Home away...

by Marion
(Lent, The Netherlands)

I am just a visitor. That's unfortunately how it still feels.

I live in the Netherlands, with my partner and our two young kids. We have fallen in love with the Moors twenty years ago, and for the last couple of years Staithes has been our "home-base" whenever we were over.

Returning home to Lent got more and more difficult over the last few times, our vague dreams of settling in Staithes became more and more real every time we sat outside with friends and coffee, watching the tide coming in...

Questions kept lingering in our minds, driving back to Hull each time. Staithes is a warm, welcoming place, but what if one would decide to move there?

Would one overstay his or her welcome?

Would we be able to adapt to the town's ways?

Would we be strangers, unable to melt in to this community? Or would a town like that have some actual use for us? Is there a need for new families at all to keep a town alive?

Why Staithes? Why not Scarborough, York, Helmsley...

Why an incredibly small, old port, almost forgotten, once one of the main fishing communities, nowadays almost entirely living of renting out the fisherman's cottages to visitors like us.

Maybe it's the smell of coal. The cries of the seagulls, or the sound cars make on the cobbled streets, perhaps the light.

Or all of these things and the fact that Staithes and surroundings are not just picturesque.

There's this huge potassium-mine for instance on top of the hill and that fits in with my idea of a real living, working area, not just for tourists to take pictures of.

People work here, mostly hard, facing everyday reality as one should in real life. Like we do at home. It's the way the people in a small town are doing their things, however usually in a completely different pace.

People in small towns are silently pleased to meet you. When they are checking the sea whether it's worth while going out there today for a small catch, or run their shop, or commute to a bigger place every day. Pretty basic. And that is all I need.

Staithes is still a living town, but I can see it being taken over by holidaymakers that are just there for a short while in summertime and then leave.

Passers-by may give the town it's means to go on in a way, but maybe this town could do with life all year long, like it once did.

The local people get older, younger people are said to be moving away to more exciting and promising areas, the cohesion of people building a community in Staithes is not as strong as it used to be somebody told me. I guess that is what grabbed me.

Maybe it should also be more alive off-season, in winter-time, with people living there, raising their kids, working, teaching, building, preserving the town for a future in the long run. Maybe I am wrong.

Ofcourse people fall in love with the places they visit when away from their own busy lives, needless to say we did exactly that with Staithes.

We all have a tendency to idealize the places where we don't feel haunted by all the hectic stuff we want to forget for a few days.

Yet every time I am 'over there' I look for jobs, opportunities to start something, ask people why they decided to move there, what brought them to that choice, how they manage to get by. Would they, given the choice, make exactly the same decisions and why...

It is possible that by now I am to some of the local people that slightly weird dutch woman who asks too much questions every time she is there.

Let's face it, I am hooked.

And I no longer doubt I would move to Staithes in an instant, would there be a way to earn a living.

Time will tell...