108. OK in the UK?
I returned to Britain in June 2013. It was a time of very mixed emotions for me. Notwithstanding my love of Africa, its wide-open spaces, majestic mountains, glorious golden beaches and the plethora of wildlife that can still be found in the many game parks, I always had some good memories of the Britain I grew up in until the age of ten. Yes, those memories were tainted by the horrors of World War II, but underlying that I constantly recalled the beautiful countryside, the excitement of spring, when the daffodils, crocuses and bluebells appeared and the deer emerged from their forest habitats.
So, how did I react to Britain in the year 2013 and until now? Very mixed feelings, both good and bad. I arrived in the ancient town of East Grinstead in Sussex, with its beautifully preserved High Street displaying houses and shops dating back as far as the 1200s. The continuing presence of a really superb fish and chip shop (well remembered from my first visit to East Grinstead in 1967) and the general atmosphere of a small English town set in magnificent surrounding countryside, these made my initial reaction to returning to Britain a very positive one.
The nearby Ashdown Forest is the largest forested area in southern England. It was used as a medieval hunting forest created soon after the Norman Conquest of England (1066). Henry VIII had a hunting lodge at Bolebroke Castle. From there he courted Anne Boleyn who lived at the nearby Hever Castle. The forest is also famous for being the home of A.A. Milne, author of the Winnie the Pooh children’s books. Milne’s son, Christopher Robin who appears in the stories, used to roam the forest as a child. The home and various places described in the books are popular tourist sites today.
There are huge herds of red, fallow and roe deer in the forest. In the region of 250 deer a year are killed by motorcars – one of the hazards of driving on the roads that wind their way through the dense foliage of oak, birch, beech, and even willow near the streams.
When living in East Grinstead, we discovered that the town was also famous for the work done by the plastic surgeon Sir Archibald McIndoe during World War II at the Queen Victoria Hospital in the center of town. Its Burns Centre became world-famous for the reconstruction of airmen’s faces burned in combat.
The other interesting feature of the town is that it lies directly on the Greenwich meridian. East Court, built in 1769, is the headquarters of the town council and the meridian runs through the building. It is the world’s prime meridian, a line running from the North to the South Pole denoting the separation of east and west. The meridian is so named because it also runs through Greenwich’s Royal Observatory. In the 1800s, 72% of all shipping around the world used this as their prime meridian on their sea charts. The United States accepted this meridian followed by most of the world, except France and Brazil, until 1984 when Greenwich finally became the global norm for longitude 0 degrees.
I spent the first six months on my own in Britain before my wife joined me in February 2014, after she had gone through the agony of selling our house and furniture in Johannesburg as well as reducing her own belongings to a couple of large suitcases. My daughter Tanya, who arrived for a three-week visit from South Africa on Monday to surprise us for our 57th wedding anniversary on that day, has stored some of our belongings back in South Africa.
As Hero and I settled into life in Britain, there were inevitably some adjustments. Perhaps the most striking of these is the difference in social attitudes between the Brits and South Africans. We have found that the Brits, as a general rule, seem to have two distinct attitudes to life. In the main they try very hard to be courteous and, frankly, overly apologetic. They take great pains not to offend anyone, but this comes across as propitiative. In complete contrast there are other Brits who are brash and arrogant. Even the propitiative ones easily take offense if you challenge them or complain about anything.
South Africans, on the other hand, say it like it is. We are outspoken and admittedly sometimes offensive when we speak about something the Brits would rather not discuss. This includes exactly what I’m saying here. I don’t think that we are intentionally rude but we’re not afraid to voice unpopular viewpoints. Let me add that I’m not talking about racist attitudes. I’m simply examining the differences we have found between living in Britain or South Africa. The other thing that we have found is that, with a few exceptions, Brits do not easily invite others to their homes, whereas South Africans are quick to offer hospitality if they feel some degree of affinity with others.
