7691/20630
Ernie had left his robot at our Air BnB this morning and was missing Rusty and wanted to see him, so we walked down town to pick him up. It was nice to have a bit of father/son time and I showed him the places that held special and boring memories of my own childhood. It's increasingly terrifying to think how long ago all these things happened. We moved to Cheddar in 1975. These memories are very nearly half a century old now. And that just seems impossible.
I showed him the Primary School which I went to for a year and a week. In July 1975 my school in Loughborough had broken up before we moved, but the Cheddar schools were still open for another few days, so my parents thought it would be good for me to go in and meet some of the other kids before the summer holidays. Mum remembers seeing me playing sadly in the playground on my own, so it didn't work. But as we know I spent a lot of my childhood playing games with myself so it was all par for the course. The school is pretty different now - the temporary classroom that I was in for that week is gone and now there is a new building to go with the old school (built in 1871). There's also a new entrance. I showed Ernie where the old one was - it's now part of the wall, but you can see where the new stones blend with the old and we both walked into it as I expressed surprise that I couldn't get in that way any more.
We passed a house that we'd looked round before we moved here, which was really close to both primary and upper schools, which would have been handy. But I remember going in there and it smelling really weird and so I didn't want to live there. I liked the house that we eventually did live in (and where my parents still are) much more because it had a fish pond in the garden. I don't think it was just my decision, but looking at the smelly house now, it looked pretty good. The smell would have gone along with the old lady who lived there. I wondered how our lives would have turned out if we'd chosen that house instead.
Cheddar is ever changing and growing. The newsagent/video rental store where Frankie Howerd propositioned my brother-in-law is now a rather nice cafe. We had breakfast there and I had avocado on toast with poached eggs - imagine that being available in Cheddar. We bumped into Anne Higgs, who taught me the trumpet and euphonium at upper school. She was one of dad's first appointments back in 75 and she's still very much involved in music in the village. I was not her finest pupil (though I did get 100% on Grade V theory, which no one else she'd taught had managed).
We got Rusty and walked back in the rain. Ernie played with the robot for about ten minutes. I had been even more tired today, so the 30 minute walk hadn't been top of my agenda. But I love hanging out with this guy. He thinks it's funny to just say willy over and over again. I don't know where he gets it from. I suppose it was strange to be walking around the village I grew up in with a little clone of the boy that I was.
It's strange to be 50 years older than your son too I suppose. But this is how I plan to straddle the centuries in as few moves as possible.
