Ontological Insecurity in the Home Counties.

The other day, my parents and I decided to take a walk out by Winchester Hill Fort: 2, 500 years old, with a terrific view of a fair bit of the Hampshire countryside and out across Southampton water to the Isle of Wight... On the way back, only a mediocre football match on the radio, I fell asleep, face-first, on the passenger door, lost in uncomfortable dreams about what the future might hold for me...

One of the subjects playing in my head was my background. I'm one of those silly people who believes where you're going depends, to a greater or a lesser extent, on where you're from. It has dawned on me of late that (if we take Surbiton as de facto if not de jure) all of my direct family: uncles, aunts, cousin, mother, father, grandparents (alive and dead), live or lived in Surrey. I can't help feeling that this has and will continue to have, a manifest effect on my destiny... not necessarily on my prospects but on the scale and the realisation of my ambitions.

Now don't get me wrong, my family are not some unusual breed of indentured peasants; all of the aforementioned, at some point or other, have a pretty big connection to somewhere else: Oxford, Bognor Regis, North London, Southern Ireland but, right now, one way or the other, they've all chosen the safe option, spreading themselves one end to the other across this comfortable, conservative little county. For myself, I spent my first few years (well, until I was 3) living beside the green fields of Eversley, Berkshire but I, too, despite a couple of half-hearted extended jaunts in Killarney and frequent arguments concerning Kingston's dubious claim to Greater London status, have also preferred to pass my days in London's back garden. God.. why? It is lovely but it's so... so... difficult to fit with an appropriate adjective.

Now, back to the point of this piece, I emerged from my empty dreams, all this swirling home-counties nihilism, to find we were back on the drive at my parents' house. My face and neck hurt a little owing to their being uncomfortably squashed against the door for a half-hour but I was okay, just a little disoriented and more than a little disheartened to boot. Still, I went inside and made myself a cup of tea, only to discover, not five minutes later, that I had received a conditional offer to study Social Policy at the London School of Economics...

Reading the words 'Conditional Offer' and 'LSE', I must confess my first thought was: 'Who gives a coconut about background? It's not about where you're from, it's about where you're going!'

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Glancing back over this, I can't helping thinking that R. D. Laing would have had a field day with me...