Just as I arrived at St Pancras, my internet reconnected. I refreshed the BBC Sports page to find Ollie Watkins score a 90th minute winner. Welcome home. Perhaps football will be coming home too? But is the UK actually home for me anymore?
Not only that, but this was the first time coming back to the UK since the General Election. The result was both a mix of momentousness and anticlimax. For the first time in a long while I felt like I could actually be somewhat content with the result. That’s probably the first time in the last ten elections I’ve followed.
Sadly, being actually into politics meant that I had to kill my own joy by delving deeper into the analyse. An increase in the far right vote in the UK is hardly a cause for celebration. Nor is the fact that in real terms, this was more the Conservatives losing their votes than necessarily Labour gaining a whole lot.
More fundamentally though, I find myself falling into the sense of questioning how much will really be different. The mood of the country hasn’t felt all that different in the short time I’ve been in London, whilst even a massive majority for Labour can’t hide the fact that there is serious turmoil and economic difficulty. The elephant in the room of Brexit is going to be ignored for as long as possible.
I used to believe far more in a centrist ideology. My ideal approach was around uniting people through sensible reform to bring meaningful change. But my recent reflections have made me doubt whether this actually works all that well. Our societal fear of discomfort means that the softly softly approach can often lead to avoiding them.
Maybe I’m accepting the more radical side of myself. I thought that the answer has been to tone down my beliefs to make them more palatable. But I’ve actually found that this makes me just compromise on my core beliefs.
So here we are with a new government. I do imagine it will be an improvement. Yet in a bid to win the election through being more centrist, it’s hard to see it being much fundamental change. The rhetoric on immigration is still similar. Many Muslim family members are dismayed at the hypocrisy around Israel. Meanwhile Wes Streeting wants to keep the ban against puberty blockers for trans people.
These events also happened to coincide with my 31st birthday. I still am not sure how I feel about birthdays, yet this one was nice and quaint. I have little desire to overly reflect on the last 12 months as I have done in the past. Perhaps that will come in a time when I am feeling less fatigued and burnt out.
Connecting to my roots isn’t just about coming back to the UK. Whilst I am British, I am also Bangladeshi. The actual reason I came across was to complete my application for my Bangladeshi National ID at the High Commission.
It’s a challenging experience in many respects. I went to the High Commission with forms filled in in Bengali. I can’t really read them very well. Most of the conversation was in Bengali, of which I can only speak at a broken level. It doesn’t help either that our language is actually Sylheti, which whilst similar, was different.
A lot of this was trying to negotiate the form correctly. It’s not so easy to write the correct full address for our ancestral home in the village, especially when it needs to be written in Bengali. Fortunately, my brother had already gone for an appointment, so I could learn from the corrections he had to figure out. Still, I did need to phone my dad just to figure out some specific questions.
It’s hard not to feel some level of dysphoria with the different identity connections I have. I find it embarrassing that I can’t speak my maternal tongue better, whilst my connection with the UK, my land of birth, feels pretty mixed. I don’t really have too much energy to properly comprehend the Belgian or EU elections quite honestly, but suffice to say the results were not feel-good.
Right now, I’m looking to just connect to my own sense of beliefs. Sometimes, it’s not worth trying to mentally ‘figure out’ what all these things mean. After all, if I do enough social deconstruction, the idea of being from a certain land is, in reality, a figurative concept.
What really matters is where I am now. And I am grateful for what I have.