LIFE IN A NORTHERN TOWN

I don’t suppose that it’s any secret, especially to anyone who’s actually met me (for indeed, despite what some might think, I am not a figment…) that Lesser Blogfordshire is actually located just outside the small town of New Mills, which huddles at the base of a Pennine or two on the very brink of Derbyshire.

It’s not a big place. Apparently less than ten thousand people are registered as living there (although it sometimes seems more), lurking as it does at the confluence of several minor rivers and named after a corn mill way back in the fourteenth century. Nowadays it’s probably most famous for still being the home of the mighty Swizzel’s sweetie factory and on brighter mornings the smell of Parma Violets does still hang in the air if you’re waiting for a train.

It’s not particularly glamorous, having grown up into one of those dark, damp, stone-built industrial towns that are so common in these northern parts since the advent of steam, and its High Street seems to be struggling in these hard times because the supermarkets are far easier to drive to than having to take a stroll through the rain to get to the butchers and the bakers, meaning that many of the shops are now takeaways or charity shops, (although it does have one of the finest second-hand bookshops known to humankind), but for a decade and a half now, I’ve tended to think of it as home…

I first moved out to this neck of the woods just over fifteen years ago after a pretty traumatic year had finally persuaded me that I really needed to find my own place and, perhaps, myself again. Being, as I was at that time, without a home of my own but just a lodger because I had sold my tiny little flat in the city for far less than I paid for it (I always was that financially astute, and believed then that I was the only person in history ever to lose money on my property investments), I started to look around for somewhere I could afford to buy a place with just my tiny little income, and New Mills seemed to be the nearest place to where I grew up that actually seemed “affordable” back in those days.

It also had the added advantage of two railway stations for catching trains to wherever the work might be (as long as you didn’t mind getting up early) and a decent enough bus service for getting to those stations, although, with the coming of new “integrated” transport policies, the bus services were soon cut, as was my “convenient” Post Office, but that’s another story…

Nevertheless, back then it seemed a good bet and, after visiting a few properties which were for sale, I picked the one that was the most ramshackle and inconvenient place to live, and, eventually, after a few years of having it all brew and bubble in my mind, Lesser Blogfordshire was born…

When I moved to New Mills in 1997 it was only a distance of about 10 miles or so, but, in so far as the people I once knew were concerned, I might as well have moved to another planet for I have seen very, very few of them since, and, after a while, you do kind of get sick of being the person expected to be doing most of the travelling, and stop asking them if they’d like to come and visit after so many requests for them to do so get ignored…

Still, as I said, things at that time had been fairly traumatic, and those people probably had other things to think about (I know I did), but I have also discovered that there’s an awful lot of truth in that old adage “out of sight, out of mind”.

Anyway, in the early days, enough people did actually make the long trek out here to the wilderness to do a few pub crawls and crash out on my futon and risk one of my cooked breakfasts for me to hardly notice how insular, cut off and isolated I was allowing myself to become, especially as, having changed my location, shortly afterwards I changed my job and another of my support networks was removed from my everyday life.

There were many excuses that I made for choosing to live out here beyond the rim, some of them financial of course, but ostensibly I moved here for easy access to some great hill-walking, which, rather naturally, I seldom do any more. This was even predicted by a few local people I met at around the time of the great relocation who told me quite honestly that if the landscape’s outside the window, you just don’t go and visit it any more…

Naturally, I believed that such crazy talk wouldn’t apply to me and my life, but it turns out that they were right after all…

But despite this, the years of endless rain haven’t been all that bad and, whilst I can be a bit surly and can make a point of ignoring the annual carnival even as I’m walking through the crowds which are waiting for it to pass, and I pay little attention to the Arts Festival and its Lantern Parade, and my only dealings with the May Queen Parade in the spring is to put my hand in my pocket and fork out a couple of quid for the programme whenever someone knocks on my door selling them, there have never been any crowds of villagers storming any castles (not that we actually have one) with blazing torches, nor any signs of wicker effigies being built, despite what some of my friends once suggested when I told them where it was that I was moving to…

So, I kind of think I like it here, even though I still feel like a “newbie” after all this time.

I wonder if they’ll let me stay…?