This coming Friday I will be moving out of the house that I have lived in since I was eight years old. The biggest part of my lifetime has been spent within these walls and I am the only one of my family still living here.
It feels like the right time; I of course have many happy memories here but it’s a large house and in recent years the sadness of the time looking after my ailing father has left a melancholy tinge to it. It needs a new family making fresh memories and giving it a new vitality and reconstruction.
I am ‘down-sizing’ to somewhere new that will help give me a much-needed energy and independent identity. I’m eager to begin a more streamlined and focused future that is productive and creative.
Over recent months I have been too wrapped up in the processes of the move to have properly engaged in the emotional aspect of leaving this place I know as home, my sanctuary. But emotions have been starting to seep in the last few days.
I of course have vivid memories in every room of the house. However, there is a particular room that has always very much been my safe place, my home within a home, and that is the room I now write in and was for many years after moving in, my bedroom. It is the room I’ll miss the most.
Originally it had Batman and Robin wallpaper (hey, I was 8!) which I used to guard with a possessive pride, but this slowly got replaced by more conventional coverings of footballers and rock stars.
This was the room I left to take on the banality and the thrills of the world, the room that I left one morning for my first day at ‘grown-up’ school when I was 11, and my first job at 16. I can’t recall how I felt, but it must have been daunting.
It was here as a 17 year-old I was hit by my first real grinding processing of grief. Its all-encompassing pain suddenly drowned me like the collapsing walls of a dam, as I sat on my bed trying to understand how my mother less than three weeks after her 41st birthday had suddenly died, leaving my near broken father and my two younger sisters, cruelly bereft from losing a young wife and mother.
I went to my first gig from here, Elton John at the Liverpool Empire on May 4th 1976. I heard for the first-time albums that would wrap themselves into my psyche and remain there. Indeed I wrote my first fledgling song lyrics here, sat by the window dreaming of success, and went out plying my songs, co-written by my then song-writing partner Bob Mouat, to music publishers in London.
I’ve bounced out of here to attend hundreds of football matches, returning triumphant and ecstatic an obscenely high number of times.
On Sunday 11th October 1987 I walked out of here with a shoulder bag with a spare shirt, a spare pair of jeans and a camera and by the end of the day I was wandering the streets of Manhattan in the dark trying to find my hotel room on a month-long Greyhound bus inspired journey across the United States, finally getting to the California I’d been day-dreaming about for years.
Painstakingly I pieced together the jokes that gave me the indescribable thrill of hearing them on the radio in front of a live studio audiences at Broadcasting House at the BBC.
First date. First heartache. First teenage angsts, first disillusionments, so many Christmas mornings, family weddings, off to meet friends, all from these four walls.
When I do walk out of this room for the final time I won’t close the door behind me, as I’ll never close the door on the memories from this room that have shaped me and will forever sit in my heart and thoughts.
I firmly believe a good home over time develops soul and character that goes way beyond just bricks and mortar. I hope to find that again.
So in the process of moving I will be taking a sabbatical from blogs for the next couple of months. I will still dip in to read them and comment when I can, but I have yet to decide whether to continue writing them, as I concentrate on other creative pursuits.
In the meantime happy blogging, stay well.
SONGS AND SCRIPTS AND DUNKING BISCUITS 
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