642 Given everything which is happening in the UK right now, to be handed some kind of forced exile would probably be a relief. I would be very homesick, in the end, so hopefully it wouldn't be too long. But if I ever was the position of choosing somewhere to be exiled it would have to be somewhere I could just disappear, where no one knew me and I could just be the person I wanted to be.
There'd be two obvious paradoxical choices. One fantasy has always been to disappear to a remote cottage somewhere with only books for company, where I could enjoy as close to silence as possible and just live the daily routine of reading without interruptions. Somehow I'd be able to achieve this without a car and would have access to somewhere to buy food. Which doesn't seem very remote.
The other would be an apartment in a big city, one of the huge ones, London, New York, Tokyo or Shanghai, offering the anonymity of the crowd. I would of course have access to an infinite amount of cash and no need to work, so that I could just "do" culture a lot or not depending on how I felt. My trips to London have been microcosms of this, of being away from it all. Being somewhere else.
Both of these have a feature of being alone and I suppose that says a lot about me. I'm alone a lot of the time anyway, when not with my family or working, because that can be what happens when you reach a certain age, all of your old friends have drifted away (literally in my case) or simply live on the other side of the world and you've become defeated by the effort of making new ones.
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