Checkpoint, Month 2: September in Review

My daily view of Morecambe Bay and the Lake District (when it's not raining)

My mornings in the lovely seaside town of Morecambe have been quiet and unplugged. I struggle to remove myself from the warmth of my bed, I test out the crisp fall air that seeps through the walls and windows, I let the covers win me over for five more minutes. Then, its down the stairs where I am enthusiastically greeted by the world’s friendliest Black Lab, Poppy, and then as a tax for petting her, I must make my rounds to the old man collie, Marley, and the little Whippet, Penny-Flo, who is snuggled in a little sweater under her own set of covers. Perhaps, Princess Penny-Flo is more appropriate. I make breakfast, I make black coffee from a tea bag, I sit and read until it’s time to catch the bus, I say goodbye to my hosts, Char and Rach, if they have not already left to start the day. The bright blue double decker bus that I am now so familiar with takes me through Morecambe and into Lancaster before arriving at the university itself. On these rides, I’ve had ample time to think and daydream and jot down bits and pieces of poetry or blog posts. Even in these short two months, I’ve grown very fond of public transportation; there’s something so romantic about a set time where you can’t do anything besides sit, wait, watch, and be with yourself. During the weekdays of September, not unlike Septembers at home, I have found myself in the role of “student” as a visiting researcher with the International Observatory for End-of-Life Care. While university in England doesn’t start until the first week of October, I’ve enjoyed the familiarity mixed in with the new and strange. Not having the chance to study abroad at Middlebury meant that I never had a chance to experience student life elsewhere; while I am not quite a student now, milling amongst the medical students and discovering my new favorite spots to read and write feels like home at this time of year.

In fact, being comfortable pushing and confronting the mix of familiar and unfamiliar has been a theme of this month. When I arrived in the small city of Lancaster after spending a month in the whirlwind that was London, I was at first nervous that I wasn’t doing the Watson justice. Despite spending immense time deep in my project every single day, being in a small town in Northern England proved to yield a slower lifestyle. In London, my time with my project was sporadic and different every day, allowing me to take full advantage of exploring in the short month I was spending in the city. Here, each day, I am spending sustained periods of time immersing myself in my Watson project and then spending time with my hosts or doing what exploring I can within the area. In the first days of September, I thought this was “wrong” and I began to understand why we aren’t supposed to be in contact with other Watson fellows in our cohort. Coming into this year, from speaking to other fellows, I had this image of a Watson fellow as constantly doing, exploring, having chance encounters, and always on the go. I think had I been able to speak to other Watson members this month that feeling might have only grown. I may have only felt more like I was out of place and not embracing the year fully.

As usual in these reflections, I don’t think I could have been farther from the truth. When I started to let go of some of these worries, I realized how much more I was soaking up English culture here than I was in London. Conceptually, I think people tend to think of England as London and maybe Manchester and Liverpool if you are a football fan. Admittedly, I was victim to this mindset before arriving further North and experiencing the shift in culture for myself. When I told people in London I would be spending 2 months up north, I was usually met with some inquisitive looks and very general statements about the communities here. As a visitor in this country with the mindset that everything that’s unfamiliar is inherently slightly scary, it’s interesting to observe the manifestation of these same emotions from people in different parts of the same country. It seems that people in the south of England can be generalizing when it comes to the North; the whole of northern England gets categorized as rougher, more dangerous, under resourced, barren and cold. As a stranger to England generally, I have been able to navigate in the space between these stereotypes, to figure it out for myself by spending time in each place. I suppose it’s true of humanity generally, but it stuns me time and time again how unfamiliarity breed ignorance, fear, and this notion of “other”. If we don’t know, we must assume, and our imaginations are almost always an exaggeration of the worst possibilities. To break this cycle though, we must be willing to exist in the itchiness of the unfamiliar, to commit to making it familiar. I am still very much practicing how to flex this muscle, and I imagine the unfamiliar will never not feel uncomfortable but perhaps over this year, I will come to know it just as a transitive stage. Thus far, nothing has suggested it to be anything more than temporary. On one of my first days here, I walked myself to the local grocery store which took me on a bit of a tour of the neighborhood. This day I was particularly anxious and just getting used to feeling out of place once again after finding my footing in London. On the way, I had to maneuver around this older couple who was trying to get in their car. The lady stopped and kind of stared at me and I immediately got worried I was doing something ‘wrong’ but after a minute she smiled and told me I looked absolutely beautiful today. I almost laughed at loud as I was sporting a very disheveled hair style, sweatpants and a rain jacket. But her random kindness was enough to shake off so much of my nerves and begin to relax into my new space.

