nostalgic

In keeping with the assumption that everyone, to a degree, is mentally unstable in some form or another, yesterday I got the bus back home to Waterloo to buy a guitar lead, a new set of strings and some picks. The fact that I can barely play three chords on my SG is besides the point. It's not very often I give my beautiful guitar some much-needed TLC.

The music shop I went to is a stone's throw away from where I grew up, and the premises has seen past occupiers such as Thresher's Wines Stores, and long, long ago, a Tesco. And those small memories took me on a detour along St.Johns Road, which is Waterloo's second main shopping area behind South Road.

Everywhere evolves or changes over time, and not necessarily for the better. In St. Johns Road's case, I recognised just four businesses I knew from when I was a kid. And if it wasn't boarded up, the rest made no sense to me at all and neither tempted me to, at the very least, window-shop either.

I now know why our parents and grandparents are nostalgic for their pasts. And being from Liverpool, with that Celtic streak, we have an extra sense of sentimentality about everything too, which I possess in droves. There's a little kid inside me that still just wants to kick a footy against St.Faiths Church wall. I used to do it for hours on end. I didn't need a friend to play with. The ball bounced back from the wall. The wall was my mate!

I toy with the idea of doing an essay based on my experiences as a kid in Waterloo - because my memory improves over time when I think back to these halcyon days. But then I thought who'd want to read about fighting, football, paper-rounds, stand-offs, getting chased by the police, football, more fighting, football, evading more police, sitting in watching telly and listening to the odd good ELO album. School was crap, and I don't want to relive that very much thanks.

I got a 53A bus back to Aintree. It was double-deck, so I went upstairs and sat on one of the front seats watching out for....changes. Crosby, in comparison, never really changes. I've always said about Crosby that it's basically one big housing estate that people come to live in (because it's something to tell their family the other side of the city that they live in Crosby) and work elsewhere. The average Crosby householder probably couldn't tell you what the next street is to them, and the shopping centre of the town is dangerously under-utilised and empty. Again, the average Crosby dweller shops elsewhere.

So I don't go and visit home too often now, because the ghosts far outnumber present-day reality. It was a bit sad really.