George Devo’s weekly column on life in the capital, published every Monday morning…
It’s just gone 2:30am and my feet are damp. A slice of pizza limply hangs from my hand as I trudge down my hometown’s high street, the softly falling rain seeping into my ageing, battered trainers and slowly transforming the takeaway cardboard box I’m holding into a pulp of greasy paper mache.
The neon signs of barbers and kebab shops reflect in puddles along the pavement. The drunk emerge from the venues in which they’ve spent their evenings, their inebriated ramblings acting as background noise to my stroll. Two bored police officers are chatting idly, whilst keeping half an eye on a rowing couple across the road.
This scene takes place in the West-Midlands market town of Stourbridge. Formerly industrial, and a major hub of British glassmaking, its factories might’ve left but 57,000 people remain.
For a couple of weeks every year that number increases, as children, siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles, wanted or unwanted, eager or reluctant, return to their familial base during the festive period. I’m part of that demographic, ‘the returners’, coming back to the town I spent the majority of my childhood in for Christmas.
As its population grows, the town’s main drag gets busier, and, as we get closer to Christmas, the bustle lasts for longer, stretching well into the night. More alcohol is consumed, joy experienced, decisions made and grievances are aired. The town develops an edgier, seedier tone, and I love it.
This leaves me, hood-up and socks-drenched, walking down the high street in the pitch black of early morning winter, heading home from a night drinking with friends.
It explains why I’m writing this hungover on a Sunday evening, thinking one simple thing: how unlucky anyone brought up anywhere but a Stourbridge-sized urban sprawl is. Deprived of the joys of a small-town Christmas, which is, in my view, the peak holiday experience.
Londoners have told me how they could never leave the capital, and with it the metropolitan lifestyle, describing the rest of the country as too quiet and the pace of life jarringly slow.
People raised in the city can all too easily believe their environment is the norm within the United Kingdom, however, it simply isn’t.
56% of the British population live in towns. That’s 32.6 million people more familiar with my style of festive homecoming than that of some Hackney expat.
That’s a majority of the country who will recognise the experience of walking into your high street’s cheapest pub and being presented with a sea of old classmates, leading to hours of conversation with people you might’ve barely spoken to in school. You discover that the social hierarchies of year 10 English have crumbled and, instead of caring about who’s asked who out or who it was fighting by the gym last week, all anyone wants to talk about is how everyone’s lives have diverged since secondary education. The awkward dialogue of fourteen year olds in the playground is replaced by genuine warmth and interest.
Also, for small town ‘returners’, every street holds a memory. I don’t mean to conjure an image of some Hallmark protagonist wandering the roads of their old neighbourhood, it’s nowhere near as well lit or saccharine, and employs a much less attractive cast. There will be no ice skating montages, cringeworthy meet cutes or hot-chocolate-drinking-exposition. However, when your part of the world is this contained and stable, everything looks familiar.
In some way you revert to your eighteen-year-old self. Your same network of childhood friends reconnect to spend evenings in the same range of boozers, and you laugh at the same teenage anecdotes repeated routinely at reunions.
I suppose this cycle could get dull or wearing for some, but, personally, it’s why I’m grateful to the town I was raised in.
These tight-knit friendships, memories and catch-ups give your life foundations to rest on. Providing steady grounding to the newer, more chaotic accessories of living.
It’s the season of goodwill, so please allow me to end on a truism: everyone has to be from somewhere. I’m glad that, for me, that’s a small-to-medium-sized town in the West-Midlands.
Merry Christmas.
