The Historic Summer of 2012

I haven't even read the other post to look at what I was doing and what I have written about the Summer of 2012. It was epic. Unfortunately the most significant things for me is that Christian died, it was my last known summer in Cornwall and well when is come to the Establishment, they were hitting it hard that year. 

There was The Royal Wedding, The Queen's Diamond Jubilee and The Olympics. For me my summer was spent locked in door in the deep anxiety of love sickness where all the relationships fall away and all that is left is the endless lingering conversations of love. I was slowly extrapolating my self from Penryn life. 

As I write this now living in Cape Town, it pains me. I never felt that I belonged in Cornwall and yet at the same time it was one of the richest times of my life. I felt lost there, biding my time until my first big next step. Trapped there, I wonder now, what make Cape Town so much more comfortable? It's an interesting question I haven't quite found the answers to yet. I always think of Cornwall and the large proportion of people I experienced there in terms of Englishness and that's where I failed to connect. Maybe it's because people had already built there tribes and I wasn't part of them. Then that isn't true I think about Belle a lot when I think about Cornwall, how she smoothly segwayed her way in. Belle is still layered and interconnected with it all. I literally removed myself from all those proto-hipsters and the vanity projects and I wonder if it was a lack of shared ideology that stopped me from bonding there. Cornwall certainly is a far more complex place than I ever managed to fully understand. I often feel that incomers never ever fully witnessed Cornishness. Even now I can think of rare examples of where Cornishness and Englishness meet. I suppose it was good training for Cape Town. 

So in many ways the historicness of 2012 and my failure to connect with it might say more about my relationship with Cornwall than anything else. It's a strange thing to be and immigrant in your own country. Where the things that are celebrated are the things that are admonished. That's the Scottish/ English dynamic. When English patriotism comes out to play dressed as Britishness it's hard to relate too. To berate the spectical. To appear separate, the refusal to assimilate. Scotland is not famous for it's summer street parties. While England was celebrating the Scots were in proudly in denial.

The country was going to hell in a hand basket and all anybody could do was bang on about The Royal Wedding, which there were actually two of. Everybody in there right mind knew it was a rouse and yet we all seemed to gleefully engaged with it on some level. It was a disturbing golden haze of parties, kind of like the ones that disguise the bleakness of winter. Some of us only glinted and at the oncoming catastrophies ahead.