Some things about Northern England reminded me of Vermont – the colder weather, the gray, smaller liberal communities, the ridiculously warm people in sometimes rough-around-the-edges packaging. I immediately felt at home once I started picking up on these shared “northern attitudes” (Noah KahanÔ).

However, outside of this general ‘vibe’, I have found that there is so much to learn about the Northern region of England. Nights spent in endless conversation with Char and Rach, or walking along the bay on the weekends, or speaking with people around Uni has allowed me to peak behind the curtain. Here are some things I have learned:

·       Yorkshire tea is the only tea worth drinking and everything else is garbage (this may or may not have come from someone born in Yorkshire)

·       Ending the night without a cup of tea and a few biscuits is sacrilegious and be very careful who you tell you don’t take cream in your tea, it could be taken rather harshly

·       It gets cold here very quickly but then basically stays the same weather throughout September until the summer

·       It does indeed rain every day in England but most days its more of a drizzle for 30 minutes, others it’s a downpour from the minute you wake up until you go to sleep and those are typically the days you forget to check the weather and go to Liverpool for the day and bring all three of the dogs you are staying with

·       A pancake is more the thickness of what the US would call a flapjack but a flapjack here is an oat bar that can come in lots of flavors (highly recommend Biscoff)

·       A bap is a roll of bread almost like a bun but can also be called a barm in some regions and I’m still trying to work out when to use which term 

·       Gingerbread can either mean the cookie or a cake-like loaf or somewhere in between so I guess you never really know what you are getting 

·       Aldi’s has become somewhat a manifestation of northern attitude on social media as they are constantly instigating the fancier grocery stores more typical in the south such as M&S; most famously, Aldi’s started selling a Cuthbert the Caterpillar cake which looked oddly similar to M&S’s Colin the Caterpillar cake…M&S tried to sue Aldi’s without success so Cuthbert and Colin both get to have their place at English kids birthday parties. I’ve tried Cuthbert and not Colin; impressed.

·       An entire sleeve of biscuits is around 40 pence. Obsessed is an understatement.

·       There a million different English accents if you really listen. Scouse particularly, which is the dialect stemming from Liverpool, can be hard to understand and they have a bunch of words that are specific to their vocabular which of course makes translating even

harder. Char’s friends from Liverpool came for her birthday and taught me many Scouse words but I’m keeping them to myself so I can use them when I get home without people knowing what I really mean. They were more than enthusiastic about this sneaky tactic.

The list goes on and on. I suppose this is all to say that even though there is routine here and less “touristy” exploration than London, I feel far more immersed in the culture which in some ways feels truer to the Watson experience. I’ve been really challenging myself to take stock of every small thing where I even feel the tiniest bit of awe: my nightly earl grey cup of tea with biscuits, watching Australian TV soaps, getting excited for Tuesdays to roll around because it means the Great British Bakeoff is on. All of these moments feels like mini “Watson experiences” in their own right.

Additionally, I have found myself with the best hosts possible. Char is a native Northern Englander while Rach is from Malaysia and came to the UK originally to for law school. They have three amazing dogs – Poppy, Marley, and Penny-Flo – which means the house is never dull and I’ve chuckled at the fact that is takes three dogs to create the amount of hysteria that my solo German Shepherd, Nala, can cause at home. Char and Rach are both in academia – Char studies religion and Rach has her law degree and mainly focused on child law. This means that there is a rarely a night that passed where we don’t find ourselves discussing religion, politics, morality, the healthcare system, and more. In these moments, I am immensely grateful and moved to have the opportunity to travel the world and engage in endlessly captivating conversation with the most interesting of people.

