I take a certain pleasure in writing about the places I’ve lived, but despite numerous false starts and good intentions – this is one I’ve always felt intimidated writing. Sure, I’ve written about where I grew up in Elton, and the homes I made in Liverpool, Welwyn Garden City, Lancashire, Lleida and Gibraltar – where I volunteered in Tanzania, and my overextended stay in London. But Chester, my birthplace – where I went to high school, where I fell in love for the first time, where I thought I figured out who I was and what I wanted to be, always eluded me. Too big of a task? Maybe, or maybe I was just not 100% sure what to say.
I never ended up in Chester intentionally. My brother and I were too young to make any decisions for ourselves – we were too busy moping around as teenagers who didn’t want to do or think about anything other than loud music, video games, and girls – well, I speak for myself at least. The move was our Mum’s decision, and despite my protests, the move was made. In hindsight, it was a great decision, but you couldn’t have convinced me at the time that it was anything other than the end of my young life. Chester is an incredible city, with a fantastic mix of culture, nightlife and history – it just took me a while to realise it.
There’s a lot to love about Chester, it has the second most photographed clock in the UK, some of the most well-preserved Roman walls in the country, a beautiful red sandstone cathedral, as well as ‘The Rows’ – shops built on top of shops that work their way up and down the high street. You’ve got the Racecourse as well, but I’ve never been there to watch an event (by choice) – just the occasional Winter Wonderland, and once as a bucket shaker for a charity called ‘Walk on Wales’ – which I’m not sure even exists anymore.
When we moved there though, I didn’t give a toss about any of it. It wasn’t Elton, it wasn’t my own bedroom – it was a new one I had to share with my brother – and we were so far out of the centre that it felt like we’d moved to the middle of nowhere, instead of to the city proper.
Like everyone does though, I adjusted. We’re like cockroaches, the human race, we live in places like Yakutsk in the coldest Siberian tundra, to the sweltering dry heat of Al-Jawf in the Sahara and everything in between – isolated islands that receive supplies once a month like Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha, or the once towering, densely populated and largely ungoverned Chinese enclave of Kowloon. Chester, compared to those, was a cakewalk. Although – if anyone reading wants to offer me a job in any of the above, please feel free to get in touch, any of those would be a crazy experience.
I’ve recently started watching Skins, the British cult TV show that I somehow missed the boat on while it was airing – probably too busy living in the era it so perfectly captured the zeitgeist of. Watching it is like a time capsule of a time so familiar, but that I’d let go to memory. From the music of Hadouken!, Enter Shikari and Bloc Party to the fashion sense, oh the fashion sense; chinos, the top man Y-necks and close enough to neon shirts make me feel a certain level of cringe that I’ve only ever been used to my parents talking about.
If there’s one thing I remember about attending sixth form, other than the tedium of studying for your A-Levels – it was the house parties, so many house parties. None of places ever ended up as destroyed as they show in Skins, but after one of my own I definitely ruined any chance of my brother ever having one – I can still remember the thick red line from a high heel that cut all the way up the wallpaper that followed the staircase up to the first floor, and the scream that came out of my Mum’s mouth as she walked in to see it, as well as the alcohol-drenched wooden floors, piles of leathered teenagers listening to the tv and stereo in tandem at 100 volume, and my poor dog contemplating whether or not to chow down on someone’s sick in the garden. Maybe they weren’t too far off, actually.
Truth being told, there is no way in hell I’d have had an adolescence like I did in little ol’ Elton. As much as it felt like the sky was falling, it was indeed just the shock of a hypothetical acorn falling on my head and sending me into a spin. Moving taught me that changing your surroundings is a good thing, and that doing so can really help you grow, like goldfish, we can only really grow to the sizes of our tanks – and this early move laid the foundations for a lot of my more chaotic moves in the future.
I’ve got no plans to ever live in Chester again, I prefer going back and visiting, seeing how it changes – just as I have since I’ve been away. It’s a relic of my past, and even though I’ve moved back to the UK, and that I can get there in an hour or less – I almost don’t want to spoil the memories by going back for too long and overwriting them with other ones. For a time, I looked at Chester as a place of pain and difficulty – just as everyone does in their formative years, but sometimes you can only appreciate where you’ve come from by leaving, and realising it wasn’t as bad as you thought.
The latin motto of Chester is “Antiqui Colant Antiquum Dierum”, or, “Let the Ancients worship the Ancient of Days”, and that’s what I plan to do – move on, do something new, but I’ll always remember those ancient days – and I’ll always treasure them.
Andrew L. Cook 