I’ve been into Middlesbrough today,
I've been into Middlesbrough today, for the first time in a few years, and it was an interesting experience. I used to be there at least once a fortnight when I was growing up, and certainly once I was a teenager, and in certain ways, it feels exactly the same as it used to: The people seem the same, the atmosphere seems just as I remember it, and a bunch of the shops seem to be stuck in a mid-80s time warp. It's both a bit reassuring and at the same time rather disquieting. I mean, this was a place that I knew intimately half my lifetime ago, and in its heart, it doesn't seem to have changed or evolved at all. Why not? I know I have, but if the spirit of a place is its people, and I don't see how it can be anything else, then those people are still the same as they were. Okay, so I've been away, and I've had different experiences, but that's all they are - different. It's not like time stopped in Middlesbrough and experience stopped with it. And it's even weirder that just up the road is a town called Guisborough, which is where I actually grew up, and I go back there and I feel like I never knew it, it feels so different. I'm not explaining this very well, because I don't really have the words to explain the feeling, and the harder I try, the more if feels like it's slipping away, so I just wanted to get this particular moment of feeling recorded.
With beautiful elegance, by the way, I'm listening to Nelly Furtado as I'm typing, and I'm Like A Bird started as I was ending that last paragraph: "I don't know where my soul is. I don't know where my home is."
Cheers, Nelly.