The places I grew up

The new visual maps are blowing my mind. Between google and msn "live" I've basically been reliving my entire life in real-time. No one else will care, but let's face it, no one else reads this blog anyway. But on the off-chance someone googles one of these places and lived there about the same time....


1979: This is where I was born, in Bicester.

It's funny, that patch of grass looks almost as enormous as it did when I was 5. We had proper snow back then.


1986: When I was about 5 and a half we moved to Scotland, and my favourite ever house, in a village called Meigle, between Largs and Skelmorlie. Meigle is such a tiny place it's not officially on the map, but I found it! Here it comes. It's the L-shaped one in the middle, with the two pointy triangle windows.


Then we had to move to Weston-Super-Mare for some reason. I think the first place we lived there was a caravan. Pretty sure this is the campsite:


It used to be called Myrtle Farm, but it's not any more. I guess it doesn't have the amazing games/comics room any more either. Sorry about the picture quality. In some places, if you go in too close it looks like a slice of dinosaur. I think, then, we moved to a flat in a block facing the sea.

It used to be called "White Lodge" but, again, seems not to be any more. Third or 4th from the right on the big white terrace there. After that, for reasons I still don't understand, we moved to another flat in the same building. Remember, I still haven't had my 8th birthday.

Not done with Weston yet, though. We moved to a rented house on this street, although I'm damned if I can remember which one. I feel like it might be one of the ones on the far left. Perhaps that one with the conservatory bit sticking out the back that I was sick in. I went through a phase of keeping all my belongings in a box in the wardrobe. I think maybe I was afraid we might move again...


I was right to be. We went back up to Scotland - Gourock, this time. Annoyingly, I don't remember the exact address, but we were on the seafront, and the arrangement was very similar to this. Those are huge (well, huge to an 8 year old) grey stone terraces. I remember they were quite imposing. We used to go garden hopping with Ryan King. Who we also watched Flight of the Navigator with. At some point we lived here with our grandparents:



I KNOW it's dull. But I can't get enough of these photos. It's like, someone else was there. You know? Watching my past. Lovely. Then we moved down to Worcestershire. Ours was the spooky little cottage with the hedge round it in the top left of this pic:

Actually we only had the right hand side of it. At some point around this time we lived in a hotel for a while, in Worcestershire. It might be in this picture:


In the winter of 1989 we moved to Ronkswood Hill, where we would be until 1994.


That's ours with the really big garden. I like what they've done with the place. Paddling pool, nice touch. Frustratingly, there's a big graphic of a camera with a line through it where there should be a picture of the Isle of Man, so I can't show you any of the 3 places we lived there. Still, a flat is a flat.

1999: When I was 19 I started University in York. My room was in Vanbrugh B block...


Then I dropped out, and for a while lived in this slightly creepy, slightly Sim City, Persimmon estate near the University:

Then the owner sold the house from under us, and we had to move to a flat in a different part of York.

High ceilings, but it was very cold and damp. In the October of 2000, I went back to University. I moved into my own flat, which was amazing. My second favourite of all the homes so far. It was in a listed building, on an old street, above an estate agent in the town centre.


But I couldn't really afford it forever, so I ended up lodging in a lady's house, with some other students. I think it's the one on the left of the three semis here.


We're up to the super-hot summer of 2003. I graduate and become homeless for a while. At the end of the summer I find a flat-share in London. That's us immediately to the right of the scary alley-way.

You have to walk down that alley to get to the front door. The guy who owned the "shop" basically just rented out the upstairs rooms. He was insane. Like everyone in north London. 2005 I moved back to York. My bedroom in the top flat of the L shaped building here looked out onto Sainsbury's car park. Which was nice.


I guess I'm grown up now. But I've started so I'll finish. After 6 months there, I moved down to Cambridge to live with Tom.

Our living room window was the top right of the middle building. That weird grille thing is a huge glass window over the stairwell. I rescued a stunned wood pigeon from there once or twice. In 2006 we moved to Colchester.

The place we live now is so new that it's not officially on the map yet.

See that middle tower thing that looks like it might have a clock/cable/delorean attached to it? The second balcony down on that section is ours. That row of flats opposite is all finished now, and the carpark is all bricked. There are flowers and everything. It's lovely. Update your photos, live.com!