England: Where It All Began January 2020

When I was a sophomore at Uni, my roommate wanted to meet up with a girl he liked in Paris during our Spring Break, but she would only go if her friend came along too, so I was recruited to complete the set. The pairing was a disaster, but I got a lifetime gift from the experience — a thirst for disequilibrium. Disembarking at Orly and not understanding any of the signs, having to rely on symbols, looking at waist high traffic lights all combined into an overwhelming sense of disequilibrium that comes from stepping completely outside the familiar. I’ve been chasing that high ever since. 

Paris is the backstory, not the beginning. The beginning for me starts at the end of that Spring Break week when I decided I would skip the following week of classes, pursue the unexpected, and embrace the unavoidable disequilibrium with a side trip to London.

The world was huge back then. Nothing was connected. Nothing worked the same across borders. We had to manually connect ourselves to places and each other. I happened to have the telephone numbers of an English brother and sister I met on a plane flight from Los Angeles to San Francisco the year before. We had stayed in touch manually, and so after several attempts from a phone booth in Paris (placing a call in a phone booth was never the same in any country), I reached Casper and asked if I could crash at his for the week. He said sure and gave me his address in Sloan Court East.

If you do not know London, then you cannot imagine the disequilibrium just around the corner for me in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. With my newly minted dreads and acid washed jeans, I was both out of place and out of class at my new address. My naïveté served me well when when Casper’s buddies would drop by that week. One was introduced as the future Lord ______ , at least three were the sons of Sir ‘so-and-so’, and my fave, the direct descendent, bearing the same surname, of a very, very famous 18th century scientist we all learn about in school. To be honest, I was still of the mind that the only person who should be referred to as Lord was Jesus Christ, and if you weren’t in armour searching for the holy grail, then I hadn’t a clue as to what the point of knighthood was. I am, however, always impressed by science. 

Nevertheless, when it came up in conversation that I was flying back to Berkeley via Paris that next weekend, they (about 6 of them) happened to be traveling through Paris that same weekend en route to a little ski holiday in the French Alps. They suggested they book into my hotel that weekend as well so we could continue to hang out. Looking back, I was embarrassed by my purposefully shitty and cheap hotel directly across from Gare du Nord station. I suggested they shouldn’t, but they did book into it, and were genuinely fascinated by it. I am sure they found it shockingly cool. But what stays with me the most that weekend was the laughter, and the sun suddenly rising over the Parisian rooftops while, deep in conversation, we were solving the world’s problems, and me recognizing that shame is manufactured by your self and no one else, and that people are people, and that there is a never-ending list of places to go —and to know.
And starting with this little English side trip, I wanted more. 

And so I am sat here, decades later and many side trips later, in a tiny, empty cafe in Liverpool, and I am in wonder of how our relationships to  places shift and evolve over time. I sat down to write about this side trip to Islington, and Oxford, and Liverpool, but instead the memory of Paris and Sloan Court comes out. You can feel the importance of a place through your connection to the people who live there. This side trip reveals that I am connected to spots around England by being ‘once removed’. Old time friends surround me here, but this trip I put in the time to check out the places and lives of a stack of students — some of whom I cajoled into coming here. And in this way my disequilibrium from those years ago has given way to a new relationship to place, which in turn gives way to roots and connectivity through the people that I love.