Poppy, Marley, and Penny-Flo on a hike around the Lake District

Once I snapped myself out of thinking that the pace of my life here wasn’t exactly what the Watson is meant to do and be like, I have found that I’ve been giving myself space to do a lot of self-reflection in quiet moments. In these moments, I’ve had many conversations with my younger self, something I typically have not done in the past and also ironically funny because I used to actually talk to myself a ton as a child. Maybe it’s too general to claim that all post-graduates have a moment of feeling like “who am I outside now that I’m no longer a student?” or “who do I want to be as an adult?” but I have a feeling most people ponder these questions after college. This month I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how I’ve fell out of touch with so many things that brought me immense joy as a child. Somewhere between middle school and college, other fascinations, or rather things I thought I should be fascinated with replaced things that were more authentically me. I’d like to use this time to introduce some of that back – after all, I’m spending the whole year with myself, I might as well get reacquainted. So far, I’ve started extremely small, mostly because I’m not sure where someone typically starts with these sorts of things. I’ve been reading more sci-fi and fictions, more myths and traditionally oral stories because I’ve always had a curiosity for them. Funnily, doing so has helped me accomplish the goal of spending less time using tech in the mornings because I can’t put these books down. In free time, I’ve finally found some of the creative influx I was hoping for and have been writing poetry when I can, although surprisingly I seem to be leaning less towards writing about experiences this year and more how these experiences have evoked old memories and emotions. At the risk of being incredibly embarrassed, Char and Rach were traveling recently so I had the house to myself; I found myself dancing a lot. My sisters and parents used to have these crazy silly dance parties in our kitchen. If you watch videos my parents used to take of us, usually my sisters are doing some sweet little dance, and I am off by myself spazzing out. I was never one for rhythm or anything that resembled dance moves but I was always extremely confident dancing by myself. I admire that about my younger self, and I’d like to bring that unapologetic authenticity to this year and my adult life more generally. It’s only September and already I feel more settled in myself than I have maybe in years.

The world works in funny ways like that. I’ve gotten a real laugh at the fact that I spend so much of my day thinking about dying and death and yet I’ve never felt more focused on living. I said once before, in another blog post, how shocked I was to find so much life in the dying room. My Watson project topic has become some type of echo chamber for my experience of this year more generally; spending time with death during project hours has made my senses sharpen towards life itself and what it means to be truly alive and present. I notice myself appreciating my bagged coffee in the morning or my walk to the local Sainsbury or the joy of a double decker bus or a conversation about religion or the great British bake off. When I look back at this time, I imagine these small very human moments will be just as much part of what made this year monumental as the moments where I saw something unbelievable or made a breakthrough in my project. More recently, in moments where I have caught myself thinking “I’m not doing this right”, I instead remember how tenacious and demanding life can be when we stop to appreciate it in all its form, whether that’s doing something courageous and insane that makes me stunned to be able to be a Watson fellow or cutting into Cuthbert the Caterpillar for the first time and feeling equally as amazed.

Getting to do the honors of chopping off Cuthbert's head

September in Review

Songs of the Month: Tear in My Heart by Twenty One Pilots, Come and Get Your Love by Redbone, Lost by Frank Ocean

Poem of the Month: Letter to the Corinthians by Elizabeth Willis

What I’m Reading: Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

In - warm water bottles, 40p custard creams, Cuthbert the Caterpillar, earl grey tea, great British Bake off, Whippets, Collies, Black Labradors, double decker town buses, plastic toy frogs, Costa Coffee Too Good to Go bags, Alphabet Dog Biscuits, RuPaul’s Drag Race UK

Out - seagulls, arctic fronts, inability to find pumpkin in the UK, lack of Fall season, UK’s version of pretzels, rain slander, amusement parks in Winter