Whaplode, Lincolnshire. Yes, that is where I grew up. Where is it? Simple words, you DO NOT want to know. The middle of no where. In American terms for all of those reading it'd be like growing up in a small town in the middle of Kansas, where you don't know if there is actually civilization around you.
Yes, Whaplode is a nice quiet little village with about 400 people living there and the average age being about 65. This sounds so exciting doesn't it? Well hold your horses sports fans because it's about to go from exciting to exhilarating, real quick!!! (I hope you all picked up the sarcasm)
From a young age this place was not a terrible location to be in, I got to play out in my garden with my neighbors and kick a football around and my family had no need to worry about me. There was not a busy road outside my house and everyone knew everyone. It was a simple life. My primary school (kindergarten through to about 7th grade, something like that) was only a quick 2 minute drive down the road so I was never far from that. Life was dandy up to that age.
But once secondary school come round (middle school to high school) everything took a big change. I lived a 20 minute bus drive from where I lived, which seems like nothing but public transportation apparently in our area was still stuck in the 1930's because we had a scheduled bus to come every 20 minutes which turned out to be about one an hour. When I started here I had to meet new friends and start kind of a new life. All sounds great, doesn't it? Well, again, it wasn't. That 20 minutes was a lot longer than you could imagine. I made all these new friends who lived in the town where school was called Spalding. And we had the fantastic 505 bus to go there, making it sound amazing and easy. Well, as you grow up, and as most of you know, you start having later nights and want to become more lively. With the 505 you couldn't do this. The last bus run home at 7:40 then you was kind of stuck, about 10 miles from your home, and parents were pretty much at work whenever I was in town, so you did not really want to miss it. So the combat of this was to try and do stuff in the village. With the average age so high it still was not easy, my friends was only a small group and then some of us were only the true ones that did everything together.
These things together were not close to exciting. Go to the petrol station and get some snacks, that was a big one, did not want to miss that one. Walk the village a little, probably with the dog to give him some exercise and sit in the park talking about unrealistic stuff till about 11, 11:30pm. Then as we got older, the park time got more exciting. This come in the form of a 2 liter bottle of cider each and some terrible music, and then be there till about 12:30.
So, growing up in a place with that kind of age everywhere, and not a lot being there, people now have to realize Fulton, Missouri is not so bad in my eyes after all. At the end of the day, it is not hard to better 2 gas stations and a chinese take away, is it?
