A mellow Todmorden Sunday Afternoon goes something like this: Kate Bush on the CD Player, SD sketching at the table, sunlight dipping in and out of clouds, falling through the window, on the window sill, where, every so often, SD goes to smoking a cigarette and stare grey eyed at Bridestone Moore over the top of the Town Hall, and to look into the street below at passers by, stopping to browse at the wool shop window.
How did I get here?
I'd been living in Salford in a Tower Block just off Chapel Street, just 5 or 10 minutes from Manchester City Centre, in this one bedroom flat on the 7th floor of a crumbling block with a concrete balcony and bare floors. I'd lived there since coming back to the North West, but never really settled there, the box shaped rooms needed too much doing to them to make them homely, the corridors outside my front door smelt of rotting rubbish and were patrolled by all kinds of wailing drug and alcohol addled creatures, from scally lads in tight fitting caps to this mad drawn woman who had drug induced mental health problems and used to drift around outside my door wailing banshee like at all hours of the night. And the lift... in some ridiculous parody of council flat hell... really did act as a urinal.
But I had a view. Sunsets over Lyme Park over in Disley, the air streaked with jet trials rising up from Manchester Airport, flickering orange lights in the darkness, Salford Suburbs stretching away to the motorway. On a sunny Sunday evening, seeing the the hills way over in the distance, out of reach to someone without a car. Always just a bit too far to go. It did my head in.
That and the fact that a walk to the paper shop was an expedition into terror. The day a chunk of concrete sailed past my head, missing me by an inch, thrown by a spotty teenager with a permanent grimace for a face, was the day I decided it was time to leave.
And so I set about moving, out of the city and into the hills. I wasn't sure where. I went out walking, through Disley, could I live near Lyme park? And then, once out to Todmorden. I was supposed to be going to the Pike but got lost and never made it and inside wound up and down the hills around the canal and the railway. I remember popping into the Co-Op to get a can of pop for the train journey home and thinking, I like it here. There was something a bit off-kilter about the place... not quite Hebden Bridge, not quite anywhere really.
And a few months later, just back from Switzerland, having been confronted by a five year old just a street away wielding an iron bar and growling like a feral beast, I was determined to move. The city was no good for me. Apart from the risk to my physical health, I was unhappy with the same few routes I had to walk on a Sunday afternoon, down to the canal basin and around, like every other place I had ever lived, the streets had become too familiar and held no magic for me anymore. I wanted to be back out in the hills. And so one day, I was idly surfing the net and typed into Google: Flats to Rent Todmorden. And there it was, first one on the list - this place.
I knew, as soon as I walked in. The large window with a view of the hills and the woods. The cafe next door. Station just up the road. The eccentric layout of the place, a huge breakfast bar between the kitchen and the living room which gives the whole front part of the flat the feel of a youth hostel.
Did I think, when I came here, that I would be so taken? I've lived by the sea, in a town with a view of the Swiss Alps, in the city... but here... here's a place where a local Plastic Duck Race makes the front pages of the local newspaper, where the best entertainment on a Saturday night is watching the Young People of Tod throw themselves against the ironing shutters in front of the shops in the street below...
But two years later - two years, a night in hospital, two and a half boyfriends (that September thing doesn't really count) and various adventures in foreign places later - and I'm still not bored. I still look forward to Tod Sunday Afternoons, the breeze through the open windows, birds flitting about the roof, the sun sinking behind the ridge. Have I found home? Is this it?