My Cambridge-coloured tent cloth

The concept of home constantly changes. At one moment, you find yourself in a place you have not been to. Very soon you then that place feels like a place you are familiar with, but not entirely. Things seem 'normal', you wake up and do not take a second glance at your smaller than usual bed, and feel the gentle rub of a carpet and forget the usual sensation in cold wooden parquet flooring. It is not your house, but it does feel like home. Then one day you miss that old wooden parquet floor, you miss rubbing your toes on the smooth greased layer for the fun of it (even though you would have never done it when you were there). The carpet is softer, you can even sleep of it (as some of your closest friends have) but it still does not feel like home until the day you are asked to leave it. You then remember the surrounding you were bored off, you then start to miss the ancestry of knowledge you know you cannot finish, the carpet which felt like a bed to lay on, now starts to reveal its dust. This is an overdramatic metaphor, as most metaphors are, and perhaps somewhat weird. It is my strange attempt at trying to describe a flurry mellowness I feel, a gentle tornado, an un-spicy curry.

In the UK, it is customary for people to greet each other using common phrases such as "How are you?" or "Y'all right" (though not necessarily in a cowboy-ish tone though I would like that). It is also customary for you to reply with a "Fine, thanks" or a "Not too bad" if you are feeling a little more daring that particular day. I think the use of the former phrase, especially in the past week, was my greatest semi-lie. I call it a semi-lie cause I was not lying, I was fine, I just did not process the feelings that I had cause I did not want to. I was not in denial that a global pandemic was banging at my door, I just thought, why worry? It is not that I can do anything. Must as well focus on the Steinfeld case so I can embark in legal gossip - I mean academic discussion - with my Consti supervisor (Consti as you may have guessed is short-form we use in Cambridge for Constitutional Law because we like to seem hip that way).

But on and on the banging on my door got louder and louder. Email after email an imaginary red alert began to materialize on the wall of my bedroom ringing passionately - as though it was yelling "Get out!" repeatedly with passion and a hint of glee. I use this next analogy with wide reservations as my own experiences are far less severe that theirs, but I feel like a refugee being forced back home as the college had no "resources" to take care of us. This was a few days after them saying that this was our home. They have since voiced contrary to this initial slant, nonetheless the trauma would remain. Not just the trauma of being asked to leave ASAP (which I must mention that was done with good intentions of safety), but the trauma of having the Cambridge bubble popped. It was more than just having to quickly adjust to change, it was the entire frame of the house that is the Cambridge bubble, breaking down before our very eyes. It was like an invisible fire, one which we could not fight.

Yet it was a semi-lie, not truth, not even a quasi-lie - Dr Maniscalco's assertion that a quasi-delict is not a delict in Roman law comes to mind. Entangling from the ideal world of a Cambridge law student for awhile (as you can see I find difficult from my repeated references to it), I lied. I lied that I know where my home is. When I claimed I was accustomed to Cambridge as my home, it was a matter of days before I was thinking about my home in Malaysia. Now that I am 'strongly persuaded' to go back to Malaysia, I complain about the loss of facilities and resources, the frame that held up my utopia being snatched away and kept from me less it be consumed by this invisible fire. The image that my fear takes is not that of being infected, but it is that of my house burning down. A house that I comfortably settled in, but tossed and turned on the bed falling onto the carpet breaking my bones but telling the world and myself that it is softer. It was not a lie, it really was softer. It was a semi-lie to describe the semi-homesickness and the semi-comfort I felt.

Before I go on I want to make it clear that this blog is not meant to criticize the way people in the UK greet each other nor the way Cambridge does things, it is merely contemplative of the concept of home that I made within the Cambridge bubble. Perhaps some of you relate, perhaps some of you don't, perhaps some of you think I'm bonkers. It's a fair statement. I'm writing unfiltered here. This is almost a stream of consciousness if not for the principle embedded within my law-student caricature of communicating with as much clarity as I possibly can in the circumstances. Standard of the reasonable contemplative partly-panicky, partly-resigned, mostly-reflective, and undoubtedly hopeful reasonable man on the London Omnibus?

Perhaps St. Paul had a point when he addressed the Corinthian church by letter. He called our "earthly home" a "tent", drawing the image that it is something temporary that we pitch. We can nail it as firmly to the ground as we can, and spread it as far and wide as our heart's desire, nonetheless it is still a tent, and it is meant to go even though we do not want it too. When the winds of Cambridgeshire howl, the tents shall fly away. St. Paul goes on to say that inside this tent "we groan". I personally absolutely despite outdoor camping so I get his point. But in all seriousness groaning suggests misery, no one groans joyfully (though let me know if you figure out how to do that I genuinely would like to listen). We groan because something is annoying us, something is troubling us. Though it seems I have stored up much in my Cambridge-coloured tent cloth, my books and papers were scattered all the same.

My grand-aunt once voiced her dislike in living out of a suit-case, something I imagine myself doing if I got stranded anywhere on my trip home to Malaysia, especially in the initial fears that I would be kicked out of my college room. I am worried that I would run out of clothes. It seems that St Paul had the same rationalization in his hope "not that we would be unclothed, but that we would be further clothed". Wait a second, how can we be further clothed if my suitcase is limited and finite and God-forbid not overweight for the purposes of the airline! He talks of a "heavenly dwelling" that we can "put on". Talk about weird metaphors. Would I then be wearing my Cambridge-coloured tent cloth like a towel when it's 9 degrees outside? Or perhaps that is precisely the point. There is no home that meets even our most basic need of being clothed. The speed at which all went south shows that nothing is promised. Overwhelming uncertainty and change in circumstances has made us doubt whether we are welcomed in our "homes" or whether they were truly our homes in the first place. St Paul's observation on the places we call our homes is thus astute. Our home cannot meet our inner longing for certainty as it is but a "tent".

This does not mean we curse and deny the very floor we are standing on, or perhaps more accurately the mattress I spent two-thirds of my day on. It is still a tent and thus has the function of being a place we stay in. We just should not put our eternal hope in it, as cloth, even one adorned with flashy Cambridge colours, would be blown away by the wind.