Three years

So it’s three years since we arrived in Argentina. I suppose I could’ve started this blog with the words, “So it’s three years since we left England,” but that would be too retrospective. Onwards and upwards.

So it’s three years since we arrived in Argentina, and I wouldn’t go back for all the opium in Afghanistan. It’s been very hard at times. I’ve felt like the only one who sees the world a certain way, and I’ve thought myself terribly isolated as a result. I’ve felt lonely, angry, lost, ridiculed, inadequate, depressed, unfaithful to my friends and untrue to my English family. It’s taken me three years of adaptation, six months with a psychologist and a recently started bout of anti-depressants to get me to a state where I can begin to accept the things about living here that drive me crazy. Mostly the problem was with me, not with the way things work here. Or don’t work here.

This country is up the creek, there’s no doubt about it – prices are going through the roof, basic commodities (tomatoes, milk, beer, beef, antibiotics) become scarce at a moment’s notice and their prices seldom return to their pre-shortage levels once the emergency has passed. The economy minister’s just resigned, spawning a fresh round of “let’s not panic, but” stories. Inflation was at 13.5pc [http://devdata.worldbank.org/external/CPProfile.asp?SelectedCountry=ARG&CCODE=ARG&CNAME=Argentina&PTYPE=CP]in 2006 compared with 2.4pc in the UK [http://devdata.worldbank.org/external/CPProfile.asp?PTYPE=CP&CCODE=GBR].

As previously blogged, the roads are a nightmare. We’re killing each other at the rate of 20+ a day and no one seems to think it might be a good idea to put on a seatbelt, slow down and get the car MOT’d every once in a while.

People here are angry, pushy, rude and aggressive if you believe what you see on the streets and in the news. And there’s a depressingly entrenched but unacknowledged apartheid at work which keeps anyone not a part of the white ruling classes holed up in grim ghettos on the outskirts of towns.

And yet I wouldn’t go back to England if you paid me. Everywhere has its faults. According to what I read online and in the paper, England’s awash with overweight, unhappy credit junkies and disillusioned depressives, and while property prices may be falling for the first time since Thatcher’s menopause, I couldn’t afford to buy anything bigger than the teeny tiny terrace we used to own. I’d be back in an underpaid treadmill existence, fretting through life squashed up next to 40 million other binge drinking drones crammed into a space the size of one of Argentina’s smaller provinces [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Fe_Province]. Anger is apparently endemic [http://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/information/news?EntryId17=57716&p=7] and the kids are very far from alright [http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/apr/24/mentalhealth.children]. Somebody tell me why I might possibly want to go back.

Whenever I start pining for Norfolk, something you might find hard to believe happens after the above invective, I just watch my kids run across our immense living / dining room and remind myself that it just wouldn’t happen like this in the UK. This house cost us £30k two years ago and is worth twice that now. My kids have a lovely garden to play in and we have a pool for the scorching summer afternoons. I might get a stomach ulcer every time I get in the car and drive to work, I might get on a downer about some of the finer points of etiquette apparently missing in many of my new neighbours, I may not have two pennies to rub together by about halfway through the month, but I have a lovely home in one of the world’s great wildernesses, and that goes an awfully long way towards compensating.