The horror creeps in at 40,000 feet, somewhere above Matadi. On the overnight flight from Cape Town to London, this is the point where you wake up and squint at the map on the little screen, hoping that the twitchy, semi-conscious state masquerading as sleep might have carried you to the white cliffs of Dover. But you’re only halfway, a mile above the gaping mouth of the River Congo. 

You are in pain. You’ve been suffering from a bad shoulder. You accidentally left your night bag (painkillers, eye mask, ear plugs) in the airport loo before boarding. You haven’t flown long distances (because Covid, inflation) in a while, so you’ve lost the knack and forgotten the drills.

The plane is cold, like the hearts of your people—the cabin crew on British Airways flight 59 (£959 return) faultlessly trained, aping their avaricious leaders in those great British values of miserable officiousness. When you were a kid, BA—in its heyday—pushed the motto: “The World’s Favourite Airline”. Now, it feebly claims, “To Fly, To Serve”, which is the least you might hope for from an airline. Meanwhile, Only hope, the very least, is a fitting theme for the destination you’ll reach after this hellish torpedo through the 600mph transcontinental log flume to return to your motherland.

Don’t hesitate to ask if there is any way we can make your journey more comfortable, they announce, smiling, jaws clenched.

All you wanted was a smile, some sympathy, and perhaps an ibuprofen pill to help soothe your discomfort. You haven’t even crossed the border before remembering how much in England is transmitted via inference and suggestion. They want you to hesitate. They don’t want you to press that bell. And when you do, they make you sign a waiver form before reluctantly giving you two paracetamols. You feel the heavy bascules of their eyes rolling as you lumber back to your seat.

And who can blame them, these shell-shocked economic desperadoes from some levelled-down province, smeared in aftershave and foundation, winging their way around the globe borne aloft on wafts of jet fuel and flatulence. They are the harbingers of the New Britain™, post-Brexit, global, pre-apocalypse, unleashed into a brave new future hurtling into the void of mediocrity to a soundtrack of slow-clapping. And here you are—traitor, escapee, ex-pat, an inhabitant of a former colony (South Africa), returning twelve years after you left, a pandemic survivor.

You’ve sat on the sidelines for years, watching your country through the wrong end of the telescope as it stumbled about drunk in the aftermath of Empire before going all out and injecting itself in the eyeballs with the crystal meth of Brexit. Now you are blowing back into Europe like the desert sands borne by the Sirocco. The question is: since you have been away so long, will you be welcomed as friend or foe?

••

Once upon a time, there was a city of wonder and intrigue where boys could be boys, and everyone knew their place. London was very much alive in my memory’s little diorama: 

The first time I ate offal at St John in Clerkenwell. A woozy afternoon bubbling to house music at the Notting Hill Carnival with a Cuba Libre in one hand and an air horn in the other. Strolling across Waterloo bridge at midnight with a new lover, then returning, a few months later, heartbroken, to wander the South Bank and howl at the harvest moon. Witnessing the birth of dubstep, watching a global musical subculture rise from the dance floor of a converted Brixton church. Spangled dawn cab rides from legendary East London nightclubs. A one-on-one immersive theatre performance in a Soho basement, communing with the ghost of William Blake’s brother. An Ashes test match afternoon at the Oval spilling out into a riverside pub sundown.

But the story this time is as follows:

The passport gates are broken. Tense ushers lump all comers from across the globe into an hour-long queue to enter. British passport? Don’t matter. Back of the line, mate. 

Hours later, I finally arrive in a cab (£80) at my dad’s house in Croydon—a hulking London suburb famous primarily for all the people who did something interesting after they got the fuck out. I flick on the TV, landing on GB News, a reactionary right-wing channel whose presence in the mainstream British media landscape would have been unthinkable when I emigrated in 2011. I watch the truculent whisky-face of comedy icon John Cleese of Monty Python fame defending his refusal to cut a transphobic scene from his new Fawlty Towers series.

What happened to John Cleese? And what has become of my Merrie Olde England?

••

When I visit my old home town, I seek to do everything I used to do.

I sit in Croydon beer gardens, pouring foaming nut-brown ale down my throat. I eat a Sunday roast with Yorkshire puddings. I watch elderly white men playing elderly white jazz, watched by other elderly white people.

I join the torpid throngs in Croydon town centre, trudging past pound shops and discount stores. I spent my teens here and most of high school. This once-bustling shopping centre is now half-empty and mostly boarded up. Its famous department store is long gone, the building still unoccupied. 

I go to Sainsbury’s, the only supermarket in the town centre. All the cashiers have been replaced by self-service tills commanding you to place your items in the bagging area. A harassed manager shuttles from till to till, helping those stuck. “This shop will be closing down soon,” he says. 

A bookseller in Waterstone’s tells me that office workers have not returned since Covid, and neither has the footfall. New businesses have not appeared: prohibitive business rates compensating for the bankruptcy of Croydon Council after the mismanagement of its investment portfolio (£2 billion). 

