A sense of place;envy

I am not an envious person. However, I am envious of one thing, a sense of place.

I am not an envious person. However, I am envious of one thing, a sense of place.

To many, I could be defined as a rootless cosmopolitan – two years in South Africa, four in Swaziland, thirteen in the UAE, summers in France, parents in Jamaica, and now Scotland. Countless houses, neighbourhoods, and friends.

I am not quite Scottish, nor South African, yet definitely not English, nor Emirati, nor French. I have an affinity for all of them, yet no true sense of place.

To many this is a dream, a life abroad exploring the world and learning about different cultures. It has, in some sense, been that. I’ve known people from all over the world – I went to school with over sixty-five nationalities. I can easily relate to people from all over, whether it is Switzerland, Colombia, Hong Kong, or Botswana.

Yet often when I speak to an English person, I feel rootless. The first question I am asked when I give someone the spiel is whether I miss Dubai. Frankly, the answer is no. I feel little connection to the place. Oddly in my first year of university, I discovered I never felt homesick.

The Welsh have a word, Hiraeth, which is untranslatable into English. It roughly means a deep, bittersweet longing, nostalgia, or yearning for a home, place, or time that is lost, gone, or perhaps never existed. There is a school of thought in Welsh nationalism that would detest my twisting of Hiraeth, but linguistics is fluid. I think I often feel Hiraeth in the sense of longing for a place that I have never had.

Pride of place is so strong in British culture – see the devotion to being a Southerner or a Northerner. Yet my experience makes me an alien in this cultural ritual, my accent places me as a Southerner yet I am ethnically Scottish but born half a world away.

I am not an envious person, but late one evening I asked a partner to tell me about their childhood in Cornwall. They described the flowing beaches, the blazing sun, the sense of community, and the striking beauty of their childhood.

In that moment I was truly envious to have that love of place. To know in one’s heart you are from there, a product of a place, a culture, and a community. It’s an experience I can’t relate to and to hear it told in such vivid detail gave me both joy for them but also a twinge of longing for the same.

Environmental psychologists talk of the bond which develops between children and their childhood environments. The location of your childhood forms part of an individual’s identity and is a key point of comparison for considering subsequent places later in life.

As people move around as adults, they tend to consider new places in relation to this baseline landscape experienced during childhood. In an unfamiliar environment, a sense of place develops over time and through routine practices.

In some sense that is comforting; whilst I do not think I will ever have that childhood sense of place, I know that at some point there will be a place which will at last be mine.