In May, as Spring moved uncertainly into summer, things slowed down for me. I formally graduated from UBC with my Masters’ in Counselling Psychology on May 19th, and then spent some time putting together an application for Registered Clinical Counsellor status with the BCACC. But I’ve had a hiatus from counselling itself: it feels strange now to enter occasional zoom seminars online and to fumble for my headset, or wait for software to update itself, so very different from the habitual rituals of preparation and reviewing notes when I was having back-to-back individual sessions during practicum.
We also travelled internationally for the first time since the pandemic started, flying from Vancouver to London, and then taking a holiday that linked up various fragments of my past life. We first drove to Bognor Regis, a faded Victorian resort on the South Coast, to visit one of the Vietnamese refugees I’d worked with during my time as a volunteer and then a residential social worker in 1988 and 1989, before I flew to Vancouver and into a new life. We then drove on to Dorset, to the village churchyard where my parents are buried, to visit their grave. The village itself had, by the time I moved there with my family as a child, already become a suburb of a larger conurbation. I left at eighteen and returned only rarely until a decade ago, when I began to come back more frequently when my father’s life was drawing to its end. From Dorset we drove further West to Cornwall for a walking holiday, and then back to London again, to visit my sister, friends from undergraduate days, and friends I’ve got to know more recently, in Southeast Asia and in Singapore, who had retreated to or were transiting through the metropolis.
What was England like after so long? It was a beautiful time of year, with the leaves full but still a stunning green, the vegetation lush. Bognor and much of the way to Dorset felt like one interminable bypass of a city centre, dual carriageway roads fringed with weeds, shrubs, and trees. But in when we reached Dorset things grew wilder: we stayed not in the village where I’d lived but in a much more genuine village, Cranborne, several miles north of Wimborne, tucked into the rolling hills so thoroughly that there was no cellphone reception in the high street. We stayed above a restaurant and went on small walks, through coppiced woodlands and up onto the gentle curve of downs covered in new crops, chalk and flint, often walking between high towering hedgerows that blocked out the view of the landscape until you came to a sudden stile or gate. There were pheasants and hares in the fields, and every now and then a wood pigeon would clatter clumsily out of the hedge as we passed. We would hear the same cooing in the morning when we woke, and in the evening at dusk rooks gathered in the air above the churchyard cawing, little black crucifixes fluttering against and empty sky. We passed through the churchyard once, and swallows swooped past us; an hour later, returning from the pub, we found the air above the gravestones alive with bats, coming so close that they almost brushed our faces.
Cornwall was a further degree wilder. We walked for days on the coastal path, following trails that led up the back of steep slate cliffs and then tumbled down to sheltered coves. Our tour guide had a background in environmental science, and so was aware of the natural world: we saw fulmars nesting on the cliffs, and a pair of choughs with bright red beaks that flew up from an abandoned mine shaft. Most of all we named plants, from the very common to the very rare: the purple thrift that grew in profusion in the stone walls and the cliff margins, and the small orchids that grew on valley slopes. We battled a consistent wind that blew in off the Irish Sea, sometimes so strong that you felt you were hanging in the air, barely touching the ground, like the gulls and kestrels that drifted over the cliffs and then circled, far below us. Strangely, the margin of land nearest to the sea, which our guide gave a name from the Cornish language, too, the morek (if I remember rightly), always bore traces of human presence: lookout towers for fish, mine shafts and slate walls, traces of strip cultivation, and even the ramparts of an Iron Age fort. The fields inland were the property of large landowners, but the margins were places where other shifting populations came and went, just as the sea ebbed and then returned, nibbling at the land.
Finally, London. I lived here, I realise, only for four years, for my undergraduate studies at University College, and for a further year after that. Yet, meeting two friends who were my classmates, I also became how important this time was in our lives; in the terms of some psychology narrative research I’ve been reading that’s a little too quantitative, it had “event centrality” in the stories we tell of our lives. I’m trying to think of a metaphor here and failing: something about a series of journeys that converge on a narrow space – a pass, or a ford across a river – and then diverge, or the threads of lives passing through the same eye of a needle, but then spreading apart again. Later, I’d walk in Bloomsbury, the area where many of the colleges of what was the University of London are located, where I spent my undergraduate years, and which I’ve returned to over the years to do research at the British Library. Physically, very little had changed. I could still walk up through the front quadrangle of University College, along the South Cloisters, down the stairs and out under an archway to Foster Court, where the English Department was located. On one level the environment seemed more attractive: pop-up cafes had sprouted in the on the sidewalks the recesses of campus, and the Bloomsbury in late May had the leafiness of early summer. And yet space had also been increasingly privatized – for the first time I couldn’t enter Foster Court, because key card access had been installed. This was perhaps representative of something larger: a feeling of being more outside, more distant, in Britain, once the initial familiarity had worn through.
One thing I came to realise is that a combination of the pandemic, the nature of my program, my own uncertainty about where my future lies, and also something of my own personality – that feeling often that I would rather do things for myself than rely on others – combined to leave me, on graduation, without a community of practice which I felt fully comfortable to belong in. Partly, I think, this is just an inevitable part of ageing; as you grow older, so there are less and less people in the world quite like you, who share all those wrinkles of particular experiences. Yet it’s something that I’d still hope to make steps towards finding, in Singapore, or here in Vancouver, in a year’s time.