Wanderer59

  Maps, Mud and Second Chances: How I Found My Life Outside   Childhood and the small town that shaped me I grew up in a town that smelled faintly of industry and boiled cabbage, the kind of place where the hills were something you read about in postcards and the sea was a two‑week holiday in a caravan with a kettle that never boiled properly. My earliest adventures were modest: cycling to school, cycling to friends’ houses, the small, private triumph of getting there before the rain. That was the limit of it for a long time; not for lack of wanting, but because wanting and doing are different things, and the world I knew had a timetable and a budget and a sensible idea of what weekends were for. There’s a particular kind of contentment in those small routines. You learn the lay of a place by the way the light hits the chip shop at five in the afternoon, by the way the bus driver nods when you get on, by the way the river smells in spring. It’s ordinary, and ordinary i...