Today I am in my hometown on a visit…

The pub in the centre of town is being demolished, my old college has been annexed into a campus of the college that was its competitor when I was there, and the photography shop that had been in town for fifty years is now a bookmakers. The registry office I got married in is now a snazzy office building, the supermarket has been turned into three separate shops, and the old cake shop that I used to have coffee in on Wednesday afternoons when I was a student is now a discount store.

I’m now in a new coffee shop typing out my thoughts on a Macbook to post tonight and looking every part the cyber yuppie that I intended not to become when I was a student here. How different I am now from what I was then! The best part of three decades since I used to walk from the college to the now gone cake shop with Jack Kerouac in my hand and my head full of art and poetry wearing a tatty old jacket and scruffy faded jeans. I wonder where all the people I knew then are now. I know the stories of some and we’ve caught up with each other over the years. Some never made it and I paused earlier outside the college remembering one good friend who died in a drowning accident when he was 26. I wonder what he would say now if he could see how the town has changed beyond recognition from how we both once knew it? What would he make of me now? Do I bear any resemblance to the person he knew all those years ago? I would hope so. Time however changes everything and the street is full of ghosts today.

After I’ve finished my coffee I’m going to walk to my Grandparents old house to see what it’s like now and I may drop in on my relatives who live in the next road. Each footstep I take today seems like a memory and they seem to weigh strangely on me. There is so much that I have left behind me, especially in the last decade. So many hard times but also so many good times. I never felt like this was my hometown when I lived here. I wasn’t born in this town and I was never attracted to its environment but it has grown on me; sometimes like strangling Ivy and sometimes with a degree of fondness.

Later I’ll set course for the Island City and I’ll look forward to seeing the Spinnaker Tower appear over the crest of the A3. It’s not my hometown but it feels more like my hometown than anything else since I left the real one and I’m glad of that. Maybe it’s time to park up the virtual Vardo and allow myself to feel truly at home for the first time in a very long age. Kushti Bok my friends...