Growing up, we moved around the country a fair bit. No real exciting reason behind this except that the only places my dad could get promotions were, well, basically everywhere except where we lived at the time. For several years of my childhood, we lived in the village of East Markham, in Nottinghamshire, where I spent a good few years hanging around on BMXs, sneaking through gardens at night, and generally managing to mostly avoid the kind of trouble that a certain Mr S. Duck seemed so adept at landing himself in (mostly, it must be said, because I was from a ‘nice’ middle class family and so when blame was apportioned, it could be conviently shelved onto the local scallies whilst we got away scot-free).
Then, just as I started high school, we moved from Nottinghamshire to Norfolk, where I met up with a whole new bunch of reprobates and discovered that even more fun could be had if you just dispensed with the BMX thing and went straight on to the burning things with deodorant spray and solvent-based glues part. Consequently, the happy days of skateboarding around East Markham got forgotten as new and exciting things like girls and BB guns made their presence known in my life.
A few years back, I got back in touch with one of my friends from East Markham, Richard (aka Dick; he doesn’t like being called that any more. Funny, that). He was still living there, it seemed, and I happened to be passing through on the way to visit some relatives for Christmas. Would I like to stop over for a few drinks? Sure, why not. Be nice to see the place again, I thought.
Well, as these things do, a “few” drinks rapidly turned into “quite a few” drinks, which then turned into “damn, we’d better eat something now before we die”, which then turned into a tequila party in his front room. Various people I’d known from school turned up, including Richard’s mate James, Jame’s sister Alison, whom Richard spent most of the night flirting with despite the disapproving presence of Richard’s girlfriend, and quite probably some other people, the memory of whom half a bottle of tequila prevents me from recalling. All of them seemed to have become professional piss-artists, which it seems is quite a common profession amongst people who never leave the village in which they grew up.
At some point during the night, someone suggested that it might be an idea for some people to go home, and that the rest of us should go for a walk around the village and I should go with them, “so I could remember how things used to be”. As it happened, I’m sure I remember things being a lot less wobbly, out of focus, and I’m sure people threw up in their neighbours’ hedges a lot less. We eventually made it back to Richard’s house, where some of us crashed in the living room, and the next clear memory I have is of some bastard opening the curtains and my tongue seemingly having been coated in the stuff you get floating on stagnant ponds. It all seemed an awfully long way from the BMXs and issues of the Beano which had, up until that point, formed the bulk of my memories of the place.
So, perhaps the old adage needs amending. Yes, you can go back, but if you do, prepare to have all your happy childhood memories sullied by the combined effects of beer, tequila and the guy who you used go skateboarding with from next door puking over some poor bugger’s begonias.
Apparently, the guy at the end of the road who we all thought was a nobber is still there, and is still a nobber.
Perhaps you should have tried burning things again… maybe not whilst drunk though. Sounds like you had more fun than me at my school reunion last year. Just reminded me that I prefer my life how it is now.
Who is this ‘nobber’? Having lived in the area for most of my 40 years I’m intrigued to know – and I could name a few myself!