Month: September 2016

Exile: To BBC or Not to Be

/ Benjamin Barnabas / 1 Comment

Two factors have triggered this post. One, a suggestion from my dissertation supervisor that I misread two months ago. Two, Emily Mortimer in The Sleeping Dictionary.

It’s been about six months since I decided to move to Spain for good once my university degree is over. The number was in my head without even thinking, and I had to count to make sure. Six months exactly (sometimes you just know these things). It wasn’t one of those eureka moments. It was, I suppose, a bit like a journey to find one’s faith: one day I woke up and it just seemed as though I’d known the answer all along. In that sense, there was really little I could do about it. You can’t deny that kind of enlightenment.

Over the last few months, freed at last from work and study, I’ve had a lot of time to think this one over. I’ve come up with something resembling a game plan for the next three years. I find it’s a useful thing to have when you find yourself having to reason your decision to abandon the land where you were born.

The repercussions are, understandably, quite immense. No more Christmas. No more Whole Earth peanut butter. No more Poldark or Have I Got News For You (or British TV at all, for that matter). And no more taking my mother tongue for granted: in a year’s time the only major outlets I’ll have for the English language will be my work and my book. That’s pretty extreme.

Now I’ll admit, it’s not as painful a decision as I’m making it sound. The peanut butter I can live without. British television will be a major loss though, I’ll give you that. You don’t appreciate just how good the Beeb is until you move abroad (Spanish comedy is entertaining, but it’s just not as brilliant as British humour – or maybe I’m just not fluent enough?). As for Christmas, while I’ve never been particularly excited about it since growing up, I was a little sad that December came and went and… nothing happened. Christmas is something that Spain simply doesn’t do. Even Lisbon seemed to do Christmas better in the twenty-four hours I spent there last year. On the other hand, they do have Semana Santa and that is a hundred times more impressive, so it’s a sacrifice I am willing to make.

There is at least one snag I’ve been almost too quick to ignore in this whole chasing-my-destiny thing and that is the obvious one: who and where is She? Is she Spanish, or is she English? Or something else entirely?

I’ve read a lot of articles on this subject. I feel like I had to; earlier this year it was compulsory reading, when I thought I’d found her and I needed to think things through. I hadn’t, obviously, but it did me good to read about others who had been down the same road. The general consensus seems to be that, unless you are both determined to stay together, and that there is something akin to a balance between the languages, these cross-cultural relationships are fraught with difficulties. And whilst I’ve heard a lot of people talk about how much they’d love bilingual children, from those few dual-nationality parents I’ve met, it sounds like a serious uphill slog to achieve that, as the language of their immediate environment will always take the prime position.

Never mind the bilingual children for now. I have more pressing things to worry about, namely my dissertation, which may or may not be on the subject of exile (a suitable topic for this year, I think). It is possible to look too far ahead. But as the prospect of exile looms closer, I think it likely that there may well be a few more reflective posts of this nature. It’s easy to say that you’re never coming back, but quite another to hold to that.

Perhaps it’s best to think of it not as exile, but going back to my roots. Even so, I was born in England and am, by all accounts, an Englishman. I never said it would be easy, and it won’t. But some things in life are greater. This, I believe, is one of those things. BB x

Disconnect… While You Still Can

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

I’m going to tell you a story. A social networking story, to be precise. It’s not the most baffling or adventurous of tales. In fact, to most of us, it won’t be anything more than a detailed morning routine – but to a readership of the previous century, I wouldn’t be surprised to find it in the Sci-Fi/Horror section of the library, if not in the Tragedy aisle.

I woke up this morning and one of the first things I did was to reach for my iPad and check Facebook. A couple of likes and comments from friends and friends-of-friends. I had a look to see who these were, how they found the picture I’d posted. Ah, so you’re a mutual friend of X who I met on my travels. In ten seconds I won’t even remember your name.

I shift over to Instagram. I seem to have nabbed five more likes on one of my rarely-seen selfies last night, bringing the total up to forty. Twenty-seven of them are students I taught last year and one of them is that girl I thought was cute, though I never told her so. For some reason that counts for something.

My friends list seems to have gone down by one. Who could that be, I wonder? I hazard a guess that it’s that one girl in the choir I didn’t feature – or tag, by proxy – in my drawing because I didn’t speak to her all that often. My guess is right on the money. That’s reason enough to be unFriended – and a fair point. If I don’t know you so well, and therefore don’t really want to feature you in a drawing of all of the people who I consider my nearest and dearest, why are we friends on Facebook in the first place?

Even so, I confess to feeling both a little guilty, and a little galled.

I have breakfast, brush my teeth and go outside. It’s a gorgeous, sunny day and the cat is rolling around on the paving slabs. I love my cat, and it looks particularly ridiculous right now, its black coat covered in dust like fine spores. This would make for a great post, I think. I’ll go and get my iPad.

And then I stop. What the hell is wrong with me?

It’s this need to justify everything we do or see. This ‘pics or it didn’t happen’ mentality. Almost every one of us seems to be under its spell, and the younger you are, the stronger its pull. Life revolves around what was done and said over Facebook last night, instead of what took place in the real world. News has lost its value: maybe you heard about the anniversary of 9/11 on Twitter, or saw it on Buzzfeed, or it was in a post that an acquaintance shared at nine forty seven last night. You saw it, your scrolled past it, and somewhere you took it in, though you didn’t really register it. If it does come up in conversation, of course, you were in the know: ‘I saw it on my wall…’

We’re a sick nation. If you haven’t noticed yet, open your eyes. This isn’t humanity. This is a fourteen-year old psychosis permanently inflicted upon us through the glow of a small screen. It gnaws at our minds and roots itself in our routine. Most of the time you won’t even think about it. It’s just something you do, like the processed meat you eat and the coltan-charged phone you use, an essential part of your day that you don’t really need to think too much about. I challenge anybody to tell me in full what news they learned from their last browse of the social network.

