My Home Town

Tuesday 2nd June

Paul Simon wrote a song about this, it was pretty derogatory and bitter, even if he asked Art Garfunkel to sing beautifully on it.  My home town was Stowmarket, Suffolk, and as a boy it was I suppose everything to me.  But we had visited London a few times and I was seduced by the noise and the crowds and the anonymity.  Everyone seemed to know (and prejudge) me in Stowmarket; I longed to leave my home town behind.  I imagined that London was big enough to lose myself in, and like a snake shed my old life and grow a new one.  Well I did come to London and the dreams of shedding my skin and starting anew soon fell apart (the new one was just the same as the old) but London eventually became my home town.  I loved the sheer size and complexity of the place, even spending Sundays travelling the length of the tube lines until the houses petered out and we were deep in the country.  I explored the parks and the West End and the City and as a young man loved the place.  This was where it was happening, this was where the Beatles were, Abbey Road and Carnaby Street, this was where Parliament was; this was the centre of everything.

But the years have taken their toll, and now that I have finished working and only return for a few days a month it no longer feels like my home town.  I almost feel a stranger here now.  I am far more comfortable walking the few old and well-trodden roads of Eymet or Walton, where nothing ever seems to change; I no longer feel any love for this thrusting high-rise too-brash and too artificial city.  I do not fit in, I feel older here; it is a city for the brave and the young. Is that just old age?  Or have I simply been a small town boy all along, just distracted by the allure of the big city?  I find the words of Harry Chapin particularly appropriate “Oh, barefoot boy – he don’t like your concrete and he seeks the country any way that he can.  Oh barefoot boy, he’s fading down your streets and I know he’ll never come this way again.”  Where I will end up who knows, possibly Eymet or just as possibly Walton.  And either seem small enough to become my home town.  But maybe it is just as Paul Young sung “Wherever I lay my hat, that’s my home.”