Coming full circle

TLOML and I decided to spend our summer in Saltburn on a bit of a whim. The lease on Fox Corner was up, and my maternity leave meant we didn't particularly need to be in London (plus our income was taking a hit). Saltburn is a lovely place to live, and we thought it would be nice to have family nearby.

I didn't really think about the strangeness of coming full circle, though. I was born in Saltburn. We lived a few miles away but Saltburn baths is where I learned to swim. The Marine is where I drank on a Friday night as a sixth former.  I wooed my first boyfriend in Saltburn, having asked him to teach me to surf  as a way to get to know him better.

All of this was twenty years and more ago. And now I'm back. Seeing my sister almost every day and my parents for Sunday lunch, drinking in the Marine, and so on. Have I regressed? My horizons suddenly narrowed? For a moment, as we drove the familiar road the night we arrived, I thought so. After all, I spent my teenage years longing to live somewhere bigger and more exciting. How strange to be driving 'home' and home be the place I spent my childhood. When I next travel I will write the same town in my 'place of birth' and in my 'place of residence'. Weird.

Despite that brief shuddering moment I actually think it's quite brilliant to be back here. How nice that Lady P's first swim will be in the pool I learned in. And how funny that we're living in a house my mum used to visit 40 years ago. I passed a house called Coverdale the other day. Coverdale is a local name, and the printer to whom my great grandfather was apprenticed was called Coverdale.

At every corner I see something that was part of my formative years or my family history, and I rather like it.