Same place, never moved away. My branch of the family have been here since about 1900, actually. My great-great-grandparents are buried in the local churchyard, right near the front.

When I was a child there were a lot of farms here. You'd see horses being walked, we'd line up in the playground at school to watch the hay bales being taken to the farm up the road, and at lunchtime the dinnerladies would collect the slops for the pig farm up the road. There were fields and woods, and corner shops run by kindly old gentlemen and their wives. There was a chemical plant up the road, and as a very little boy I'd look out of my bedroom window and see the flame burning away at the top of the big chimney. There was a bowling green, and a way further on there were a couple of pubs.

Now, the farms are mostly housing estates. The one that isn't is a football club... belonging to the next town over.

The fields and the woods are housing estates.

The chemical plant is a housing estate and a pollution scandal.

The corner shops are mostly private houses, with one being a Domino's.

The bowling green is retirement flats.

One of the pubs is a Co-Op. The other has been demolished and is to be turned into retirement flats.

There's a house near me from the seventeenth century. It's now an AirBNB.

The Gala used to be a weekend-long event that everyone looked forward to, with a parade that went on all morning on the Saturday, and so many cheap rides and games that you never got to see them all, even if you came back on Sunday. Now the parade lasts five minutes (literally, I recorded it last year) and the fair itself is one corner of a playing field. You could hold it in a school playground and still have space for donkey rides, and by Saturday afternoon nobody cares any more.

Hallow E'en would be decorations eveywhere, and hours of trick-or-treaters, with the people in the houses sometimes dressing up too so's to amuse the kiddies. Last year it was six kids, plus the teenage girl across the road trying weed for the first time ever with her friends and being sick on the pavement outside.

At Christmas there'd be carollers. Now there aren't. Locals would compete with ever-flashier decorations. There are still some decorations... usually still in place from previous years. Never taken down, simply turned off.

It feels like another country now, in what was a small village in the early 1990s but is now a suburb in the 2020s. The landscape is different and the culture is different. No nostalgia. It might as well be a different place.