Saturday 20 October 2012

Wherever I Lay My Hat........


I don’t know whether it’s nature or nurture but somewhere deep within me there’s a Romany spirit. Not in a Big Fat Gypsy Wedding kind of way, I’m not likely to buy a caravan or aggressively manhandle women in a car park; it’s more wanderlust.

One thing I’ve learnt about myself over the past few months is how easily I settle into a routine, and that makes the flighty part of my brain quite cross, and so I always have that urge to up sticks and see another part of the world.

I suppose I could have gone backpacking when I was a younger chap but it didn’t appeal. At the tender age of 17 I’d discovered beer and girls and the thought of holing up in a bivouac in a desert didn’t seem as appealing as the new world I was exploring in my own back yard. It’s also not about just visiting somewhere, but moving lock, stock and barrel somewhere for a year or two, and to really live somewhere, warts and all.

I can only guess this may have something to do with the fact that I lived in three places before the age of 12. To a young and expanding mind this sets out the stall for how you live your life, constantly on the move. That need for a change of surroundings becomes the routine.

I never really moved that far, but there was always a change of school involved, and so that created challenges in maintaining friendships and having a sense of place, but I don’t think it harmed me. If anything it made me less clingy to one location because my childhood memories were scattered around.

So, for no good reason I’ve compiled a quick assessment of Hayward Homes past and present. All the places I lived and the ups and downs. Or the downs and ups, we’ll see how it pans out.


Calbourne, Isle of Wight

Technically I didn’t live in Calbourne, I lived at a place called, according to the map, Five Houses, but Calbourne was the nearest village. There weren’t actually five houses there. There were two and one of those as I’ve mentioned before was haunted. Also, the place was overrun with spiders, woodlice and other creepy crawlies, it was a good bike ride to get to my friends’ houses and there was an Alsatian who used to come and shout at me. 

On the plus side however there were fields, and countryside, and so many places for a young lad to play. Farmers’ fields were just massive play areas and I have very fond memories of the place. Had I reached my teenage years there it would have probably driven me insane as there was nothing much to do, unless I was going to become a farmer, but that didn’t happen, which is a relief as I can’t milk a cow and the smell of manure turns my stomach, so all to the good.


Nursling, Hampshire

Technically I didn’t live in Nursling either, but again it was the nearest village. I lived on Foxes Lane. It’s not there anymore; it’s now a B&Q car park. When I did live there though it was like Calbourne but with added fun. A motorway had split Nursling in half and we were on the abandoned side. Next to our house was a steep embankment. This could only mean one thing; a length of blue string tied to a tree meant that I had a makeshift abseil rope.

Behind our house there was a patch of what we called ‘the wasteland’ where I used to play with friends. It was a fairly uneven patch of land but the tour de force was what appeared to be a large crater. Many hours were spent speculating what may have caused it, a crashed spaceship being our favourite option, and we’d go searching for the aliens that were obviously now hidden out in the nearby Industrial Estate.

There was plenty of countryside on our doorstep, and a railway track, amazing for someone who came from the Isle of Wight. I accept that there’s a railway line on the Island but not like this one. These were exciting trains that went to exotic destinations, like ‘that there London’. There were some horses in a field opposite the house who I used to feed cow parsley to (not sure if I was supposed to), and there was an abandoned road we discovered where we could cycle up and down with abandon. Also, when I got older and braver (about 10) and my parents were out, I could cycle to Redbridge station and catch a train to Southampton on my own. My parents never knew, and that’s what made it all the more exciting.


Totton, Hampshire


Totton felt amazing when I arrived there as a tender 11 year old. It was only a normal town with houses, and streets and shops but I’d never lived in one before. When I finally left, in my twenties, I realised I’d been there too long as I’d grown to hate it. Everything about it just seemed to annoy me, the miserable, ageing shopping precinct, the large Asda dominating the town centre with the same faces behind the tills that were there when I was a kid, and the lack of a decent public house, one that wasn’t filled with aggressive track-suited chavs, all meant that I still to this day slightly resent visiting it.

It did, however, have its plus points. All my friends were a stone’s throw away, it’s close to Southampton and public transport links were, in my day, good. Having a big Asda was actually quite handy, and I was always slightly impressed by Eling Quay. There’s Totton looking a bit run down and sad, but walk a couple of streets and there’s Eling with it’s boats and church, and tide mill, and pubs. It was an incongruous sight, but a very welcome one.


Leicester, Leicestershire

I loved Leicester. On the surface it’s a fairly standard East Midlands city but it became my home when I chose to go to university there in the 90s, to the point that my visits home during the holidays became less and less frequent.

I can’t pinpoint what I loved exactly, maybe it was the convenience of a city, the freedom to be away from my folks, the many wonderful pubs, the many friends I made, a lot of whom were residents of that fine city rather than my fellow students. The only reason I left was because I ended up living on my own in a grim studio flat after my degree course, flitting between temp jobs, and I realised I needed to save some money, but it was a wrench and I remained a very frequent visitor for the next couple of years.

After years of pining for Leicester I recently realised that the flame has dimmed and it’s been consigned to the back of my mind as being ‘that place I used to live’. Leicester has changed, the pubs I drank in have closed and, in some cases, bulldozed to make way for the future, and with it my memories and fondness have faded, just a little.


