That home, in Netherton where I once lived, the one with the white walls and beige door I called home, is long gone now. Forty-two New Road has long-since been smashed and bulldozed to make way for the Southern By-Pass. The hospital, along with the school that I once went to, has long been repurposed and bulldozed also. Those smashed buildings take with them their memories, hiding them from those too young to know they were ever there. Even Fearon Place, the road which I return to live on now (until the move) has disappeared from Google maps, conspiratorially, just as a housing prices hotspot materialises in the area, and luxury flats and family houses are being built opposite the Piddock Lane Police Station.

There is no place for social housing here, not in a world on the brink of gentrification.

It’s all change and all steam ahead. For those who can’t keep up, well, they’ll be left behind with their longing for spaces and times long gone. Their memories warping, becoming grander and turning into nostalgia, for a past that never was, as the physical reality of buildings turns to dust. 

Nostalgia is for the weak and not the strong, some might say.

So, yes, it’s all change I think, as I say goodbye to the past. Planning to move from Smethwick next year to Montreal, to live with my wife Erin, opposite the PA Supermarket, up the road from the 80 bus stop, right down there on the corner of Ave du Parc and Fairmount, which finds itself over the road from the Jean Coutu Store, and three thousand one hundred and forty-four miles away from where I was born.

5/5