Nostalgia

Passing through the West Midlands on the train, feeling a real poignancy hearing familiar Brummie accents and seeing the rather bleak Black Country landscape. It was instant nostalgia. Here is where I belong – or not. I am in voluntary exile from these God forsaken parts. Living in Manchester is fine but my first 18 years in Kidderminster in Worcestershire have marked and shaped me. I know how to do it, how to be among these strange but familiar people. It started on my mother’s knee. She had that Black Country friendliness which isalso in me but a bit buried. It comes out sometimes when I drink or play pool.

I don’t feel that I make choices so much as discoveries. I do make mostly small choices that have all kinds of implications that I never knew of, never signed up to. Like the seemingly small matter of leaving my home town and moving North to Manchester aged 18. Never to return. Inside me I have some pieces of rural Worcestershire engraved on my heart and soul. Snap shots of the Clent Hills, the Clee Hills, Rhyd Covert and the River Severn at Stourport and Bewdley. I have a burning desire to cycle the canal path out of the heart of Birmingham South Westwards toward Worcestershire.