The low road home

I grew up in a small community.

In a small place. On a small island. In a village that is a couple of kilometres long and a couple of houses wide. The village had three shops, four pubs (at its peak) and more bed and breakfasts that you could shake a rather large stick at.
As I grew up I became aware that most people would bang on about how it was sheltered, living in a bubble, away from the real world where real things happened, where it was all harder but so much more rewarding. Most of these people had lived in this real world (so they said) and could tell me with some authority that I was better off here. While of course retaining that mystique and obvious superiority that having lived and experienced this real world brought.

There has always been a prevailing attitude there that somehow the evils of the "outside" world somehow stop at the ferry terminal on the mainland, and to a certain extent it is true.

The population is mainly in the over 50s bracket, people looking for a quiet place to get on with the next step in their lives, people fleeing the "rat race", people looking for a haven from unsatisfactory lives elsewhere, so it is little wonder that people feel this way. There is little crime, indeed the resident crime lords are petty drug peddlers flogging second rate class "C" recreational drugs to the minority youths on the island, providing an expensive but vaguely thrilling alternative to getting pissed up. Which they will do after anyway. You can't steal anything large or expensive as there are only two ways off the island and they both have a sufficiently awkward frequency as to make any kind of getaway impractical and dangerous. In short, not many nefarious deeds happen there.

Having said all of that I have lived in the "real" world since my childhood and found it no more "real" that the island. Indeed everywhere I go I find the same attitudes, mostly from people that come to a place, be it rural or urban. A kind of anti-greener grass attitude where people cling to the hope that the place they have come to is somehow is remarkably better that that the one they hail from, that people here are somehow simpleton hicks and that they have seen things that those people wouldn't believe, attacked ships on fire off the belt of Orion.....yeah yeah and the rest.

The hard truth is that everywhere is as real as the next place. Sure the problems might be different, the living might be harder depending on circumstance and opportunity but less real? The fact I might not have first hand experience of a mugging or live in an area where you wouldn't go into certain areas if you were white somehow makes my life worth less? That there is some strange glory in having been through “it all”, something that makes you so much more admirable a person? Certainly someone to look up too and take the worldly advice of?

The problems at home are nationwide problems. The main ones are alcoholism, unemployment, depression. I have lost one friend to an alcoholism related suicide, my father died painfully and slowly at 52 as his body fell apart due to his massive drinking problem. My mother is an alcoholic and I am seeing the same thing happen to her. I go home and I go out to see friends I knew ten and fifteen years ago hitting the bar like they were eighteen at a party. Every night. I see the locals in the pubs, wizened and twisted after a lifetime of the same, smile sagely at them as they live one dram at a time, taking the pitying looks without a flinch because they know, they know the score, and they are just keeping the stool warm for them. If they make it.

Sure I can walk down a street there at 3am and not get raped or set on fire. But don't you ever fucking tell me it isn't real.