For as long as I can remember, all I’ve wanted to do is leave my hometown of Exeter, Devon. Not exactly an orthodox way to begin a Romantic ode, but bear with me.
We’ve always been an odd fit, Devon and me. There was always an unshakeable and creeping feeling of being an outsider to the place I should call home, but “home” never seemed right.
I hated it for large, looming reasons, like how I could never shake the identity frictions of being British-Asian in a county so barren of diversity, or how the farmer’s markets and cosy villages of the shire could never house the extent of my ambition and curiosity. I hated it for small, trite reasons, like how it makes my allergies flare up or the irritation caused by the infrequency of public transportation.
I don’t know where my distaste came from. I don’t know how to make it go away. But when I got the opportunity to finally move out last year and come to Oxford, a city whose spires are filled to the brim with dreams, my excitement was indescribable.
Put very simply, my affinity for my hometown has always, unfortunately, been limited, illustrated by my Spotify, rammed full of Noah Kahan, crooning over melodic guitar strings about his bittersweet feelings towards his similarly rural childhood abode.
This place is such great motivation
For anyone trying to move
The fuck away from hibernation
– Homesick, Noah Kahan
And yet, here I am, writing a so-called loving ode to Devon. Well, as I’ve gotten older, it’s been ambiguity and lack of surety that has plagued my relationship with my hometown, and it was a particular moment when my perspective began to change.
On a train journey, inevitably delayed, advancing eastwards from Devonshire towards Oxford, it was another Noah Kahan song that came on shuffle.
The things that I lost here, the people I knew
They got me surrounded for a mile or two
The car’s in reverse, I’m grippin’ the wheel
I’m back between villages and everything’s still
– The View Between Villages, Noah Kahan
And, perhaps, like the forever faithful English Literature A-Level student I always will be, I was hung up on the language here. ‘Lost’ is undoubtedly mournful in tone. ‘Surrounded’ feels claustrophobic. ‘Reverse’ feels like regression. ‘Gripping’ feels like anxiety. ‘Still’ feels like discontentedness. All very in keeping with my childhood thoughts on my hometown; no surprising perspectives here.
Then I listened again; and despite the words being the same, the meaning was completely the opposite.
‘Lost’ became cathartic. ‘Surrounded’ could be comforting. ‘Reverse’ feels like reminiscing. ‘Gripping’ is like a rush of energy. And ‘still’ feels like contentedness.
Now, do you see what I mean when I say ambiguity?
It was this last bit I was interested in. My county’s stillness had been my greatest chagrin as a teenager, with road after road of sleepy lanes, an England left behind by time, rather than the modern, dynamic society I wanted to contribute to. And yet, at the same time, I had never got to appreciate Devon for all its stillness. My school, though lovely, was certainly academically intense. Tucked away in a tiny village of 800 in the East Devon countryside, and near the tranquil coast, it was an alcove of academic pressure and achievement, forever reaching for more and more Oxbridge offers. It becomes difficult to appreciate the beauty of one of England’s most picturesque counties when you spend seven years in it striving to reach a level of academic perfection which does not exist. Thus, it was upon leaving my school, and entering an even more academically intense university, that my perspective on achievement and landscape began to evolve.
⧫⧫⧫
Whether I make something of my life, measured by wealth or status or any other facile barometer of achievement, or I do not, the winding coastal paths of Devon remain indifferent. I’m not the first to notice that the natural landscapes of the West Country bear no care for the human condition; it’s the very thing writer Thomas Hardy, from the neighbouring and equally rural county of Dorset, often lamented in his poetry.
Beeny did not quiver,
Juliot grew not gray,
Thin Valency’s river
Held its wonted way.
– A Death Day Recalled, Thomas Hardy
While Hardy’s elegy to his late wife decries nature’s indifference to her passing and his suffering, perhaps there is something to be said for the natural landscape’s stoicism in the face of human emotional volatility. The regular ebb and flow of the tide, and the annual regeneration of the trees happen without care for me, and my collections stress, and my internship anxiety, and my overthinking. I think there’s something quite poetic in that.
⧫⧫⧫
There’s no part of the academic pressure cooker of Oxford, in my experience, that accepts a lack of productivity, academic or otherwise. There’s no part of bustling, hustling central London, my hopeful future workplace, that appreciates stillness and rest. Perhaps, I am yet to find a part of myself that accepts a failure to succeed or constantly achieve. Maybe that is why I return again and again to the meaning of Devon to me. From the rolling hills of East Devon, to the beaches of Salcombe, the tors of Dartmoor, to the meandering roads of Lynton and Lynmouth, there is no part of the Devon landscape which asks anything from me. Not success, not failure, not anything. It is existence without preconditions.
There’s a version of me, in some parallel universe, that spends the rest of her life in Devon. While this existence would probably bore the living daylights out of me and finds no place within my unswerving ambition to do good in this world, I think there might be something emotionally cathartic in accepting it. And recognising that has to come with finding a new kind of joy and love in my hometown. I will finish with one more lyric from my favourite underground indie artist you won’t have heard of.
And the voices that implore
“You should be doing more.”
To you, I can admit
That I’m just too soft for all of it
– Sweet Nothing, Taylor Swift
Those voices are loud in Oxford, but they are loudest within my own head. Every term, I try to take on new things, to make my list of projects and achievements longer, and every term I feel more unaccomplished than ever. But whenever I go home to Devon, and retrace the steps of the coastal walks my parents would drag a disgruntled teenage version of myself on, I can finally admit something I can’t to anyone or anywhere else: that maybe I’m just too soft for all of it.