Native or Rogue?

The Foreign Office has a policy of moving its diplomats on every couple of years. This is, amongst doubtlessly more complex reasons, to avoid them 'going native'. That is to say, becoming so involved in the country and its people that you forget the interests of the crown, and start expressing emotions or something, forget who King George is or how super marmalade can be.  

It has occurred to me a few times this year that we both must be 'going native' a touch. 

For example, I now think that meetings do not need to run in any linear, structured way: they run perfectly efficiently when everyone speaks at once, an agenda is not even offered never mind adhered to, and everyone goes away having got a lot off their chest. I find the custom of kissing everyone in the room goodbye at any social occasion (irrespective of whether you've spoken to them or not) simply marvellous. Mate, Fernet, swearing in front of old people, apologising for getting in the way of motorcyclists as they drive down your pavement.  These things become not normal exactly, but not remarkable.

  

Some cultural barriers, however, continue to baffle: the insistence, as proffered by every passerby over the age of 12, that Leah is 'going to catch a cold' when we take her outside is extremely irritating. As is the fact that if one deigns to pick her up, or wrap another blanket around her, the inevitable comment that she is 'spoilt already' is muttered as a stage whisper. 

What is that? Is it like saying break a leg on a stage? Come on all you Argies reading this blog, help an increasingly native foreigner out here please.    

And I'm not 100% sure about all this psychology either. I happen to think the subconscious should be like Wales (or, to make a geopolitically appropriate reference, Paraguay): rarely explored, never discussed and kept at a safe distance. What good can come of going there? The things there are weird and confusing, and exist somewhere between an urban myth and a waking nightmare.  

Anyway, the stage beyond 'going native', to continue in Foreign Office parlance, is 'going rogue'. Captain Kurtz in Heart of Darkness (or Apocaplyse Now, if you prefer) would be an excellent example of such. Where you no longer have any handle on the cultural appropriacies of your past and before you know it you're chanting Owmba Owmba in a Circle of Skulls. 

It always happens.  

As for us? I think we've some way to go yet before we reach the 'rogue' stage, but I'm not the best person to judge. A handful of incidents from recent weeks have blurred this barrier, and could highlight what one might chalk down as a 'Cultural Difference', although this has to be my Top Trump:   

A friend was leaving her gynecologist appointment the other week and, as he always does apparently, he patted her on the bum as she was leaving.

But I really don't disapprove. So: you tell me. Native, or rogue?

'I've forgotten what the balance be

tween culture and my sanity.'