I'd already written this down for another 'project' I'll just paste it here....
I moved to Mid Wales from an out of town housing estate in a large town, when I was 14 years old, well me, my brother, sister and Dad. And to say it was a culture shock would be correct. Only 135 miles in distance but a million away miles in reality. It wasn't as if we'd never been to rural Wales before, but holidaying somewhere is completely fucking different to living there permanently.
That's where the drugs came handy in I suppose. There was literally fuckall else to do. Well I say that but plenty of other kids managed and still manage to stay away from drugs, which is the right thing to do of course.
They filled their time with normal activities, went to college and then university and are probably earning a shit ton of money each month (and 20grand in debt) I, on the other hand, didn't.
I got into drugs, thought I knew it all, left school at 16 on my 16th birthday. Had a few failed attempts at college, got a job to earn some money as all of my friends had jobs straight from leaving school.
And today, well, I still have a low paid job with fuckall responsibility. But I had some of the best times that I can remember in Wales between the ages of 15 and 22. I wouldn’t change it for anything. And I was sort of predisposed to that kind of life anyway, coming from a housing estate littered with single mothers where it is considered a miracle if you don’t end up a crack/heroin addict, an alcoholic or on the game and ultimately in prison. Miraculously I’m none of those and never have been but half the shit I saw or did I'll never tell anyone because if you were telling me the same story I'd never believe you and I'd tell you to fuck right off.
The first thing that I couldn't get my head around was we had just moved from one town to another town, but how the fuck could you call this shitty little town in rural Mid Wales a town was beyond my grasp at the time.
It had one street for shopping, just one. OK there were other streets and a few little housing estates scattered about and there was an industrial area and a high school and a doctors surgery and plenty of fucking pubs. But the whole town was probably smaller than the estate I had just moved from.
How is this a town? Why isn't there a name for something bigger than a village but smaller than a real town? This is shit! How can people live like this, there isn't even a bowling alley or an amusement arcade in the town centre, because there is no fucking town centre.
I began to realise that the life I'd had on the estate wasn't the normal life that I just assumed everyone had had. Simple things that wouldn't even register as wrong or to be causing a problem back home, would be at the opposite end of the criminal spectrum and cause big problems with the locals and the police here. Don't shit on your doorstep covered the whole fucking town in this place...
(That's just part 1 but I think it's plenty)