BACK TO THE OLD HOUSE

I’ve been sucked back in time.

It’s not where I would’ve chosen. In a place that size, large as it is, there’s only a small number of choices. A small number of career choices. The same old streets, the same old pubs, the same old girls, the same old tired faces.

I was born there. I was bred there. And if I wasn’t careful, I was going to be laid to rest there.

Back to the old house. Back to the same old streets. These narrow places, these tiny, muddy alleys that looked like a universe when I was growing up. At ten the end of my street was a lifetime away. Twenty minutes walk was another universe, a different plane of existence, a foreign land. Somewhere I would never get further than. Somewhere I would never escape.

I felt like Steve McQueen. Or Donald Pleasance. Trapped forever in a shrinking world, dreaming of what lay beyond the barbed wire that ringfenced the whole city. My crime was merely being myself, being trapped in an alien culture I neither understood nor could escape. This town wasn’t a home. It wasn’t warm. It didn’t offer me the career I wanted, the salary I deserve, anything. It felt like a small town, a small village. The kind of place Bruce Springsteen sings about when he talks about dead end nowhere towns where the first thing you feel is when you fall on ground.

That type of place.

It was 1997. The whole city of Birmingham felt like a maximum security penitentiary. Breaking out was impossible. Even I thought I was dead.

Even the next village, the next suburb, felt like another country.

I might even need a passport to enter the hallowed land of Northfield. Or Bourneville. These places, that now seem so dull, so provincial. Made of nothing but hills, and grass, nothing but concrete and cornershops, nothing but kids on street corners and girls smoking fags outside garages. Terraced houses and terrible memories.

I couldn’t wait to leave. I couldn’t wait to live in a place where people didn’t think the pinnacle of a social life is a Saturday Night Karaoke, where people didn’t want to mug you, or bully you, or try to fuck you up so they could get enough for a pint or a joint. I didn’t want to die in a dead town.

The same, tired skyline I saw for twenty seven years. Every day, reminding me of too many bad memories. Too many failed love affairs. Too many dull weekends wandering for love, too many desperate days stupefying at work.

When I come back here it reminds me why I left. Dull, piss-stinking buses. Towerblocks of thudding drum and bass, tracksuited girls who repeatedly press buzzers hoping their dealer will answer, and that accent.

If you think you’ve never heard the Birmingham accent, think again. Think of every time Ozzy Osborne says anything on The Osbornes. Think of a place where every constonant is flattened, every vowel elongated, every phrase pitched in a cross between the grating of fingernails on chalkboard and the off-key warblings of a drunkard.

Think of an accent that basically, sounds really thucking fick.

And it’s not just what they sound like, but what they say.

Such dull, banal conversation. A conversation that revolves around dull, stupid repetition, he said, she said, then I said, blah de blah de blah. All they care about are their own lives. Not about changing them, or escaping them, or thinking about taking any of what life has to offer. Just about taking the babby dow-en the shops

I don’t recognise this place anymore. I don’t recognise these people. The friends I had, the tribes I knew, all scattered to the breeze, fragmented by time and love. This is no place for me anymore. Everything I used to know has been bulldozed, reshaped, landscaped and rebuilt.

I needed the escape. I needed the see what lay beyond the next mountain, to see what else life had. I knew that living in Birmingham my life would always be shaved and poured into a suit that didn’t fit. That if I stayed I would no longer evolve, no longer progress, but regress, I would devolve, I would have exhausted the challenges of the city and have nothing to experience.

I’m thirty. And I still haven’t seen Paris.

For some people once you hit a certain age you become a creature of routine. Life shrinks to routine : the supermarket, the post office, the betting shop becomes your North, your South, your West. And I wanted more.

I refused to live in the same old streets, follow the same old ways, be tarred by the same old memories and the same dull mistakes. I cut free, started again. Took who I was and made it who I am.

I refused to shrink my life to a box. Going down the boozer with your dad. Taking the same train to work that you did when you took it to school. Still dialling an 0121 number or an 01902 number or an 01922 or an 01527 number. I couldn’t live that way. I couldn’t run back to where I grew up : to spend your whole life and to have not gone anywhere. What kind of journey was that?

Birmingham’s not my home anymore. It’s the place I grew up in, the place I couldn’t wait to leave. When the child leaves home, he becomes a man. I did what I had to do to becomes the person I had to be.

Sounds very twelve step plan.

I had to look beyond. To the next town, the next mountain, the next world.

But Birmingham was, is, the wrong place to call home. A small town, a place of squashed streets, of dirty buses and vile accents. Of memories that I wish I could forget. Of lovers who leave, of years that bored, of a childhood made of desperation and shit. To not move on, to not take life for all it could give, would be to sell my life short.

Life’s too short not to travel, not to live, not to love. I had to leave. I had to be the pupae that became the butterfly. I had to break free from my shell. I had to banish all the old bullshit. All the vile memories and the people I had nothing in common with anymore but mere geography. No longer could I be a victim of geography.

I had to leave this town. Leave these small streets and these crowded memories. I had to move on to somewhere else.