Things they never tell you
How to never belong anywhere ever again.
The internet is awash these days with people wanting to move to another country.
In recent years, many people want to move to Portugal because of instagram or something.
I don’t know what they’re expecting. It’s as if Portugal is a hidden paradise that has suddenly been revealed to the world, a Shangri La that has just popped up out of the sea next to Spain. But apart from the weather, the favourable (and wildly unfair to locals) tax rates, comparative cheapness of things, and the niceness of the Portuguese who happened to wait on them when they were on holiday, what do they really know about Portugal? What they’ve seen on instagram? Or puff pieces in travel sections of newspapers? Or how nice Lisbon was the week they came to stay? I see so much bloviating about Portugal on twitter and threads and facebook, and I really have to control myself by throwing my phone to the other end of the room so I can’t respond how I would really like to. In my business, you rather need people to know that you’re adorable and not a nasty old English woman shouting at British and Americans on the internet. I saw someone on the internet bemoaning the lack of miso paste outside of Lisbon, just yesterday. Christ on a bike. Do you see why I throw my phone?1
I look at all these people saying they want to leave their homeland for somewhere else, not necessarily Portugal, and I wonder if they have any idea of how their life will change if they leave their homes for good, beyond the taxes and cheapness and the nice-ish weather. I wonder if I would have moved here for good (which I didn’t do on a whim, or to escape a hairsprayed orange, or a shitty climate, but that’s another story for another day) if I’d known.
They never told me that after many years I’d become like the Portuguese, a little bit, and therefore foreign, a little bit, in my homeland, and would forget the rules about never looking at a British person for more than half a second, or I’ll get stabbed on the tube. In Portugal, people just stare at whatever the hell they want to, give you the once over, starting at the shoes, moving up to your head and back to the shoes, and apparently now, according to my children, so do I, a little bit. That little bit is too much in London. I now use too much olive oil for an English person. It has to be swimming, and I miss farinheiras when I am away.
They never told me that I would never be able to have a fully shared past with my Portuguese contemporaries. The Portuguese pop music, the films, the television, the books from before this century, while I have tried to catch up with them in general, are a foreign hinterland to me, and it’s impossible for me to share my own hinterland with them. Portugal of the 1970s was a whole different kettle of sardines to the UK in the 1970s.
They never told me that Portugal is the coldest country in the world. Ignore what it says on the thermometer. It seeps into your bones and if you’re lucky you make it to Spring, when you start dreading the summer when you will surely boil to death.
They never told me that even if I am very fluent in my new language, which I only started learning at 29, I would, after 25 years of speaking it 50% of the time, every single day, still have to think about every word that comes out of my mouth. English falls out of my mouth, and falls into my ears, with zero effort. Portuguese, even though I seem to be speaking quickly and fluently, is being pushed out of my mouth while a ticker tape of words and genders and tenses passes through my brain. I still have to pay attention when people are talking, to every word. I also discovered that I become a slightly different person when I speak a different language.
They never told me that even if I have been here for 25 years, I won’t be a tenth as Portuguese as a Portuguese child who has been here for only 10, or that when people meet me for the first time, they assume I just stepped off the boat, even if I am speaking in very fluent Portuguese, and they will try to explain to me what a fucking pastel de nata is or who Salazar was. The other day, I went back to my pilates class after a couple of weeks out, and one of my co-pilates said to me “Oh, I thought you must have gone home”.
They never told me that my tiny bilingual children would feel ashamed in a supermarket when the cashier asked me angrily “why you are speaking with them in English?” I didn’t know this until the other day when my 25 year old told me how she felt that day, 20 years ago. My 25 year old who has lived in Portugal since she was 2 months old, and only ever spoke English at home.
They never told me that the Portuguese do not mix, not even with each other, so making friends and networks is one of the hardest things to do if you are not Portuguese. People will always assume that you are well off and don’t need to work. You will always be other, however Portuguese your life becomes.2
And they never told me that when I left my homeland, my homeland would continue to exist and move on without me.
They never told me that there would be new systems and shops, new mores and attitudes, new lines on the underground and fewer bus routes in the countryside, or that my ability to read car license plates (I know, but it’s something I used to do) would be wiped because they changed the system, and I have no idea what they mean any more, or that I can get lost in the town I grew up in because they have changed the one-way system three times since I left.
They never told me that going to the pub to buy a drink would become weird. I saw people queuing, single file, at the bar last summer. What the hell was that?
They never told me that, even with the internet, I wouldn’t know who most people on Strictly or I’m a Celebrity or Big Brother are. I wouldn’t care, but all my internet friends in the UK blather on about them for weeks on end and I have no idea what or who they are talking about. When I left the UK, only to discover that I wasn’t going to be able to go home several times a year to keep up with friends, I immediately started losing touch with popular culture. There was nothing on the internet such as streaming and social media, just some forums filled with sanctimonious fuckers. There was basic cable TV which had BBC Prime, an abysmal channel filled with Eastenders (twice a day, one was re-running it from the beginning, and one was about a year out of date), The Brittas Empire and Keeping up Appearances on a loop. I didn’t want to just be watching British TV, but I wanted to at least stay IN the loop, but that was impossible. Once streaming and youtube and facebook and twitter and all the rest appeared, it was too late.
They never told me that those friends I left behind would also move on, just as I did, and that I would lose most of them forever.
They never told me that I would never feel like I belong anywhere, ever again.
A brief aside to Britons wanting to leave (because of the weather?) and Americans intending to leave because of the toxic orange. I get it, I do, but please, I really, genuinely beg you, think about the problems in the countries you’re intending to move to. Not the problems for you. The problems that already exist for the people in those countries. There are many. Your dollars and pounds won’t help, they won’t touch the sides, except to help push prices up for everybody. I’m not saying don’t move, but think really REALLY hard about it, especially if you’re going to rock up, stay for a bit, and then leave again once you discover it’s not Shangri-La, and the prices have gone up.
I've only been in Portugal for 5 years, but last year, I did have a small crisis of identity and what you said about never belonging anywhere - yes, that was very real for me. But I've now come to terms with that, and whatever issues there are living in Portugal, I still prefer it to the UK. Nowhere is perfect, that's the bottom line. Wherever you go, there you are. You have to be happy in your own skin.
Lucy, you've put into words everything I feel and know about this whole identity thing. Parallel stories (except I've been here since 1974!) You've said it all xx