By Marcus Coetzee, October 2026.
When I look at places and organisations in the UK, I can often see a mental overlay in my mind’s eye of what it might look like in a strained or deteriorated state.
It is like a visual switch. Like clicking Google Maps to turn on the satellite view, or switching to a dark theme on a computer. It’s like a reality overlay where two realities merge into one.
Perhaps it’s a neurodivergent quirk, or perhaps it’s something that everyone who moves countries experiences. But unlike the lens of gratitude which I also experience every day, I have also experienced a place that declined during my lifetime, which gives me a lived visual template for deterioration that most people in the UK simply don’t have.
This double vision happens to me because I lived in South Africa for most of my life before emigrating to Scotland in 2021, and because my life in Paisley (near Glasgow) often reminds me of the environment I grew up in, leading to frequent moments of déjà vu.
I grew up in a safe suburb in Cape Town with parks, relatively friendly neighbours who helped each other, and children who played in streets and at each other’s houses, and roamed around on bicycles and skateboards. I enjoyed relatively safe public transport, walking to school and university, and a sense of community identity. There were often waist-high fences around houses which improved neighbourly empathy and cooperation.
I am aware that this was a cocoon created by Apartheid, which I was strongly against, and which tried to replicate a European-style existence for White people within South Africa while engaging in colonial-type behaviour. But my current life in Paisley contains many of the same neighbourhood ingredients as I experienced in my youth, though obviously the weather is worse.
I vividly remember how these places in South Africa changed over my lifetime, sadly more often for the worse. The 1990s with Mandela at the helm was a time of hope, vibrancy and integration. There was a massive reduction in overall poverty combined with improved access to utilities and government services. I think of this fondly as a honeymoon period following the collapse of Apartheid in 1994.
Unfortunately, I noticed a steady decline from the early 2000s in the things around me, culminating in my wife and I emigrating in 2021, walking away from everything we had cultivated in South Africa, and dealing with the resulting grief. This gradual decline was felt across the country, and most severely by those with the least resources to insulate themselves from it and migrate into safer regions of the country.
These experiences give me three reference points with points of contrast:
Reference point 1 — South Africa I grew up in (1972 to 1990s): A European-style cocoon in Cape Town, and subsequent honeymoon period, as described above. I concede that I was young and may have been looking at the world with naive and optimistic eyes, unaware of the full extent of the political instability and risks that were present.
Reference point 2 — Recent South Africa (2000s to 2021): High walls, gated communities, constant risk of crime and need for vigilance, reduced sense of social cohesion and identity, daily scheduled electricity blackouts, collapsing municipal services, state capture by criminal cartels, and a set of seemingly unsolvable economic, social and environmental problems, and generally corrupt, incompetent and self-serving political leadership that proved incapable of finding alignment.
Reference point 3 — Current community in Paisley: A persistent sense of déjà vu as I notice things around me that remind me of my youth in South Africa. Some friends who also emigrated to Scotland observed that my current setup is very similar to where I lived in Cape Town for the past two decades. Scottish people often describe Paisley as a “rough” area, but the murder rate in Cape Town is 35 times that of Renfrewshire and Glasgow, to put things into perspective. I feel safe here, though I acknowledge that Paisley sits in the 30–40% most deprived areas in Scotland by the SIMD, so there are pockets of real poverty.
Here are five examples of how these reference points overlay each other:
Example 1: Most weekdays I go out for a coffee and work at a café. Usually my favourite Costa in Paisley, one with a nice ambience and friendly staff, and where I can sit and work for a while. People casually leave laptops and phones on the table when they go to the bathroom or to order. There are many regulars I am getting to know, and the baristas make my coffee when they see me in the queue.
But I often overlay the place with electric perimeter fencing, access control booms, security guards and cameras — a sight common to South Africans.
Example 2: I often walk in my local park, which has mute swans, mallard ducks and an assortment of gulls on the pond, and pigeons and garden birds throughout. There is a beautiful walled garden where I sit and contemplate life and nature. I often see elderly people, women and children spending time there alone. This reminds me of the park near the house I grew up in which I walked through most days.
But I can easily imagine a silent park, except for certain hours when people gather together for safety, and where dogs are more alert and aggressive. Enough muggings and attacks can easily create that environment. That is the park I left behind in Cape Town.
Example 3: I can see how hard various community groups, charities and volunteers are working to keep social problems at bay, develop communities and protect the environment. These organisations exist in a relatively wealthy, though strained, funding environment, despite a gradual sense of austerity and increasing competition for resources, combined with rising demand for their services.
But this is a world I know well. I can imagine their strategies, business models and methods of triage in an environment where such funding is almost non-existent and service-users have minimal means to pay for help. I know exactly how the downstream impacts of economic strain and service collapse tend to manifest, having worked with many good organisations trying but struggling to mitigate it.
Example 4: I walk down my street. It is nice and safe. My neighbours are friendly. Tradesmen and delivery drivers leave their vans wide open. People leave valuables in their cars. Parcels are left outside my front door. I often see people greeting each other in the street as they walk to the supermarket or take their dogs to the park. There are children and elderly people out at all hours. Just today, I walked back from Tesco with an elderly neighbour who lives across the street, chatting about his love of Harley Davidsons and his local motorcycle club.
But I can easily imagine the same streets where high walls, electric fences, security cameras and automated gates would go up, and how this would change the neighbourhood dynamic entirely, creating silent streets with an air of threat.
Example 5: I have had very positive interactions with the police in Renfrewshire, and have encountered several former police officers in my work with charities, often in board or CEO positions. I even wrote our local police a long letter of thanks earlier this year.
But I can easily imagine a world where no one trusts the police, and would far rather call private security or friends in an emergency — and where criminals deliberately target police officers and security guards to steal their weapons.
These visual overlays, and tendency to see two realities at once, feel like a curse at times. I would much prefer to simply see and appreciate the country I live in. I would also prefer to overlay a positive version of my current reality, but I have no reference point for this. I am most familiar with the many ways that places decline, and how people and organisations valiantly struggle to hold things together. And I will spare you the hundreds of other examples since this happens everywhere I look, across the whole country, not just my neighbourhood.
But perhaps this is a kind of memento mori — a daily reminder of how fragile and temporary things are, and how quickly circumstances can change over a few decades. And perhaps that is not only a burden. It is also an invitation for us to notice what we have, while we still have it.