Interesting week this week. I don’t know the artist of this, which sums up my huge learning curve, but he/she has put it concisely enough.
We all do things for a reason, primarily we work to pay bills. We aim to get higher on the pay scale to have more left after paying those bills.
This week that penny dropped for me. The real reason why I read what I read, watch what I watch and wear what I like.
I read what I read because I like the story. Not because the book on my coffee table will give me a better social standing. No one can see my coffee table for Moshi Monsters anyhow. I wear what I can afford, because most my money goes on what the kids want to wear!
Let me make another jump. For long enough I didn’t tell anyone I was from Hull. Being from Hull was a bad thing, poor education, poor jobs, unique grammar, the rest of the world believed the only thing Hull had going for it was the fact that it was at the end of the M62.
I am and have always been glad to have been raised and live so close to a city that has had a hand in so many developments of our society. Glad that it is far enough away from the madness that it is easy enough to chose a different path. Glad that it was so often left alone that it is used to sorting itself out and fighting its own battles.
Larkin, Hull Truck. That “Northern City” that took the bombs and kept morale up for the rest of the nation from Zepplins and later from aeroplanes. Yes, whales, fish, Wilberforce, and now, (as before) green energy. These things in themselves aren’t Hull, the are the underpinning elements that bring it together.
In Fantasy and Science Fiction, ports are the happening places. The new ship made on a space station, the chance meeting on the wharf, the bar brawl in the docks. Tolkien stayed around these flat marsh lands and the villages beyond. Some say it inspired him. It certainly inspired Lewis Caroll.
Being different isn’t bad, being unique isn’t wrong. Being detached from the chase everyone else is a part of isn’t terrible either. You shouldn’t be afraid of you, of your voice, your art, your ambition. Just make it the best, most individual thing you can.
Now, all I have to do is take that to heart!
My husband’s a northerner – born in Yorkshire – but I’ve never been to Hull. Perhaps I should, if only to annoy those people who pray “From Hell, Hull and Halifax, Good Lord deliver us.” 🙂