Categories: uncategorized
Date: 23 December 2006 22:31:05
Being back in The Old Village has made me realise how much has changed. For one thing, a quick trip to the pub last night made me realise how many of the youth group I used to lead are now not really youth any more. But more than anything else, I've been noticing how different the place has become when compared to what it was like when I was a child.
Of course, there may be a bit of rose-tinted spectacle action going on here, but I remember the days when I lived in a village with a shop. Now it's more like an out-of-town shopping centre with a few houses tacked on the side. The old Tesco is now enormously sized and sells a million and one things you don't really need to get on an average trip to the supermarket, and since I last popped by (in February I think) it's been joined by a sizeable branch of Next. There are plenty of other, more specialised shops (estate agents, chippie, two mobile phone shops, dry cleaners etc), which is probably great news for people in the surrounding villages, but you can bet they wouldn't be quite so keen if it was their doorstep that backed onto a colossal car park.
And, of course, mostly these days I only tend to be back here at Christmas, so I don't get to see the place in summer, but the leafy areas and greenery I remember from my childhood seems to be all but gone too. It just looks quite run down, and a little depressing, to me at least. Yet, at the same time, I've been walking around today - going down to the ridiculously-oversized Tesco and the like - thinking how many good times I'd had here in the past, and that, even if a lot of things have changed so much that it's nearly unrecognisable from the village of my younger days, I still feel quite a fondness for the place, warts and all.
Now you tell that to your young folk these days, and they won't believe you...