Are Gypsys And Expatriates Made From The Same Mould? ?

I have never really come to grips with that overused cliché, The world’s your oyster,” for, if one thinks about it, an oyster never moves from its allotted spot on the bottom of the ocean or a river. It clings limpet- like to a fixed body until it is plucked, shucked and promptly eaten.

I’m glad I’m not an oyster.

I have though inadvertently used that cliché as a compass that has led me to some far flung corners of the globe and, over time turned me into a permanent expatriate.

The wanderlust was probably infused into my system when my parents decided, when I was quite young to up stumps and move to Africa leaving behind the place of my birth. (UK) As a family we bobbed like flotsam in and out of the ‘colonies’ before washing up in the shadow of Table Mountain at the tip of the African continent.

It was there my parents found for themselves a life that suited them however, the constant movement between countries in my formative years instilled in me a wonderful sense of the impermanent.

I spent twelve years in South Africa until I could no longer resist the urge to ‘move,’ in whatever direction I could. I was barely twenty and remember the day clearly when I took off on the great O.E. promising friends, who had come to see me off that I would probably see them in six months.

I never returned.

I did however embrace the oyster myth, settling for extended periods of time in Kenya, Greece, France, Spain, the U.K and other wonderful destinations.

Eventually it was in London where I returned to my trade in the field of advertising and my partner and I ‘settled’ awhile toiling away at our respective professions.

During this time while working for Ogilvy & Mather I was offered the opportunity to re- locate to Wellington to set up the Ogilvy Direct network working with the intrepid Everest climber Robert Anderson.

I was about to become a ‘corporate expatriate’

At the time I did think that Wellington was a few miles north of London near the satellite town of Woking until, consulting a map I discovered that I was to be dispatched to the world’s most southern capital of New Zealand!

Here I discovered the true nature of being an expatriate working far from the gaze of ones multi – national masters working in their ivory towers in the UK and America. It was a great life, the people fabulous, the language my mother tongue and I discovered another country while immersing myself in a society that was, to all intents and purposes far different from anything I had ever experienced.

A few years later in between stints in Hong Kong, Australia followed and this too was ‘different’ even though, on the surface, apart from the baking sun there was no discernable difference from the other countries in which we had lingered. I also came to realize that no two countries are remotely alike.

Soon, without realizing, my life became moored to weighty institutions like universities as my wife began to pursue another degree. We took out citizenship, mortgages and inevitably, children arrived …yes we became true blue Aussies!

Or did we?

The expatriate mantle had been cast aside for a more ‘settled’ existence in an adopted country although, to be honest, ‘settled’ never sat comfortably with me as I discovered there was no sense of ‘nationalism’ in my being.

I don’t take extreme risks but I often felt that I was under the skin of a human being I am not. In time I began to watch myself from a distance and imbibe the contingency of who one is and what one feels.

It was to stand outside myself and watch my bourgeois life prodded, pushed and buffeted around by lives quite unlike my own. It was then to surrender myself to a destiny of a nation I couldn’t control.

Hemingway once glamorized the expatriate life thus, "If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man," he wrote in a memoir, "then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast."

On the other hand, he mocked Americans living in Europe. "You're an expatriate," Bill Gorton tells Jake Barnes in Hemingway's 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises. "You've lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed with sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafes."

Perhaps he was right, for I now find myself living on the island of Bali, having succumbed to the lure of another country. I am by design, part of the international flotsam that makes up the expatriate community forever drifting on an uncertain tide of impermanence, as I no longer know where ‘home’ is.

Oh, and these days I do hang around in cafes.

Paul v Walters is a best selling novelist and when not cocooned in sloth and procrastination in his house in Bali he scribbles for a number of International travel and vox pop journals.

His latest novel, “Scimitar” will be released in August 2016.