"England, my England...England, my own"

I tend to forget. A lot of things, if I’m being honest, but I'm referring to something specific here. I’m pretty sure there’s a post somewhere about how much I love Britain and why. *searches* Yep, it exits, but only as a draft. I’m just going to merge it with this post.

Fernweh (n.): German; Crave for travel; “farsickness”; being homesick for a place you've never been

Sehnsucht (n.): German; “The inconsolable longing in the human heart for we know not what”; a yearning for a far, familiar, non-earthly land one can identify as one’s home

(Link--in case you want to see the rest of these beautiful words, and I suggest you do, because suddenly you find there are actual words for what you are feeling.)

I'm not British. Or American. Or European. I’m not even white. Or black. I’m Indian. And I love everything British. My father calls it “the British hangover”, from when the British ruled India. My mother’s side of the family jokes that when the British left in 1947, they forgot a key patriot: me. (Though that doesn't make sense because my parents weren't even born then, let alone me. But whatevs.)

If I remember correctly, my love for all things British began, as I suppose all interests of an adolescent girl do, with a man. Orlando Bloom a.k.a. Legolas from The Lord of the Rings (and now, The Hobbit). My first celebrity crush. Also the first time I ever felt that strongly about someone of the opposite sex. I blatantly ignored the fact that the man was eighteen years older than me. He was captivating, he was beautiful, he was British.

At the time, I was interested in anything British, only because it made me feel, in some way that I can’t possibly fathom, closer to him. Today I no longer go crazy over Mr. Bloom the way I used to, but British culture still has a strong hold over me. What started off as a silly hobby has now become something I admire, cherish, and long to be a part of. I don’t know what it is about Britain that has this magical hold over me, but it’s never wavered, not until recently.

When I moved to New York, Britain sort of moved to the back-burner. It was my first time away from home, from my family, in a new country, and all the way on the other side of the world. I was like a sponge, absorbing EVERYTHING. I loved it. To the point where I decided that maybe New York was my place now. Because I had people here now. I had my step-siblings, whom I loved incessantly, I had a few close friends, who were almost like family, and I fitted into the system fairly easily. There was reason for me to stay. And yet, Britain was always pulling me.

Every few months or so, something reminds me of how much I love that place, and I’m overcome with fernweh and sehnsucht and spend some time reading/watching something inherently British to reaffirm my forgotten love.

It is that time again. Of all the things to remind of my love, this time, it is *cringes in embarrassment* Tessa Dare. For those of you who don’t know, she is the author of a bunch of romance novels that my friend got me hooked on. They’re basically erotica, just with more plot and character development. To be fair, some of them are actually pretty good. (For example, one of them had this absolutely brilliant line: “I am a single woman in possession of a good fortune. Why should I be in want of a husband?”)

Anyway, all these novels are loosely based in Regency England, one of my most favourite time periods ever. So I’m reading about all these lords and ladies getting it on in various locations in England, and combined with my Pinterest being flooded with pictures of rural Britain, it is a sure step to my remembering. And oh, how it hurts.

I don’t know what I’m doing with my life. I haven’t a clue. But I know this much: I will go across the pond. I have to. I can’t stay away forever. Every cell in my being is begging to go there and who am I to deny my poor body that? I don’t know how long it will take, but one day I am going to walk every path that Shakespeare and Wordsworth and Keats and Austen and Hardy and the Brontës and Tolkien and Lewis and all of them walked.

Who knows, I may even meet Orlando Bloom. (Or Tom Hiddleston. He’d be more than willing to accompany me down all those paths. Life would be unimaginably blissful.)

(Note--The title of this post is from a poem, which you may read here)

Cravings

Some people crave food. (I do too.) But I also crave other things. (Books, mostly.)

A Curse Dark as Gold. The Chalet School series. Neverwhere. Harry Potter. Ophelia. Lady Macbeth's Daughter. Macbeth. To Kill a Mockingbird. Gone With the Wind (merciful heavens, who thought I'd ever say I crave that book). Lord of the Rings. Pride and Prejudice. The Dark Crusader. The Guns of Navarone. Force 10 from Navarone. Every Alistair MacLean book, really. Journey to the River Sea. Star of Kazan. Anne of Green Gables. The Battle for No. 19. Double Click. Confessions of a Listmaniac. City of Beasts. The Bartimaeus Trilogy. Indian in the Cupboard. The Septimus Heap books. City of Ghosts. The Emperor of the Moghul series. When Amma Went Away. Growing Up, by the same author. A Series of Unfortunate Events. Moby Dick (now I'm really losing it). The Graveyard Book. Coraline. The Little House series. Gone-Away Lake. Return to Gone-Away Lake. The Dark is Rising series. Chronicles of Prydain. The Inkheart trilogy. Eragon. That entire series, I suppose. Anything and everything by Jill Mansell. The Casson Family series.Homecoming and the entire Tillerman Cycle. The Chronicles of Narnia. Cry of the Icemark. Every Enid Blyton ever written, the Famous Five books in particular (Julian, my love). A number of ghost stories--that one about the ghost in the mad scientist's old house, the one with the doll, the one where there's a girl being drawn to a house with the floor that's falling apart--basically ghost stories written for slightly older children, all set in summer in the countryside. The Fudge books. I could go on and on.

I crave the feeling of lying on the floor in my room, curtains blowing in the breeze from the ceiling fan (dear god, how I miss ceiling fans), and reading for hours on end until the sun went down and my room was too dark to read in anymore unless I got up and switched on the light. Sneaking to the kitchen looking for a snack when I got hungry. I crave sitting quietly in the corner of the library at school and devouring books. Sitting on the stairs near the football field or by the swings and reading late in the afternoon while waiting to be picked up or during a free period. Reading in the bus on the way to school and on the way back. Listening to music on my old tape-recorder while I read. I crave reading late into the night with the fan on full because I'm too stubborn to go to the cooler rooms. Reading by the dim light of my night-lamp because it was a school-night and I was supposed to be asleep. Being woken up half an hour or more early on Saturdays, just so I could read.

I crave so much more than food.