Another Time, Another Place...

I came across my copy of Carl Chinn's book "Peaky Blinders, The Real Story", whilst rummaging around in the studio. Looking through it at the old black & white photographs of my old city - a place I left almost exactly forty-five years ago at the age of twenty-five - I was moved by a curious nostalgia for something I voluntarily divorced myself from in 1980. It's a strange thing as I, as a young adult, actively hated the vestiges of Victorian Birmingham, and glorified the concrete brutalism of the city's 1970s architectural transformation. The thing is now, I love both: I love all the onion-skin layers of a the great city's history. But could I return there to live? Never. Big city, or even big town living has not been on my radar for most of my life.

My village here has a population of fewer than five hundred approximately nine hundred people [correction courtesy of Wikipedia: although I feel they might be conflating parts of the community that are electorally separate]; the larger communities of Bethesda and Gerlan add only a further four five thousand [ibid] at most. I feel safe and content in the mountain fastness of Rachub and Fairview Heights. When my childhood home of 16, Winson Street [pictured above in its death throes as a home: the only one not boarded up] was no more, and I'd severed the cord to my upbringing to find my own way in the world, I made for the mountains of North Wales and the sanctuary of a place where I truly felt at home. I was talking to the young barman at The Bull Inn, Biwmares, yesterday. I said that I was a Welshman at heart, who by accident of birth, was born in England. He, being Liverpool-born Welsh, agreed with the sentiment: Wedi fy ngeni yn lloegr ond cymraeg yw fy nghalon...