Over the last three days, I've been back in my home-town, visiting parents, seeing a whole load more of the family than I would wish on even my worst enemies, and also colliding (sometimes literally) with people I'd been to school with, worked with, that kind of thing. It's been quite interesting in lots of ways, but it's not something I'd want to do to often.

  In fact, the first thing I'd dispute slightly is the term "home town". It's not the town I feel is my home. Technically the town I feel is home is actually a city, but that's slightly beside the point. It's definitely the town I grew up in (in as much as I've ever grown up) but home? No, not really. It didn't feel like it even when I did live there, and now I've been away from it for rumty-tumty years, it feels even less like home. So really it's just a place I lived in - nothing more, northing less than that.

  It's been good to see my parents of course. We get to see each other about four times a year if we're lucky (if we're unlucky, it's more often) and that's pretty much fine with me. The fact it was a family gathering, including all the aunts, uncles, and also relatives of parents cousins/aunts (I'm not a genealogist, I've no idea what the correct terminology is for them), well that just made it slightly more of a punishment out of Dante's Inferno. It's actually only by deception that my mother ever gets me or my brother to meet up with them - she'd conveniently implied that the gathering during the Bank Holiday weekend was more of a friends thing than a family thing - infinitely preferable in my experience.

  But the interesting thing for me has been the colliding with people from my past. I'm actually in touch with only one person from my home town on a regular basis, and more and more I find I couldn't actually give a blue blazing toss about the people I went to school with and the like. Obviously I looked at the Friends Reunited website, and find it interesting quite how many of the people I did grow up with who always said "I'll go off to Uni and never come back here" who (to be fair) fulfilled the first part of that statement, but now they're all back from Uni, they've set up home back in the town, and they're happpy there.

  I'm not even knocking their happiness, the fact that they've come back - I can see the appeal that it must hold for most people, to go back to the place you know, where you know all the people there who are of your own age/peer-group, to feel that level of security. It's just that it's not something that turns me on at all. I've thought about it, as a purely intellectual exercise, and it just leaves me numb, the idea of going back to live in a place you've walked away from once, Living somewhere twice isn't really in my software at all.

  I remember reading a book a while back (well, re-reading actually, it's a novel I love) where towards the end the protagonists describe leaving a place and coming back to it, saying "you move away, you map out your route, do it carefully so you can come back, only when you look back the way you came, the entire landscape is changed, you can't find your way back, and the only way to go is forwards". The band Ministry summed it up even more succinctly "Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going wasn't ever there, and where you are isn't any good unless you can get away from it". For me, both those sentiments are totally true, the entire concept of going back to somewhere for anything other than a brief visit, well, for me it just seems like a mission in futility. There's so many other places you can go to live in, why bother with ones you've already tried?

  I did also find it quite bizarre how old some of the people I'd been to school with and so on actually looked when I met them. Their comments about me all included the phrase "You haven't changed at all", which leads me to believe that even if I do look bloody awful, at least I'm consistent in that It worries me in some ways, considering that I'm now 30 and left school when I was 16, and these people I went to school with say I haven't changed. All I can come up with as a conclusion to that one is that I must have looked fuck rough as a school-leaver...

  All the same, it's decidedly weird seeing people I went to school with who are now 30, look forty, are married, have kids, pets, mortgages and the lot. They look older, less happy, more stressed, and all of a sudden I can see why skincare is such a huge industry. Neal Stephenson (well Neal Stephenson writing as Stephen Bury) described such people (fleetingly) as "debt-hounded wage slaves". It's a description that's really not all that far from the truth.

  However, going back to the hometown and seeing these people I went to school with has made me also want to go back and visit some of the other places I've lived and worked in the last ten or twelve years, possibly meet some of the peole people I knew from those places, and see what they're doing now. In some ways I would just like to see what's been going on with their lives, but it's also down to seeing whether some of the decisions I made were actually the right ones - not that I regret them anyway, nor even would I regret them if I found out I'd done the "wrong" thing by leaving. It'll just be interesting to see what's happened in the years since I left some places and people.

  Obviously I have no idea what my own future holds, but having seen the way people my own age are beginning to look, the idea of having children, marriage, debts etc seems to be appealing less and less again....h