Streets of My Town

If anything makes you feel your age, it's showing somebody around your hometown when they're a stranger to it. You can't help but say things like "that used to be the shop where my granddad bought his shirts" where there's now a poundshop.

Though in mitigation, my own birthplace does seem to have changed beyond recognition in the 25 or so years of my living memory. In a positive light, the harbour now looks fab, thanks to a healthy injection of cash. The huge grey concrete silos knocked up as part of a big chemical plant that loomed above the town are gone, as are the rusty old cranes, replaced by a shiny marina and town museum. The town centre itself has always benefited from some work - the horrific brown brick motif street furniture of my youth has long gone, somewhat mercifully. To anyone visiting, it must look very picturesque and on a sunny day (rare as they are in West Cumbria), it can warm my twisted old heart to know I'm from there.

As with anything, though, scratch below the veneer and you get the fuller picture. Driving around, I realised I was saying a lot of things like "there used to be a textile factory there". The chemical works that used the aforementioned silos have also gone, along with the few thousand jobs it provided. The story is the same up the road in Workington, with the decline and closure of a steel works that provided high quality rail tracks around the world.

If my cynical nature concerning politics comes from anywhere, it's from growing up where I did. Though deep in the heart of 18 years of Tory rule, it was clear that the decline had begun long before and that Labour hadn't given a toss in their years of rule either. Who blamed them? We were a provincial backwater of a town in another provincial backwater of a county. Labour had a safeseat anyways, so why bother doing work to win votes that were already won?

I always considered that my childhood ended at the age of 11, when I entered the big, bad world of secondary school after the relative innocence of the primary years. From there, it's a big gap of pretty much nothingness until I was 16 or so and the finishing line (being 18, leaving home) was in sight. In between was just finding ways of killing boredom, be it endless sessions on Championship Manager or forming my first band. It seemed a better option that standing at the bus shelter, drinking piss-weak cider and trying to look a bit menacing to younger kids.

At that time, I probably hated my hometown. It just meant boredom and a bunch of people I perceived to be small-minded. It meant having to take a 70 minute train ride to get anywhere with a record store.

(I'm aware there's people in, say, North America, Australia or Russia who may live a days travel from anywhere even vaguely interesting who would scoff at that last paragraph, but I'm talking from the context of a 16 year old desperate for some kind of stimulation beyond the top 40 records played in the crappy local nightclub. That's closed down now, too, which made me feel old in a good way, to quote Julian Cope.)

Since leaving, I feel protective towards it - sure, I'll make jokes that Cumbria is where "men are men, and sheep are afraid", but I'll not take any lip off any Southern jessie who tries taking the piss.