Sheffield, South Yorkshire


Sheffield was the city I cheated on Leicester with. I made new friends, drank in new pubs, and rode on the tram system, even once going as far as Halfway just to see what was there. Not much, as it turned out.

I’m fond of Sheffield and for some reason it felt like a thrill to live there but I’m a sucker for dramatic views, and my bedroom window in the attic of an old stone house on a hill meant I could see all across the city below and all the way up the hill on the other side. It was magnificent.

The atmosphere of the city was always great and of course Meadowhall is on your doorstep for all your retail opportunities. Myself and the present Mrs Hayward were tempted to move here after I finished my course, but she got offered a job near her home in Peterborough and so fate played a hand in my next move.


Stamford, Lincolnshire


When the (at the time) future Mrs Hayward and I first moved in together it was in a little house by Stamford railway station. In the brief 18 months or so we lived there we got married so I have a lot of fond memories of that time. I also have a memory of streaking naked around the little court of houses we lived in, so ecstatic was I that Rowetta had been voted out of The X Factor. I may have had a little bit of alcohol before venturing on this scheme and the amount of heart attacks I caused to our elderly neighbours is unrecorded.

I still love Stamford, it’s a beautiful looking town and I would move back there in a heartbeat. The only down side is the cost of houses. For the same price as our barely two bedroomed house by the station, you could buy a good sized family house in, somewhere, er, well, like…..


Bourne, Lincolnshire


Ah yes, the hometown of the present Mrs Hayward. Say what you like about it, and I often do, it’s a nice little town with a couple of decent pubs and a motor racing heritage that was celebrated the other weekend with a cavalcade of old cars being driven by the likes of Damon Hill and Sir Jackie Stewart.

There’s also nothing nicer than driving back home after a day in ‘that there London’ to the tranquillity of the countryside. I don’t have to lie in bed at night listening to lorries rumbling past or police sirens or goods trains loaded up with gravel, the most you hear in the dead of night is the occasional Owl hooting in the distance. OK, so one night a Fox was outside screeching and it scared the be’jesus out of me but that’s about it.

The slight downside is the travel. If you want to go anywhere you have to drive for half an hour before you come to a decent road, and if you want to catch a train you have to travel back in time to the 1950s as the line has now long since gone. If you want to catch a bus you can, but only on every second Tuesday, and then only if the moon is on the wane. Bourne. You’ll never leave.


So that’s it. That’s where I am. In deepest darkest rural Lincolnshire. Those itchy feet though, they’re getting itchier, and no amount of athlete’s foot spray is going to cure that. The Romany in me wants to hitch up his caravan and move on. Time to stick a pin in a map and see where I end up? Perhaps, but I suspect that if I suggest leaving Bourne to the present Mrs Hayward she might just stick a pin in me. Ouch!!

Tuesday 9 October 2012

Low & Mighty



I have come to the conclusion that I am either the most common, run of the mill, Mr Average you are ever likely not to notice, or that I am an abhorrent, mutated, freak of nature.

Some of you will have already formed an opinion but hear me out, I’m going somewhere. You see the thing is, I went out at lunchtime today to look for a new suit. Nothing special, an everyday, run of the mill suit for going to work and sitting at my desk and pressing buttons and, well, we’re not here to talk about the nature of my work.

I wasn’t looking for an expensive suit, just a cheap one. The cheaper the better. So I ventured to a local large supermarket who I was confident would be able to furnish me with just the very thing.

I mean, what better place to go, with their huge square feet of retail opportunities, surely I would be spoilt for choice of colours, shapes, and sizes? Well, that is, apart from my size it would seem.

Now I don’t think I’m an unusual size, a bit short in the arm maybe, but not so much that anyone has ever mistaken me for a Velociraptor. 

However, try as I might, not one suit jacket was available in my size. If I’d been some long-armed giant I would have been well catered for. They had lots of suit jackets for these mythical massive-chested gangly creatures, but nothing for someone a bit smaller.

Let me be clear, there’s no way I can ever be described as petite either. The last shirt I bought was a medium size (a fact that had me dancing about and whooping with such glee in a changing room that other customers were concerned that I was either being attacked by a troupe of boisterous but well-meaning Vikings, or that I was having some sort of operatic-themed seizure, but that’s another story) so I’m smack-bang in the middle of average sized clothing for men of my demeanour.

So there you go, case solved, I’m Mr Average but one who’s turned up to the shop too late to get any clothes that fit him.

The thing is, as I’ve mentioned, my size has recently, well, shrunk a little. This I understand to be a good thing. After all, no-one says to you “Have you put on weight?” Well, not unless they’re an elderly relative. They seem to revel in that kind of socially challenging behaviour.

However the thing is that even when I was a little portlier around the midriff, I still struggled to find clothes. So have the rest of the country’s men shrunk with me or, well, what? 

So I have a choice. I either need to shrink further so that I am the size and shape of Yoda from Star Wars, or that I grow upwards and outwards so that I become Mr Creosote from Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life.

It’s hard to know which way to go, but after a recent trip to an all you can eat buffet restaurant last week I think it might be easier to slide down another “wafer thin mint” and get clothes shopping.

I can always trim the sleeves down.