I’ve lived in the same part of the world in the south west of England for all of my life. I am rooted into this place, and its familiarity is comforting and has always sheltered me in tumultuous times. This little corner of Devon has always felt like a safe haven. And yet I am feeling increasingly ‘unmoored’. The certainties that have kept me upright for most of my life feel as though they are disintegrating. And it is frightening.
I have not – at least not yet – lost my home through war, climate change and rising fascism in the way that so many people across the world have done and are doing as I write. But I am beginning to feel something similar: a sense that the ground beneath me is shifting.
A profound and thought-provoking book – ‘Nation of Strangers‘ by Ece Temelkuran – is helping me to make sense of this disequilibrium. Ece is an exile from her home country of Turkey, and in a series of letter to us the readers she charts her experience of being what she terms ‘unhomed’, responding to responding to four key questions, frequently asked of refugees by immigration officers: Who are you? Why did you leave? How will you survive here? When will you return home?
For me, that feeling has come to be symbolised by what has happened to the pier at Teignmouth, a place I have visited since early childhood. Built in 1867 for Victorian pleasures, with a promenade deck and a large pavilion added in 1890, the pier was the first amusement park in mainland Britain. Once a place of ballroom dancing, children’s rides and a landing stage for steamboat excursions, it has become gradually diminished over the years by ongoing neglect and increasingly intense Atlantic storms eroding the foundations.
On the 23rd January 2026, I stood on the seafront. Storm Ingrid was heading for Devon and the sea was already in a frenzy, the ground vibrating with each wave that slammed into the seawall. I was soaking wet and cold, yet there was also a feeling of exhilaration in witnessing the sheer wildness of it all. Above the surf, the gulls swooped and veered over the cresting waves, playing a game of brinkmanship. But when I returned the day after the storm, the wind and waves had destroyed the whole end section of the pier. Standing there, amongst the crowd of other shocked onlookers, I thought of another of Ece’s questions – “What have we lost?”
The broken pier suddenly felt symbolic of something much larger – a sense of environmental and political collapse. I found myself close to tears as I stood in that familiar place looking at the destruction. The damage triggered a collective outpouring of sadness from me and from the local communities who treasure the pier, alongside anger that it had been left unrepaired from previous storms over many decades. The pier is privately owned, run for profit. It is uninsurable and now, like so many of our shared assets, it no longer belongs to the communities who love it. And yet those who have profited from it over many decades have failed to adapt it to withstand the realities of a changing climate. Later, photographs appeared on social media sites showing fragments of the pier washed up further along the coast and I saw for myself the erosion of the sand, leaving beach huts undermined.
Those sights deepened my anger, not just about the pier, but about a political system that has allowed so much of our once common wealth to be privatised and exploited. Water, energy, transport, green spaces, housing – resources that once belonged to all of us, have been sold off for the short-term benefit of the few, with profit placed above environmental protection. At the same time, the political protections many of us have believed in for decades feel increasingly fragile. Ece argues that we are seeing the end of democracy. What once seemed unthinkable is becoming normal. We just have to look at Trump’s America to see how quickly democracy can crumble. The climate system is destabilising faster than our politics can respond. Many are turning to authoritarian solutions because democracy has failed to deliver the equality it promised.
But Ece Temelkuran argues that in this moment we cannot simply look to restore the old order; the ‘home’ we long for may no longer exist. As a result, we are currently, in her phrase “mourning in future tense”, grieving in advance for the loss of both our environment to climate crisis and our democracies to the rise of authoritarianism. Instead, we must build a new political and moral home, with generosity, humility, compassion and kindness. And, paradoxically, it may be that it will be the migrants, the strangers in our country, those who have lived through the experience of being unhomed – that will be the experts on how to stay humane in this world, how to be self-sufficient in the face of climate crisis. As Ece reminds us:
“This is the first time in human history that we are mourning in the future tense”, losing our democracy and our planet.
What I long for is in the past. There is no going back. Our future depends on the kindness we show each other along the way. “Our country is a table full of friends”.
You can listen to Ece Temelkuran talking about Nation of Strangers with Krishnan Guru-Murthy C4 Podcast.
This article first appeared on Valerie’s blog and is reproduced by kind permission.
