Been so long since I been around

While visiting friends in the Midlands, I was struck with the idea of visiting Derby -- taking the girl to see where I had once lived and gone to university.
I don't remember now how long it's been since I last visited that old city, but seeing it again was a strange mix of the new and the familiar.

We headed directly into the centre of the city -- early on a busy Sunday afternoon -- where the plan was to ditch the car and then set out on foot to find some old pubs I used to visit and a place for lunch.

Parking the car was made slightly more complicated than it needed to be by the advent of a big new shopping centre, the first thing that was different. I had the feeling it had always been there in some form or another, but had just been expanded/extended/built upon, but either way it really threw out my already hazy sense of direction -- never having driven in Derby before. By chance we found our way into the shopping centre's car park, beached the car, and found our way out into the city itself.

A little disorientated in the city, I lead the girl through the pedestrainised areas, pointing out places I remembered ("Down there is an Irish bar Tom and I used to drink in, when our favourite bar caught fire and was closed for ages!") and using the city's cathedral as a landmark, I lead the way towards a pub called the Bless. I only sort of knew the way -- I took us down the road I thought it was on, and it wasn't there.

Unsure how to find it, we kept walking while I searched Google on my mobile phone. The first result gave me the road name of the pub, and by luck alone we spotted the right road when we got to the bottom of the street.

The Bless is completely inseperable from my experiences of Derby. I first went there with my poetry friends in my first year, later becoming a regular customer of their pub quiz.

I remember sitting in the beer garden at night, I remember going there with Matt and Rie -- and Rie always wandering off to talk to strangers, bringing them back to the table and getting Matt to confirm to them that yes she really was married to him, she just didn't wear her ring.

I could point to the table where Matt and I were sitting so many nights, talking and drinking. Nights when we stayed out late and I drank only coke, or the night when like so many others we sat drinking -- but I was unaware that I should have been home to say goodbye to my grandmother.

Much of the high street looked deserted, the new shopping centre either providing shiny new homes for the places, or just putting them out of business
We walked down the cobbled side street where I showed the girl the old indie club where I spent so many schoolnights drinking double-vodkas, the piercing and tattoo shop where I had both my left ear and right eyebrow pierced, on seperate occasions.

Friargate I think is my favourite street in Derby -- an old winding, treelined street, with its big stone railway bridge (now disused) and the old Friary -- which like so many other buildings in these places has been converted into a pub.
When it was ever a friary I couldn't tell you, although it is reportedly haunted -- but with Derby being the most haunted city in Britain, most places are likely to be. It's a typical student pub -- it doesn't have a whole lot of character of its own, although I recounted the days when my flatmate Chris and I would go there on a Sunday lunchtime for their special offer on a 4-pint jug of beer and two roast dinners.

After the girl and I ate, we made our way back to the shopping centre to pick up the car so that I could make some more stops on my city nostalgia tour -- places where I once lived.

First stop, my first year halls of residence. In themselves, nothing much to look at -- but I was fortunate that from the road you could see what was once my bedroom window, and driving round the back of the building, could point to what was once my kitchen. I expect now, almost 10 years on from when I moved in there, that its been repainted so many times you can't see where I spent so many hours sticking glow in the dark stars to the ceiling and walls of my bedroom.

We barely slowed down, let alone stopped the car, before we moved on to the next place on the tour -- the house where I lived in my third and final year, with Matt, Rie and a cat named Dubya. The street was lined with terraced houses, a narrow road parked up with cars so again we hardly even slowed down -- and I didn't recognise the front door of the house as being where I lived. Either they've changed the door, or I got the house number wrong. But the chip shop at the top of the road was still there.

Sometimes I still long for Derby, for the houses and the rain (always the rain, it comes off the hills, see) and the memories -- but I guess everyone yearns for the place where they spent their student years.