I buy a SIM card which doesn’t work. They can’t refund me. I’ll have to contact customer care. Customer care, which requires navigating a circuitous maze of bots before you can speak to a human being, does not reimburse me. I pay for a flat white (£4.20), then ask, as usual, for a spoonful of honey. But a spoonful of love is not accessible in England. Unlike in South Africa, greeting a shop assistant or stranger is not often reciprocated.

The trains are on strike, so are the nurses, the doctors, teachers, etc. 

I walk the Wandle River from Croydon to where it meets the Thames, ancient waterway and coronary artery that pumped colonial cells out to the organs of the Empire. I walk along Wandsworth High Street, wondering how much it would cost to live somewhere so pretty (answer: £575,000 upwards for a one-bedroom flat). 

“”
I love my family, and I miss my friends. But day by day, the root of some groaning antipathy dawns on me. I am a citizen of the UK, and I am free to wander its highways and byways. Yet, so many of its doors now feel closed. The city is springing up like a Shanghai-on-Thames. Even with my respectable salary in South Africa, I wouldn’t have the means to move back.

I still love London, but does London love me back now that I can’t afford it?

I revisit old haunts: the enclaves of Brixton and Peckham, where year by year gentrification is edging out the local immigrant communities that gave the places their unique flavour, giving way to a global hipster monoculture of box parks and ramen bars. I meet friends in Vauxhall and Wapping, where shining, vertiginous tower blocks are papering over the views of the city skyline. Luxury flats and palisades recall all the charm of a suburban Johannesburg mall. Who will live here, and how will they afford it?

I love my family, and I miss my friends. But day by day, the root of some groaning antipathy dawns on me. I am a citizen of the UK, and I am free to wander its highways and byways. Yet, so many of its doors now feel closed. The city is springing up like a Shanghai-on-Thames. Even with my respectable salary in South Africa, I wouldn’t have the means to move back.

I still love London, but does London love me back now that I can’t afford it?

••

Enoch Powell said that “without the empire, Britain would be like a head without a body”. Without Europe, will it look like a sack of turnips with a comedy face drawn? But that joke is not funny anymore, especially for those who can’t afford to put turnips on the table. Few people I speak to seem to feel optimistic about post-Brexit Britain.

My trip is purely a pleasure; I have no business here. And joy quickly turns to pain when you are priced out. My fortunes have been handcuffed to the suicidal ZAR, the South African Rand currency with its feet set in concrete and dumped in the poisoned sludge of devaluation. 

My trip becomes poverty tourism. My naively slim spending money is gone in days—cadging meals from friends and family. I start to live like the natives: hunting for bargains and freebies and complaining about how expensive everything is. About how the police don’t come when you call. How hard it is to see a doctor.
How hot the weather is (so unnerving, so unheimlich).

On the news, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is saying that things would only get better if everyone would just make a bit more effort and be a bit more optimistic: “It’s time to roll up our sleeves, take on the declinists
and watch the British economy prove the doubters wrong,” he says, androidly.

Tell that to those without the means who experience England as a country of economic micro-horrors dispensed in imperial weights and measures. The width by which the passenger next to you is encroaching. The 0.1 percentage point loss in a rate. The one pint too many. The fifteen-minute delay due to leaves on the line (as if leaves don’t fall every year). The inferior grade of your local school. 

Somewhere, under the veneer of meanness (that lofty bar to success), and beneath the high watermark of staying afloat, we all want a thimbleful of kindness. If this is how it feels to come back as a citizen, how must it feel to be an actual foreigner or a refugee in 21st-century Britain?

••

Despite everything, I still love London and England, especially when I seek solace in its ancient history.
I always have time to snuffle and snout around the old City of London like a cadaver dog, searching for the toothsome threads of some palatable past. It makes me feel rooted in a story of England that moves me: of struggle and resistance, fires and plagues, the Roman and Norman conquests. 

And best of all, walking is still free at the time of writing. You cannot drive a car into central London for free any more (£15, excluding Christmas), but you can stride in like some mediaeval pilgrim seeking fortune. You can explore the monuments, the churches, the burial grounds and temples of strange cults.

There’s a calm about the square mile, which grew from within the ancient city walls the Romans built thousands of years ago. Look at it now: the epicentre of global financial services and ingenious legal tax avoidance! What an achievement! What a thrill!

And just when you feel a spasm of patriotic pride, you pass yet another statue of some genial genocidaire on horseback, and the cold and bony finger of white supremacy taps you on the shoulder and says: not so fast, son. 

But, listen to you, talking down Britain again. You self-hating ex-pat, you cynical citizen of nowhere.

Somewhere, close by, you imagine a jingoistic mob assembling, wrapped in Union flags, muttering: If you hate our country so much, why don’t you go back to where you came from? 

With a small sigh of relief and regret, that is precisely what you do.