Something I miss about home is the sea. There’s a comfort in the fact it’s always there and never seems to change. When you walk through my hometown, even if you can’t see it, you can smell it. Here I feel claustrophobic; I like Oxford, but it’s weird to live in a place that seems so permanent and solid, constrained on all sides by land. The beach is integral to my town’s identity. The boundaries of the shoreline shift and change. As the tide meets the earth, new environments are born and thrive. Mud and sea come together in the salt marshes to form something that is neither one nor the other. If it weren’t for the groynes, the stones would migrate and shift to somewhere else and the whole landscape would look different. The council tries to stop it, but nature will take its course eventually.
There’s this odd sense of liminality about this town, which is always changing in little ways, but simultaneously a constant. My memories of the town from childhood colour these changes and lend a kind of discordance to the buildings and the trees. An uncanny feeling pervades the place as somewhere in flux. I love to walk around my hometown; I’ve become so familiar with its small number of streets that I even dream about walking them sometimes. There’s something terrifying about coming back and seeing that things have changed.
On paper, it’s not a big deal, and it’s not something that can be compared to the difficulty that so many other communities in the UK face. My concern is one that comes from a place of privilege. However, it feels like the place is in a bubble, though; even something like the local chip shop, owned by one family for decades, closing and being replaced by a Starbucks introduces a sense of decline. Whitstable has been, unlike many other Kentish seaside towns, gentrified to such an extent that it’s almost unrecognisable from 20 years ago (or so my parents say). I’ve worried before that when people stop coming from London, find somewhere new and ‘cool’ to visit, and investment dries up, the town will basically die. Its reliance on tourism means it must be beautiful and picturesque, but that is a curse rather than a blessing; I have friends whose families have lived there for generations but can’t afford to buy their own house, rents driven up by people owning holiday homes they never visit. Oxford seems a world away; going back home to visit feels more like a vacation.
The people are what make the town. You can walk down the High Street and see at least five people you know; in the pub, there are always familiar faces. Yet, it seems that the people are in flux just as much as the town – I notice how my mates have met new friends, and it’s not something I begrudge them. In many ways, I love meeting these new people, but there is a voice in the back of your head that asks, “is this the beginning of the end for us?” There’s a strange awareness that, as the terms pass, the distance is only going to grow. There are jokes I’m not in on, new habits unfamiliar to me, and events that I’m not privy to. The tide is going to march on, and the stones are going to shift, and this is something I won’t always be a part of.
