Between the Satan’s Slaves and the Sisters of Our Lady of Compassion sits the pub. Once upon a time it was our post office , the world changed, and piss replaced postage. Now I sit with my mother and sip beer, the ghost of my father stares at us across the street.

The ham factory no longer billows smoky semaphore, the pictures have lost their frames. A port hole to the heavens stares out through the stained glass of a wild mind. The hot bread shop has ceased to excrete vapors.

Up the hill the school is still perched on its fortified ledge, ramparts of Edwardian concrete defy gravity with steadfast resolve. The Kindy still lies down with the Catholics, old divisions set in chiseled grey stone.

In a cleft in the hill sits the wild wood of my childhood, a theater of war, and arcane bottles, pornography and tested limits. Just beyond the Beast of Berhampore once plied his filthy trade, now the land sits empty and windswept beneath a cliff of crumbling houses.

I pass a wall I painted 25 years ago, it’s now rotten, my paint has cracked and given in to the northerly; rain has penetrated the wood; it has eaten it from the inside. My knee aches and sears , a sweet and sour bloody symphony slowing my passage down the road.

These streets, this valley , these hills which are such a part of me are now in a second century of civil livery, for all the creeping and cracking changes this place is still my home, the backdrop to my dreams, this child is now firmly middle aged.