It was confirmed to me earlier that I shall leave Barnsley in a week, assuming I can find somewhere else to live in the meantime.
Lack of employment opportunities here mean that I'm jumping at the chance to take my old job back. I need them, and they need me - so it makes perfect sense. Sadly, the distance between here and the town I'll be working in is too large to bridge every day by train. I did it before and the travelling and late nights obliterated me.
Oh, Barnsley, I hate to leave you. Such a caricature with your rainy sky-coloured rooftops and horizons the colour of slate; squadrons of pigeons in various states of disrepair begging or stealing stale bread and cold chips. Others might mock you - I think my suspicion that they do so is far in excess of the reality - but I adore your twisted vowels and recite them as a catechism: ee, ah, eh.
Almost everything I know is here. Almost every memory, many of them formed as my blood turned to rain inside Oakwell on some horrendous December day or night, watching us surrender pathetically to Grimsby or Blackpool or Doncaster. That's it. I've fucking had it with them now, seething up the hill on the way to the station, secretly proud of the silent deal I'd struck - my bewilderment and shock for your mediocrity.
This must be the only place in the world where half the town stops because a train has to be let through, the barriers sliding smoothly down into position and leaving me partitioned on one side of the great divide. Sometimes it can take three or four minutes before crossing the railway line is possible, the time punctuated by sighs and glances at watches and each other, and by swearing.
I shall miss the humour with which we suspend ourselves ever so slightly above the misery and awareness of our ordinary lives; the feeling that this is everything and smiling grimly. An ordinary life spent under your unblinking eye, watching the world spin from the plinth; the giant base of a statue which for years has sat unoccupied, waiting for the likeness of someone uncontentious enough to adorn it. Its circumference is now home to a percentage of the aforementioned glut of pigeons, and I suspect it'll never be otherwise.
Unpretentious streets, hard streets, cynical streets, I shall continue to exhale your bone-sapping winds even when I am away. It is the case that I shall be separated from you by only 50 miles, but it may as well be 50 light years. I shall mourn you 50 times. You are forever carried on my breath, my tongue unapologetically forming the shapes of the dialect I left behind but continue to cling onto, reluctant to relinquish another one of the threads which threatens to unravel my identity.
