Loving where I live
"Do you want to move somewhere with better weather?" my wife asked, while it was grey and I was also feeling grey.
"Yes please," I said. "But we will need to take all our extended family, their extended families, our house, the garden, all our favourite restaurants, the NHS, and so on."
"Probably stay here, then," she said.
Sometimes my wife and I talk about alternative universes where we made different choices. Not regrets, it's more cathartic than anything. Talking about what our life could have been only reinforces this is what we chose.
What we chose, are still choosing, is that I'm back in the town where I was born and grew up.
People often shit on their hometowns and I understand. There's plenty that could be better here, but there's plenty that is great. It's a very specific place and I like and feel comfortable with that specificity and it's only really found here and in London. Other places make less sense to me. Some people look down on staying in the same place, or returning, and I've got no time for that.
We lived in London for ten years. Before that we lived in Cardiff. London is great, except when it's shit, and a big draw was that my sister and brother-in-law lived there.
Not long after I moved back, a friend noted my return and I said, yes, my sister had a kid and is expecting another and they moved back. They then asked why I moved. And I'm like... because my sister had a kid and is expecting another and they moved back?
Obviously that's not the whole entire truth but it mostly is. We wanted to buy a house and there's no doing that in London. Moving back to my hometown halves the distance between my wife and her hometown - her family, the other niblings.
As it turns out, while all this was going on, my dad was ill, we just didn't know it yet. Then there was this weird flu thing. Extremely glad we made it out of London just before lockdown and that I was a five-minute walk away from my dad rather than hours of trains or driving.
My family is really important to me. I want to be near my niblings, my sister, my brother, my mum. I watched my mum run herself ragged looking after her ageing parents who lived several hours away. She's not going to need that for a while yet but I think about it. I love being more than a visiting aunt - I'm a very active participant in the lives of my niblings. And I'm glad I'm here to help out my siblings.
We found a great house and were amazingly lucky with how things panned out so we could actually buy it. I love the area - it's where I always fantasised about living as a kid. I can walk to the train station and the city centre, there are nice independent shops, and parks. I'm a ten-minute walk from my sister, a ten-minute drive from my mum, and thirty minutes from my brother.
We all end up where we do because of the strangest confluences, buffeted by the winds of circumstance. We can only try to end up where we feel we should be. And I'm very lucky that I am.
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