Cead Mille Failte

For some reason today I was put in mind of a woman I knew in my distant past.  I was living in Amsterdam at the time and the woman was Ghanaian.  She lived with an acquaintance of mine, a guy twenty years her senior with a raging coke habit and delusions of gangsterism.  He wasn't a bad bloke.  In fact, he was quite decent in many ways. He and his wife gave me a place to lay my head for a while for which I will be eternally grateful.  He was prone to flying off the handle now and again, and his paranoia was sometimes difficult to put up with, but he wasn't a bad geezer - just another lost soul in a complicated world perhaps, if you don't mind me waxing poetical.

His chemically assisted temper was no threat to the Ghanaian lady I should say, who was twice his size at the best of times (those being the few months between coming home from prison and wrecking his system with Marching Powder all over again).  He was no physical threat at least.  There is the question of how detrimental his rather skewed world view may have been however.

I recall a time during one of John Lennon's death anniversaries (or birthday anniversaries, or the anniversary of him farting or something) when they made a big thing of the 'Bed Ins' at the Amsterdam Hilton.  It was a fun time.  For an entire week the TV was full of all things Lennon and a lot of whacky baccy was smoked - well, more than is usual in Amsterdam I would guess, or more than was usual by me in Amsterdam I would guess.  By the time this all finished, my gracious hostess was of the unshakeable conviction that not only had Yoko Ono physically split up the Beatles, but also that she had had John murdered and may have had something to do with the Kennedy assassination too.  This was not idle speculation or conspiracy theorism.  To her it was fact and all the patient explaining in the world would be to no avail.  She had been told this by her husband, and in lieu of any other real avenue of information in a foreign and alien environment, she took it as fact.  What choice did she have?

Well, why do I mention this incident at all?  It's a good question.  The answer is something to do with the way this woman, who was intelligent enough, seemed to be constantly in a state of confusion.  Kind of 'not there', but all the time.  It was a sad thing to see in a way that I can't quite explain.  She went through the daily rituals of life in the West; hoovering the floor, washing the dishes, making the food, watching TV etc, but she handled things like they might blow up at any moment.  The hoover was treated the way you might treat a psychotic house guest whose mood you could never quite predict, and the Yoko incident spoke volumes about how hard it must be to gather reliable information about the world around you when you are not of it.

I don't know how she'd wound up in Amsterdam and married to this  mostly harmless old coke head, but you got the feeling she hadn't quite grasped the enormity it all.  I imagined the life she had in 'The Dam' must have been better than the one she had left behind, though I was young then and didn't really know much about anything.  Perhaps she had arrived in in Europe following a whirlwind romance with my acquaintance while he was on one of his apparent and oft romanticised smuggling missions.  Perhaps he had been wearing a lightweight white cotton suit and fedora hat when they first met, with cigarettes in a silver tin and a moustache like David Niven.  A large part of me doubts this scenario, but you never know.  Stranger things have happened.  The point is, recalling all this brought something home to me:  there is a huge difference between an immigrant and an ex-pat.  From the point of view of the native population I mean.

While living in America, I was somewhere in between.  As an Undocumented Alien I spent a lot of my time living in a real or imagined fear of  'la migra' coming through the door in the dead of night and carting me off.  And while I didn't have to put up with the associated racism which constantly follows those unlucky enough to have traipsed off around the globe in search of a better life, it did give me a certain unpleasant insight.  Not that had I traipsed off in search of a better life of course.  I wound up in America for much the same reasons as I wound up in Amsterdam - I just kind of went along with things and assumed stuff would pan out okay if I didn't think too hard about it all.  And I am white.  And English.   And so guess what?  Things did pan out pretty well.  I never had anybody tell me that I was bringing down America, or spit on me in the street, or try to beat me up for taking American jobs.  Just as my American wife has never been racially abused here in the UK.  We are white so we have some god given right to go anywhere without too much fear of abuse.

So I was lucky I suppose.  Shit, I was born lucky.  Literally.  Being white and British I was born into a tiny group of some of the luckiest people on the face of the earth and at any time in history.  I was never an illegal immigrant, I was only ever an Undocumented Alien.  Push come to shove, I could get away with being an ex-pat.  The Mexicans working at Main Street Market could never pull that one off.  They would never be elevated to the grandiose status of first class citizen, a status so casually gifted to me through no other reason than sheer spermicidal good luck.

Well, I seem to have drifted a bit.  But what the heck, it's Christmas and I am full of fine food and fine thoughts.  But I was wondering what may have happened to my African hostess in the port of Amsterdam.  I wondered if she ever got the hang of being largely unwelcome in a foreign land despite her best efforts, or if she just upped sticks and went home, which at the end of the day is the dream of all immigrants.

Home is where the heart is after all, even should the body be conscripted by fate to wander.  And no amount of tower block flats in European ghettos, and no amount of welfare cheques or badly paid jobs, or even the knowledge that you probably wont be carted off in the night and killed for no real reason you could point to will ever change that.  I think we either choose to forget, or refuse to believe the fact of that basic premise:  Home is where the heart is.  It is also the place, I believe,  where you welcome tired strangers.  As I have been welcomed more than once.  Despite everything.  Even myself.

Goodnight.