny harbor, see the fishing-boats coming in and going out. And when you've had enough of that you can, as I used to do, walk down into the town to eat sone of the best fish and chips (fries, not chips as they are here) I've ever tasted, fish almost straight from the sea.
I don't for a moment miss the life I led there. I miss the light, and the wind, and the landscape.