My Birth Experience

Don’t worry it’s not exactly my birth experience, although I was there. No, this is about my very dramatic birth (start as you mean to go on), and my childhood in rainy Scotland.

Now I’m fully aware that this isn’t the most imaginative start to my everyday blogging; but my brain is fried from exams, and right now, sat on a seminar room floor with my coffee and my subway, all I can think to write about is where I grew up.

Now you might think that rural Scotland would be an exciting place to grow up, and if you do, I’m sorry but you’re wrong.

If New York is the city that never sleeps, the tiny town where I grew up was in a permanent coma.

I should clarify that I was born via c-section in Liverpool, 5 weeks early and put in an incubator for 2 (I don’t think my height ever quite recovered from this). Then 6 weeks after my re-enactment of the scene from Alien, my parents packed everything up and moved to bonnie Scotland.

Now growing up in a small town, often means half of the town consists of charity shops, and despite being smaller than most most people’s living rooms still manages to have at least 2 primary schools that competed fiercely for nothing whatsoever except pure unbridled Scottish pride. Essentially it was shit.

Those of you who live in small towns will know; the main currency of any small town is gossip. My little town in Dumfries and Galloway could have been mistaken for Gossip Girl on occasion, although with slightly more tracksuits and angry pensioners, and slightly less Chuck and Nate.

Who slept with who’s wife, who drinks a full bottle of whiskey a night, who was caught behind the bus stop snorting what? All questions that could be answered by the town gossips, of which there were few, but they all worked in shops and cafes, and even if the coffee was awful and the shops only sold novelty tartan hats, that wasn’t what you went in for- you went for the gossip. Many small towns have probably built successful business empires simply by employing a town gossip.

That’s all for me right now, I hope you enjoyed this blog on the weird and wonderful thing that is small town life, and if not I definitely got some exercise from sitting on my legs for so long.

Ta ta