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We took a walk around Cheddar, my wife, my daughter and my niece. It feels so odd to be in my own stomping ground with my family. We walked through a housing estate and I said, “I remember when all this was fields.” My wife, thinking I was doing the joke where you say, “I remember when all this was fields” doubted that that was the case. These houses look really old, she said. But even so I did remember when this cut through was just a path through a meadow, like in Victorian Times. I used to pass through it on my way to primary school and middle school forty years ago. So yes, the houses look old, but I am older.
But cutting up other pathways and short cuts that are more or less the same as they were in the 1980s, I could almost sense (and smell) me and my teenage mates, bowling along with no clear purpose, looking for something to do, or someone to be cheeky to. How would that teenager have felt to know that I would be in the same place thirty years on, with my wife and tiny daughter? I mean, probably pretty freaked out that I was so old and yet my daughter was so young. It’s so odd being visited by your own ghost.
I mean, I know I go on about this a lot. But fucking Hell. My family have lived in this town for nearly 42 years. That’s insane. I mean, remembering stuff from that long ago. You’re essentially a walking history book.
I showed my niece the house where her dad’s first girlfriend had lived. She didn’t seem to want to know or think about this for some reason.
We passed a house that I remember looking round in 1976 when the family were down trying to choose their future home. Two elderly women lived in it and all I remember is that it smelled weird. I liked the house we finally lived in and which my parents still live in because it had a fishpond in the front garden. I don’t know how much my disdain for the smelly house and love of the fishpond helped my family make the decision they made. But as I am finding out myself, the choice of where you live makes a big difference to the future. Had that house not smelled bad and we’d lived there then my life would have been different enough to ensure that none of the people with me today would have been with me today.
Anyway had we all not ended up here then some other people would have and in all likelihood they would have been roughly equivalent to us. But I still prefer us to the non-existent idiots who didn’t make it because of a stink and a fishpond and a hundred billion billion trillion other bits of happenstance.
We went home and had a terrific family dinner and skyped with my new grand-nephew (oh yes my friends, I am a grand uncle) and my daughter danced around and charmed everyone. I can’t wait until she is old enough to understand all the boring old stories about my youth that I will tell her every time we visit here. Just as my own father did when we used to go to Middlesbrough.
Ah well, the world moves on.
