Those feet were made for walking

[chickenfeet]

nicked from tanuja, a journey through my life courtesy of Wikipedia.

I was born in Manchester, as in really in Manchester not the leafy suburbs, though my parents were living in Sale at the time so that's where I spent my first few years.

In the winter of 1961/2 (the cold one) we decamped to Bradford where I first went to school next door to a crisp factory in a class of 42 five year olds (and you tell that to young people today...).

In 1966 we moved again, this time to the very alien Home Counties, to Bishop's Stortford, to be precise. This was a shock as it was green and there were no mill chimneys and sparrows were brown and there were only thirty kids in a class. Two years later I won a scholarship to Bishop's Stortford College, a school noted for swimming, hockey and producing particularly inept spies. Still I managed to amass relatively large numbers of 'O' and 'A' levels there.

Enough indeed for me to head north again to pursue my studies in Durham. From there I moved to the other large city in Lancashire to start my career. Liverpool may seem an odd choice of a place to live but when one is working in the hellhole known as Kirkby it seems positively civilised.

In not much more than a year I was on the move again, having been transferred to Walton on Thames. Having no desire to live in commuter land again I based myself in London, in fact somewhere in the general vicinity of Wandsworth Prison.

By 1980 I was on the move again. Back to Merseyside, to be precise Bromborough. As far as I can tell, the place I used to work is now a landfill.

In 1983/4 I made two extended trips to Canada where I was based in the deeply unlovely town of Sarnia. Despite this when a permanent job was offered to me I accepted and move to the much nicer but far colder Ottawa, where a few years later, pigsnout000 was born.

In 1990 my employer relocated me to Toronto where I acquired a daughter and have maintained a home ever since. However, having moved me to Toronto, the company decided almost at once to send me to Wigan for a year or so though we actually lived in Clayton le Woods. Back in Toronto I barely had time to draw breath before they packed us off again, this time to Melbourne or, to be more exact, the industrial slum called Dandenong though I managed to find us a house in the considerably more salubrious Brighton.

I continued to do a lot of short and medium term travelling after returning from Australia but nothing that has required more than a hotel room so that's where the story ends.

Comments

[tanuja.livejournal.com]

I like the idea of going to school next door to a crisp factory, but then as a six year old I wanted to be own an ice cream van, not because I wanted to drive around, but because I could eat all the ice cream I wanted!

Did you enjoy living in Brighton?

What amazed me about Wikipedia was some of the more unusual facts about the places I have lived.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

Brighton is OK in an upscale white bread suburban kind of way. We were only about 100 yards from the beach in a house I couldn't have afforded if I had been paying for it.

[klig.livejournal.com]

Brighton, nice.