This is not to say that we feel completely out of place in Britain, but it does take some getting used to. Perhaps the thing that does infuriate us (having come from a country where rules and laws exist but are often ignored) is the overuse of protective laws in Britain. For many years it was said that Britain rules the waves. We just wish that in some cases they would actually waive the rules. As an example, the other day I went to the local pharmacy to pick up some medical stockings prescribed by our GP for both Hero and I, to prevent swellings on our legs. The lady behind the counter found them but said would I please step outside the pharmacy. Mystified, I did so despite the fact that it was raining. The lady handed me the packages containing the stockings and apologized, saying that the qualified pharmacist was not available that day and that the non-qualified staff could not hand over any prescriptions. However, they were allowed to deliver them to the recipient. Therefore, by stepping outside the pharmacy she was in fact delivering them rather than handing them over the counter. In the process the poor lady was getting sopping wet. I giggled and took the packages, which hardly contained dangerous drugs, and wondered at the infinite number of petty laws that bog this country down.
After nearly eight years in East Grinstead, we decided to find a place closer to our younger daughter Xanthe and not that far from our eldest son Jason who lives in High Wycombe. Despite our frustrations with some aspects of British culture and social behavior as outlined above, we had grown to love East Grinstead and the neighboring village of Forest Row.
Xanthe lives in Wolverton, a village incorporated into the greater area of Milton Keynes. All we really knew about the area was that Milton Keynes was conceived as a town to be built from scratch in 1960 to relieve a housing shortage. It is situated fifty miles northwest of London and was designed on the American grid system – a huge contrast to the cute but rambling villages and towns of Sussex. We were anxious about moving there as we were reluctant to give up the rural atmosphere of the East Grinstead surroundings.
We need not have worried. We found the retirement village of Lovat Fields that offered us an attractive two-bedroomed apartment. Best of all, it is surrounded by parks, lakes, the Grand Union Canal and the river Ousel. As I’ve written before, the town planners built a functional downtown area with a huge array of good shops and restaurants but left the suburbs to remain very rural. We are walking distance from Willen Lake, which has a marvelous pub and restaurant, where we either drive or walk to for breakfast or lunch about once a week.
Close to the lake is a Peace Pagoda built by the Buddhist monk, Nichidatsu Fujii, in 1980. It was the first such pagoda built in Europe; over many years he was responsible for building eighty of them all over the world. Fujii met Mahatma Ghandi in 1931 and from there he conceived of creating symbols of peace all around the planet. A Buddhist shrine has also been built at the foot of the pagoda and it certainly does create an aura of peace and harmony in the area.
The difference between life in Milton Keynes and East Grinstead is perhaps a feeling of greater space in the former and in the latter more of a sense of being surrounded by trees and narrow winding lanes. Both have their virtues and neither bear any resemblance to our beloved Africa.
To sum up, when one moves from one country to another, it’s inevitable that there will be differences. We have found that it’s best not to try and compare England with Africa, but rather regard them as two individual environments where one has to adjust to the differences. Neither is perfect but both have their attractions.
If I think about the forthcoming arrival of the ExoBrain system on the market, it will be somewhat like arriving in a different country, with a very different culture to that of the existing computing world. The difference being that the new ExoTech world will be a place of utter simplicity after a nightmare of complexity where we’ve been forced to speak an alien language. I really can’t wait.
An ExoTech Ltd shareholder, Chris is currently authoring two of the four books to be published the day ExoBrain launches and has helped to create ExoBrain’s introductory video to the Confidential Technical Briefing. Chris has spent his working life in the film and television industry, starting with BBC Television in London, then ATV in Birmingham becoming, at the time, the youngest Studio Manager in Britain.
Later, in South Africa, he wrote and directed film and TV commercials, having four South African entries at the Cannes Advertising Festival. After a number of years of writing and directing or producing documentaries (eight international awards) and corporate videos, he concentrated on writing feature film screenplays (five screened) and television series (seven screened). He has a novel, ”Pursuit of Treachery,” with a literary agent and is currently obtaining finance for an action adventure feature film he has written and is co-producing. He is a published poet and has given many readings.