I was lucky enough this year to be – however briefly – in the strange position of being pretty much as out of contact as it’s possible to be in twenty first century Europe. For some time I had a phone with no data in a house with no wireless in a village with no Internet café. Because of this, I took in the news like never before. And because of that, the Paris attacks shocked me to the core like nothing ever has. The night of the attack, I was watching a film on my own, none the wiser. A full twenty four hours later, after I’d traveled to a neighboring city to do a little sightseeing, I saw the whole thing on the morning news as I took a Cola Cao in the hostel bar. And it shocked me stiff. News had never been so alarming. It was the first I’d heard of it, and it hurt.

Not only that, but those internet-free months were probably the happiest of my year. When I finally worked out how to activate my data allowance (which, I suppose, I had squandered thus far), the remaining months rolled out in a sequence of worrying over eking out my one gigabyte of data expenditure to last the month. Another routine, another shackle, another link in the chain. The network has us by the balls.

I’m worried for my generation. We are, perhaps, the last to have grown up in the pre-Facebook world, though it was already starting to bleed through into our childhood as we hit our mid teens. Maybe wording this all in a blog post defeats the point, or maybe it doesn’t. Perhaps you have to fight fire with fire. A hundred years ago you’d have had to write a tale like this by hand and post it all over town, on real walls – and would anybody have paid it any more attention then, I wonder? Or is it, in the end, only in human nature to scroll?

I’m breaking free whilst I still have the power to do so. In this hyper-connected world, it can seem not only difficult but extremely inconvenient to cut yourself off from the world by switching off your network stations. But when you think about it, is it? Do you need to know what those eight hundred-odd friends of yours are doing every day? Is that normal? Those few who you do consider your friends, if they are worthy of the title, would surely find you by other means if they needed you and begrudge you little for the effort. That’s what real friendship is – or rather, what it should be.

It’s already been proposed that addiction to social media is having long-term effects on the mental stability of the next generation, as well as the present. We can’t know for sure, but I don’t want to wait to find out. I miss the freedom of the old world, when Google was in its infancy and the idea of a ‘social network’ was still a twinkle in the eye of the Internet.

Take a look at the twelve-year old girl posting duckface/sparrowface/(insert generic bird name here)face selfies on Instagram and tell me that’s normal. Really, tell it to my face. And it’ll have to be to my face, of course. Because as of tonight, I’m making a break for it. If that’s the lesson this grand artwork has taught me over the two and a half years I’ve been working on it, it was well worth both the time and the effort.

I’m getting out whilst I still can. Will you? BB x

A New Beginning

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Hello blog. It’s been a while. In case the absence of posts over the last few weeks wasn’t proof enough of my self-imposed isolation, the cramp in my left shoulder is what has really kicked me back into gear. I’ve been slaving away over the megadrawing for almost a solid month now and it shows: at seven metres and twenty centimetres in length, I’m very almost at the end. Only two sections remain.

Even so, I feel I need a break. And with the gorgeous weather we’re having at the moment, I think my drawing arm could do with a break.

There are still another couple of weeks to go before I’m needed back in Durham (in truth, another month – but I’m quite ready to get going long before term begins in October). With my target language research project out of the way, I have very little to worry about for now. And that, I should point out, is pure bliss after all of the administrative missions of the past year. How long it will be until the spell is broken is debatable. It simply depends on whether I’m ready to tackle the workload that final year has to offer.

I can. There’s no doubt about it. Mindset is the key and I believe I can. Truly.

It’s unseasonably warm and sunny for September here in Sussex. I missed out on autumn last year in Spain; it came in a couple of days in the middle of winter, and was gone in the blink of an eye. Autumn is my second favourite time of year after spring, so I was a little sad to see none of it last year. There’s something wonderful about the falling of the first leaves, the coming of the conkers and that first chill in the air that tells you that winter, far off, is on its way. Perhaps that’s something England does better than Spain. Or perhaps I simply haven’t been in the right part of Spain in autumn.

I don’t have much news to tell for now. Doubtless that will change when I get to Durham. I sent off my job application for next year and am waiting patiently for a response. If I should succeed in that, I will follow it up with a second, in the hope of snagging the two-job rota that kept me so well afloat last year. In the meantime, I have my sights set wide, and if it comes to it, I’m more than prepared to bite the bullet and freelance for a time. All I need for now is enough money to survive and as much experience as I can get my hands on. The main reason I’m planning to return to my former post is simple logic: I’ll be teaching many of the same kids, so I won’t be able to fall back on my old lessons. I’ll just have to draw up a whole year’s worth of new ones. And once I’ve been a year at that, I’ll have two years’ worth of ideas under my belt and will be truly ready to go mobile.

That, at least, is the game plan.

A lot can happen in a year. I can be rather spontaneous when I choose to be, but it’d take nothing short of a miracle to turn me from my road now. Spain is in my heart and it’s Spain for which I’m bound. I don’t think even Helen of Troy could dissuade me at this hour.

Unless, of course, she was Spanish. BB x