Returning to Krypton
July 6, 2006
IT IS tempting to believe that most of the world has now done away with outmoded notions like culture shock. After all, when you can take an EasyJet to Ulan Bator, drink sickly white chocolate mocha from Starbucks on the Nogayskaye Steppe, and receive spam emails in the barrios of Chimaltenango, there is nothing left to shock you. The world, as everyone keeps saying, has become much of a muchness, the sort of globalised mush of high-tech amenities, fast-food joints, and brand-name advertising that allows people to describe Shanghai's Pudong district as "Milton Keynes on steroids" and provokes otherwise sensible columnists like Thomas Friedman of the New York Times to suggest that perfect peace can be achieved under the glow of the Golden Arches of McDonalds.
Nevertheless, your correspondent's first visit to the United Kingdom in three years – which included almost four hours drinking sickly white chocolate mocha in the ineffable city of Milton Keynes itself - did produce something akin to culture shock. In fact, England's green and pleasant land, chopped up by the mazes of suburbia, its population growing ever plumper in coffee shops and bistros and twenty-four hour "gastropubs", didn't seem to have changed all that much. Sure, the country's police force seemed to have got ever so slightly younger, the TV schedules seemed to be packed with more attention-seeking, talent-free nobodies than ever before, popular music seemed to have degenerated into camp dance routines, and Tesco's had swallowed up another 15.7% of the nation's gross domestic product, but the tranquil essence of England's posher regions remained unaltered. After spending years buried in the high-decibel excess of China's construction boom, everything on the whole seemed so bloody quiet, and I found myself waking up at dawn in north Oxfordshire, utterly aghast that there were no demolition men hacking away at stumps of rock that used to be tenement buildings, shocked to find that the ringing in my ears had subsided, and quite unable to sleep through the awful, lingering, unbreakable silence of an early England morning.
Of course, few things symbolise the globalisation of culture more than football, especially during a much-anticipated (but ultimately disappointing) World Cup. Despite not having a team at the biggest sporting event of the year, China itself went World Cup crazeee, even topping the list of World Cup-related deaths over the course of the month. And almost everyone, not only in England, had an opinion on the efficacy of Lampard and Gerrard stepping on each other's heels in midfield, on the wisdom of selecting the untested 7-year old striker Theo Walcott in place of more seasoned Premiership performers, and on the enigma that is Sven Goran Eriksson and his curiously laissez-faire approach to key coaching techniques such as morale building, tactics and basic footy nous.
The difference, in England, was a question of intensity. Football, as the man said, is not a matter of life and death: it is more important than that. Phone-ins up and down the land testified to the fact that this was the most portentous moment in British history since… well, since the last World Cup. Pundits queued up to tell the nation that the losing team, whoever it would be, would certainly be disappointed by defeat, and that the winners would, make no mistake about it, be delighted to go into the next round. Sagacious members of the public suggested that all England needed to do to prevail was to make sure they took the lead and held on to it for ninety minutes.
And so it proved on the warm Saturday afternoon when England’s hopes were dashed by the nefarious Portugal. Your correspondent was ensconced in a public house built on the lumpy quilts of turf and pasture that cascade from the hills of northwest England, where untethered sheep electrocute themselves on fences and wide-eyed deer are run over by gleaming Peugeot 307s. About a dozen local stalwarts had gathered to shout and swear at the big screen and give full vent to their distrust of foreigners, including England midfielder Owen Hargreaves. Hope gave way to despondency as hothead Rooney was sent off, quite predictably. Despondency was replaced by defiance as England's rearguard remained implacable and unperturbed. Defiance collapsed and the void was filled with recriminations against the referee and the bete noir of the game, Cristiano Ronaldo, as England went out on penalties, again.
England fell to its knees, slumped in its seat, sucked dolefully on its cigarette, and had nothing left to say apart from a plaintive, whispered, four-letter word. Those embittered few who managed to show disdain during the course of the match tried to feel vindicated, but they could not absolve themselves from the pervasive feelings of national and cultural failure that prevailed on Saturday, July 1, 2006. One assumed that the ludicrous opulence of British football, and the preposterous salary demands of old Svennis, would have led to a commensurate level of world domination. But what the hell. It was only a game. England, one assumed, was still more than that.
And it was. But after so many years away, punctuated by the triennial visit, all the special powers your correspondent had accrued in China seemed to suddenly wither away, like Superman returning to Krypton. There was nothing special about your departure all that time ago, England seemed to say, and there is nothing special about your return either. The country, of course, has moved on without you, subtly and creepingly, dragged along by the slow, evolving drift of daytime TV, tabloid scaremongering, Tesco's 'Healthy Armenian' range of microwavable single-person meals, exotic Ecuadorian caffeine-free coffees and Bolivian low-fat chocolates. You missed it. You missed the incremental way in which a country's character changes itself over the years, the way an obscure reference point sinks into a nation's discourse and casts the anchor for years of ironic in-jokes that will, forever more, exclude you. You speak the language, but you have lost something somewhere down the line, including the traumata of Jade and Jordan and Calum Best. That, I suppose, was a good thing. It also explains why the most seasoned expats are the more likely revel in nostalgia, and in the less transient aspects of the homeland. In the end, I thought, I can think fondly about warm beer and cricket without having to drink or watch it.
