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 Anyone who knows me at all will know two things about me: I resist labelling; and I detest jargon. Which is rather unfortunate.

Because, at the moment I feel like I'm trapped inside the box of my flat drowning in a sea of both; and will be discovered one day strangled by the strings of all those labels, with a note saying "I have ceased to conform within the paradigms which constitute proof of life."

It's fortunate that, after those dark years of thinking I would never again be normal, I at last came out of the fog. It was miraculous and freeing, and opened the world up for the first time in 6 years.

And then we went into Lockdown. And I realised I would never be normal.

Now it might surprise anyone who knows me that I have always dreamt about being able to pass unnoticed through a crowd. To walk into a gathering and to be able to join in with what everyone else was talking about. To have shared the same experiences. The same cultural background. And to know automatically what label I was carrying around with me. What it allowed me to do. How I was expected to behave. What would count as the wrong thing to say.

I expect when you get to be as old as I am now, and as peripatetic as I have always been, its a bit much to expect to know who the Kardashians are or why, on learning they are a family I've never met nor will ever be called upon to meet, I could summon up interest in their doings. Or to have known my place in South Africa. Or been able to fall into intense discussions about the rulers of all the dynasties in China. Or to have understood at first that being called a "fucken' wingeing Pom" was said as a term of affection and carried a complicated history in Australia.

But I had always thought that one day, when I went "Home" I'd become one of the crowd. An English person living in England. Just another Brit. 

As I spent the first year of being 'just another Brit' losing my future, my money and my place in society; the second losing everything I owned except for my slippers & pjs; and the next couple bat-shit crazy (Oh well; 'not up to par' for the sensitive); it hasn't been till this last Lockdown that I've been able to sit and think. Rationally. And in complete isolation. With no input from anyone else. Without a sounding board; without distraction or relief.

During the the last few months, I've been watching and listening more to the people around me - on the street; on Twitter; on Youtube.

 Two things have become blindingly clear: I've lived my whole life as a foreigner...and that's never going to stop. Because, I now understand, I'm never going to be "English".

It's not just because I don't understand the vast swathes of conversation that are related to TV or radio; its because, depressingly, another huge swathe of people think in a completely alien way to me. 

Because, though I have a culture I share with many of those around me, and one in which I've always been steeped, I know less than bugger-all from, really, the Edwardian to - well  March, 2021. 

I'm the person carolling out a hearty Hurrah! and suddenly realising everyone else is growling Boo! I'm that woman who told such a dreadful anecdote about her dog being called Boris; because it had never struck her there were people who actually felt that Boris was a jolly nice name to be standing in the park & yelling at the top of one's lungs. In Brighton.

I was definitely the only person on the dance-floor of the Royal London Yatch Club ( situated, you'll learn, without even batting an eyelid I expect, in Cowes. On The Isle of Wight) to yell, stridently "Who the fuck is Alice?" and then laugh at the dead silence until the crimson-faced guy I was dancing with explained that the otherwise universal interpolation I had added to the old and ancient "Living next door to Alice" was not generally the version sung here.

But now, having been watching the  changes which have insidiously crept not just into our language, but from thence into mind



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