Flying home for Christmas

Christmas has came and gone and 2009 has began in earnest. After having returned from Korea for what feels like an age ago ten, I can safely say I am ready to go again. Back to Korea, back to ….anywhere actually.

As you can tell I have mixed feelings about coming home. Of course there is the reason I came back at all, my mother and her failing health and without this reason I surely wouldn’t have returned at all. As it is I am back and aside from the things I despise about this country I am finding some things that are rekindling my faith in the Great British public.
First, the things I hate, have hated, still hate and will always loathe. British rail, Network rail, Midland, Arriva, GWR or whoever charges 47 pounds for a single ticket from Liverpool to Cwmbran are probably top of the list. I love trains, they on the ground, up close and personal, passing through life and not 30,000 feet above it.

I resent paying 47 pounds and so upon returning I booked a 26 pound train for the following day. Another expensive thing I encountered was the cost of a healthy lifestyle. Over 50 pounds a month at a gym I refuse to name just so I can do my bit not to add to the burden the NHS is under from all the fat people that seem to have appeared in the last few years. I have noticed on this return that there seem to be more lardy, even grotesquely over weight people. We truly are overtaking the US as the fattest nation on Earth.

Coming back toward the end of December dropped me right in the middle of the Christmas shopping rush and what a rush it was. For all the news I read in the various rags coupled with panicky journalists flapping on TV, the credit crunch seemed as mythical as, maybe more so than Father Christmas. There were signs of the credit crunch but it is hard to believe it is as serious as the media and politicians make out when people are spending with such reckless abandonment. I really don’t like the disgusting commercialisation of Christmas and with a bit of luck this credit crunch will make people re-evaluate how much they really need all the cheap, expensive, superfluous trappings of what is often called modern life.

There are some things I do like of have been happy to witness since I’ve been back aside from seeing my friends and family which is nice…for a while, I hadn’t imagined there would be much else to balance out the perceived boredom I was absolutely sure would be waiting for me.
I often talk critically of the public here and if you watch the news and read the papers you may well agree but I have to say that a lot of the people I have interacted with have been nice, usually charmless but polite and pleasant enough. The conductor on the train, a man and his young son at Chester train station, a few fellow shoppers in Cwmbran have all made me smile to myself. Another incident in a supermarket reminded me of exactly where I am and I’m sure could only have happened in Wales. A TV, being displayed was playing a DVD of Wales’ ’08 grand slam win and a crowd of men were gathered around it, reliving glorious victories over the five other nations as their wives and girlfriends filled their trolleys and maxed out their credit cards.

Smoke free nights are another positive thing to have changed since my last visit and now clothes and hair do not have to be washed as a matter of course after a few drinks. Somewhat ironically I do have to wash my clothes after spending a little while in my mother’s living room in the company of my oldest sister who smokes like they’re free.

Overall being back home hasn’t been a wholly bad experience. I have enjoyed it up to now but it is from mid January that Cwmbran will start to chip away at me and so whilst I enjoyed the first couple of weeks back, I do feel like anything longer than a holiday here feels like a step backward.