Discombobulated in the City.
Image credit: iStock Athens
The light has changed now it’s Autumn; the sun is lower with more shadows, this transition always enchanted me . Years ago, at university I would spend hours in the black box theatre in North London trying to recreate this light, up and down ladders hauling the heavy black lamps, using gauze and stencils to diffuse the light to create this quality.
There is a gentle cooling breeze as it moves through the trees and leaves, rasping and rattling. The dog stops and sniffs here and there as I take him for his evening walk. I can see the sweeping expansive basin rising into Parnitha, one of the four mountains that surround the city of Athens and the sprawling metropolitan area. These mountains at times protective, awe-inspiring, at other moments I feel suffocated by their presence like a wall looming over me.
I haven’t felt the exhale of Autumn for a long time after living near the equator for so many years. Although I thrive in hot clients, Autumn was my favourite season, that liminal space. Whilst I loved the heat, Summer seemed tinged with disappointment in my younger years. It had such high expectations, like a haughty spoiled child with insatiable demands that we enjoy ourselves endlessly. My life never quite lived up to its lofty expectations. It was never fun enough; I never had quite the right outfits, never hung out with quite the right people. Maybe that’s why I loved Singapore so much, no seasons, just never-ending heat, but without the expectations and demands of a finite summer.
When I lived in London I always remember Autumn arriving, bathing the city in its golden light, like we were being wrapped in soft blankets. The nights drew in and the air sharpened with cold breezes from the River Thames. The expectations of summer forgotten and replaced with late night conversations that went too deep for summer frivolities. The cold air stinging my face after dancing in hot and sweaty clubs, theatre season in full force, and somehow the history of old London seemed to push forward to make itself know in this season.
Winter came quickly after Autumn in Athens though, too quickly. I wanted to languish in those Autumnal days, that space in between. It was surprisingly harsh, dark mornings and cold rain reminded me why I dislike living further from the equator. I kept having to remind my children it would be cold outside, they only knew that warm tropical rain, where we splashed our way down the street in shorts and flip flops to 7-11, to buy cold coconut water with cracks of thunder so violent you thought the earth would break. .
But every few days the weather would brighten to brilliant Greek blue skies. The rain and wind would stop momentarily. We didn’t have those endless days of heavy, low hanging, slate grey clouds of countries further north, for months on end. Then the floods arrived, gushing down steep streets, running off all the surrounding mountains.. Potholes and junctions deep with water, homes flooded in some neighborhoods and electricity cut. It was the same amount of rain received in 24 hours, that we would receive in just one hour in Singapore.. But this dry parched land, long neglected by state is overwhelmed easily.
iStock Athens cityscape
Always a guest.
Some days I wonder if I really have the resolve to do this. I want my old life back, but there is no going back. That life is dissolved; it no longer exists. Our apartment rented out to a new family, my kids places at schools taken, my car sold to a new owner driving it about the city now, my presence in the myriads of places I used to frequent gone. Perhaps imprints of energetic presence left here and there. I wonder if the aunties at my favourite noodle stall notice I haven’t been for a while. Probably not, the international community comes and goes in these places. No matter that I had been going there for a decade.
If I close my eyes I can drive or walk around the city and remember all the short cuts, all the places I would park, the people in the stores, the accents, clipped and melodic mix of Malay, Hokkien, Tamil and English, the smells of frangipaini, the calls of the Koel bird, the electronic chirrup of the pedestrian crossing with its rapid tik-tik-tik-tik, the shopping malls with their distinctive scent, and gargantuan underground carparks, the old aunties pushing the cleaning carts in and out of the restrooms, the endless pick up trucks filled with migrant workers from Bangladesh. Yes I can quite easily traverse the entire city in my mind, some days I do just for fun, I’m afraid I might forget otherwise.
But the truth is, I was always just a guest there, always the question ‘how long are you staying?’ It doesn’t matter, ten, twenty years. But guest or not, I felt this deep connection to the lands across this part of the equatorial world In south east Asia. An astrologer might explain its my favourable planetary lines that run right smack through Singapore (they do) and their magic reverberates right across the region of South East Asia for me. A person that believes in past lives, may get say I lived there before. It’s a familiar place for me, whatever the reasons, it doesn’t matter. The feeling is inexplicable, the land speaks to me. Much like the African American women from Texas, who I met at an event here in Athens, she told me the moment she steps off the plane in Greece, it feels like home for her. Why? Who can say.
Where is Home?
Now I get asked, is this your μόνιμη κατοικία? Permanent home. I really don’t know, I don’t know if I have passed the point of no return to ever have what I call a permanent home. But it’s at least nice to be asked, as opposed to being asked when I might leave?
Paradoxically in many ways, Greece was my first real feeling of home. When I arrived in Greece for holidays, or a short spell of living here, it felt like home instantly. The hot dry heat, the smell of pine and incense, the byzantine chanting of the priests and orthodox bells, the shrill rhythmic call of cicadas, the noise of TVs on balconies during hot summer nights. The speaker tied to the top of the old pick trucks advertising fruit & vegetables, fish, collection of old junk, or a new night club. The meltemi winds banging at the shutters, the long deep throaty ferry horn, signalling its departure or arrival into the islands, the sounds of the language, pure, bright, expressive, the smell of olive oil frying potatoes in my Grandma’s apartment, the cool tiles beneath my bare feet, riding scooters weaving in and out of traffic through Syntagma square, even the discombobulation and chaos of the place felt comforting. A deep sense of safety, the feeling of being loved and belonging amongst my family. But coming back now, I don’t feel much sense of home or belonging, I feel like those memories belong to another person and like I want to move about the city invisible.
