Home town girl

I bought a vegan ice-cream, bantering with the young girl running the kiosk about whether she’d tried them herself. I noticed a same-sex couple kissing on the beach. The old Victorian pier, half burnt-down some time ago, now boasts a couple of hipster coffee shacks and a crepe stall where the slot machines and fortune tellers used to be. There was an advert for an Iyengar Yoga class adjacent to the bikers’ pub, once notorious for its heavy metal gigs and violence. The promenade now hosts a sociable Saturday morning Park Run, participants decked out in fancy Hoka running shoes and athleisure, performative in their run vests, stowing energy gels into multiple pockets.

So many things have changed in my home town. It is superficially more cosmopolitan, presenting more opportunity and diversity, yet still I can see it remains a poor place. It’s easy to scrape back the promising facade to reveal the same old social inequalities, deprivation and drugs in the back streets.

The Park Run crew, shiny in lycra and sweat, pass by the lost or homeless cracking open their first drinks of the day as they sit on the benches overlooking the sea. Out of sight of the fancy new beachfront hotel the fishing fleet looks increasingly anachronistic, unable to compete with supermarket prices or EU legislation, everything made increasingly challenging by Brexit. The charities which aim to support the refugees arriving in small boats across the English Channel face some hostility, as locals struggle to make their own ends meet. Graffiti along the promenade told this sad story, with angry invective scrawled over the official messages of welcome.

I saw all this too.

Some of these things amuse me or inspire me, some disappoint, some make me sad. And still this is my home-town, where I grew up. It made the beginnings of me. Similarly to this seaside town, I too have a careful facade that hides cracks and the parts of me that still feel broken and unchanged. I am getting comfortable with this. There’s no contradiction, both states can co-exist, I am still evolving. The town is still evolving. It’s nice like that, feeling that there’s no final destination, everything naturally adjusting over time. Perhaps awareness of that is all that matters. The joy of feeling changes as they happen as well as the sudden surprise when you look back and see how far you’ve come. It’s a shifting of identities that once seemed as immutable as the sea cliffs here, but which are actually friable sandstone, and softened by time and the weather until they take on a new form.