Wem. Where do I start? It is a very small market town in the north of Shropshire. You haven’t heard of Shropshire? It’s close to Wales.
Wem boasts both a primary and a secondary school, the latter of which was afforded its fifteen minutes of fame about eight years ago when the headmaster poached several thousand from the school’s budget and was duly ousted and tried for theft.
Another exciting feature of the Wem landscape is the surprising religious presence. We have our standard Anglican and Catholic Churches, along with a friendly Methodist, and then a nutty Baptist thrown in for good measure. Fortunately the various representatives of organised religion are only given limited air-time in the secular paradise that is Wem; only at weekly assemblies, youth groups and annual Bible activity weeks for the town’s children are the faith groups let loose.
A few years ago, the council tried to close down the town’s swimming pool. Aged fourteen, I couldn’t resist a good cause – my stubborn vegetarianism is a rusty relic of those heady days – and so joined the righteous campaign of the swimmers and invested in a ‘save Wem pool’ t-shirt. I say invested, but really there is no other occasion on which such an item is wearable. I am still waiting for someone to come up with a suitable fancy dress theme.
I have worked at the local supermarket for several years, and every return home brings with it the predictable ‘so, when are you back?’ enquiries. Good to know I always have shelf stacking if the degree doesn’t come through for me. The people of Wem are surprisingly impolite to the staff of the Co-operative supermarket: highlights of my experience there include ducking a loaf of bread-turned-projectile-missile when a customer angrily declared that it was ‘too expensive’, and the time I unwittingly incurring the wrath of the woman who could not understand why we only stocked two sizes of tinned peas.
I would be lying if I said we went to Wem to ‘go out’. There is one good restaurant, the waiter knows ‘my usual’, and the staff have seen me embarrassingly drunk too many times for me to look them in the eye these days. The various pubs have few redeeming features, and besides, all the cool kids have other places to be – as far as I know the place to hang out in the evening is outside the public toilets on the playground. To my (not so) great disappointment, my invitation to this nightly get-togethers has as yet failed to materialise.
These days my family actually lives in Aston, which is in fact half a mile outside of Wem, and therefore enjoys various amenities which reflect its separate status, including, and limited to, a post box and a broken phone box. Aston is in fact a road with fewer than fifteen houses. The demographic is heavily pensioner biased, but with the arrival of my very large family the average age dropped by a good twenty years. The corresponding levels of rowdiness have, I feel, been to everyone’s liking. I like to think the farmer has developed a fondness for our ‘hilarious’ tradition of drunkenly throwing the same traffic cone in the river every vacation. Fortunately for me Aston is a very friendly place, from the sheep which wander into the garden, the quiet man down the road who leaves his home-grown sprouts atop cars every Christmas Eve, and the neighbours who pitched in to lift out the car my visiting friend inexplicably managed to drive into someone’s front garden. Sometimes I feel like we live in an episode of The Archers.
