The "Soutpiel" Phenomenon

I think it was Bryce Courteney in "The Power of One" who described the unique human condition of being a 'soutpiel'. One foot in South Africa and one in England (and your 'piel' hangs in the separating seas, making it salty!)
Between 2003 and 2006, I found myself in this rather awkward position and vowed I would never do it again. But now, I am back here in sunny England, my 'piel' dangling precariously and inexplicably between Cape Town and Heathrow.
Being a South African, whether from Benoni, Bloem or Bellville, in England is a remarkably unique experience which deserves some sort of investigative analysis as a phenomenon and diaspora-of-sorts.

Outside the sky is deathly still and the particular grey only an African can recognise as being so damningly English. Always mutable, today it is cranked up to ‘luminous’ – managing at once to be both darkly overcast and glaringly bright. When I left England almost exactly two years ago, I was deeply convinced I would never live here again. But here I am once again, confronted by the daily-ness of living in a world I feel I cannot call my own. In the past I used words like alienation, isolation and exile to describe my existence away from home. But now my reason for being here is so utterly different that now I look at those words and think they sound a little dramatic – but perhaps there is some hint of truth to them still.
Living in the UK is very different to popping over here on a mere holiday. In fact, when one is here as a South African on holiday, one is pleasantly comforted by the cosy English pubs and the red buses of Piccadilly Circus – it is just like in the movies and sitcoms which are the staple diet of South African television. But when you have lived here for awhile, the persistence of pubs and the glaring lack of restaurants becomes a source of cultural irritation and gastronomic frustration and all you wish for is a swish Italian café which doesn’t serve chips with all their pasta dishes! This and various other idiosyncrasies of the South African/English experience fascinate me now in a way which didn’t before. And though each South African’s experience of living in the UK is unique, we all have shared many of the same dreams, frustrations and asked the same questions. And so I hope you will enjoy this collection of bitingly true stories and frank interviews as much as I have enjoyed writing about them!