A land defined by Paradox
This is a place that has no single answer to any question. It is a place defined by paradox. The fierce exclamations of a nation that prides itself in freedom or death, but also a nation shackled by its own chaos and disorganisation, with a stifling suffocation from heavy state control at times. The state wields the sword of bureaucracy with endless stamps and obscure departments to navigate, that no one seems to really know what they do, ask and you are met with a shrug. This form of bureaucratical control takes your most precious commodity, TIME. This lack of trust between state and people is palpable. But it is has also created a kind of magic too, a deep currency of human connection, the life blood of this country. Whilst there is nepotism and the ‘who you know’ circuits, there is also a deep humanness and heartfelt desire to help one another, often expecting nothing in return. It is a place you must develop a deep sense of faith that somehow everything works out, albeit often excruciatingly slowly and not in the way you might expect.
‘Corruption erodes trust, and without trust, no system can function effectively.” Lee Kwan Yew
This land sits at a complex point geographically and culturally, part European, part Balkan, our ties with our orthodox brothers and sisters across Russia and Eastern Europe. Influenced by hundreds of years of Ottoman occupation, and before that Byzantine culture. The tectonic plates beneath us colliding between Europe and Africa. No, it’s not an easy place to define, that friction is felt daily which can leave one feeling constant frustration.
“Greece is not a country one can understand immediately. You must live it, breathe it, suffer it.” Jacques Lacarrière.
Previously I had lived in places with heavy state control, but we traded that for efficiency and organization, a free market with minimal oversight at a daily level. Nothing was nuanced, everything was consistently applied, no one crossed the red line. The biggest reward? The gift of time. Whether you liked it not, you could see how it benefited the harmony of society. The citizens follow the laws, and the state delivers the results. Whilst there are people unhappy with the system, and undoubtably people who have indeed suffered at the hands of these regimes, overall, there is a trust built through this consistency and sense of fairness between state and people.
“Freedom can only exist in an ordered state.”
Lee Kwan Yew.
Connection versus Transaction
But as I lived longer in these places I noticed something pernicious creeping in too, everywhere I looked people were glued to their phones increasingly, more so than in other places I traveled to. People barely seemed to look each other in the eye or even greet each other anymore. And whilst these lands are places where many exchanges are fast and transactional, there was an imperceptible shift, I saw less people smiling or laughing, everything was done online, fast efficient with little human contact. After covid more businesses closed and the energy felt a beat off, a slow sense of dehumanization. But the lure of organization and comfort is seductive, it offers you a type of freedom. In structure we find freedom always.
But Why?
Every time you move countries you get asked, ‘why did you move here?’ A perfectly acceptable question, but one which I really have no clear answer. There was no single reason, we didn’t have to move, which makes the move all the harder. I consented to leave a life I loved. I stop trying to explain. I see people’s attention drift off when I cannot supply them with an easy palatable explanation. I choose to walk away from a community, a part of the world I have a deep connection to, to leave a place I loved deeply, to build something different, something not yet in existence, something I am not even sure of.
‘..Its like walking yourself backwards through all the choices you’ve ever made, carrying on further and further into the past and finally realising that personal decisions only ever played a partial role in configuring a course through life. The rest was determined by circumstance and serendipity; by the combined decisions of family and ancestors that brought you to that particular point in time, by remote events you had no control over but that helped sculpt the context of your options and by an unfathomable number of people whose paths run parallel to yours. ‘
Julian Hoffman, Lifelines - Searching for home in the mountains of Greece.(pg 8)
I somehow make it through the winter in this discombobulated city where everything feels upside down, where no-one plans and everything is last minute. It often felt like I was moving through a surrealist painting where nothing seemed connected, random groups of people thrown together, endless tiny streets where parked cars are almost touching nose to bumper, driving through them I had the sense I was in never ending maze and might never escape. I find myself sometimes standing on a street corner where I have a vague and hazy memory from my past of being there before, I can’t quite place the time or person I was with. My past colliding with present, in random moments, much like the city itself, graffitied walls next to ancient relics.
Much later than I expect we reach spring. It is not a foregone conclusion though. It drifts in and out tantalizing me with its softer air and brighter mornings and then it turns cold, windy and wet in a moment again. Around orthodox easter the days finally lengthen from morning until evening. The birds in a constant playful chatter, fluttering and swooping like children playing. As we drive down to the southern tip of the mainland the vegetation is so much lusher than I have ever seen, a mix of olive groves, pine trees, and conifers. The grass is long and deep it reminds me of soft abundant English grass. The flowers are like an explosion in my heart, overgrown grass spilling with wildflowers, yellows, pinks, purples, fiery red of poppies and the strong smells of orange blossom, pine and oregano. Some of the fields almost look like meadows you might find in alpine landscapes, especially with the steep jagged peaks rising sharply behind, with snow-capped tips, it’s intoxicating. We walk around ruined castles on the sea, and climb through steep stone villages, the air still sharp, the sun coming in and out. The land that pushes me to my edge and then rewards me constantly with such rich and pure beauty, with its harsh edges and deep warmth and love.
A month after this trip we unexpectedly celebrate our one year anniversary, exactly to the day, right back where we arrived after leaving Singapore; on my ancestral island, attending a family baptism and with an impromptu guest from Singapore, dear to us all. Although I can’t actually be sure what it symbolises, it seems somehow like the perfect synchronicity and completion to mark our first 12 months here.
Photo taken by me. Peloponnese, Monemvasia.
“Other countries may offer you discoveries in manners or lore or landscape; Greece offers you something harder — the discovery of yourself.”