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Travel

You Need to Get Out of Your Small Town This Summer

It's time to stop dry-humping life and the girl next door.

Photo courtesy of the author

In the small town where I grew up, summer began the day my dad took the paper out onto the front step and ended when he put his shirt back on, three months later, and returned to the house with skin a rusty brown colour like the backside of a toilet in a nightclub where it's not safe to ask for Craft beer.

Highlights included: jumping off the bridge into the canal. Hanging bicycles on road signs. Finding roadkill. Distance spitting. Distance pissing. Stealing golfballs off the fairway. Selling them back to the golf club. Getting a touch off a girl in August but only if you started begging her in June.

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Oh, we were bored, but we never admitted it. Admitting you didn't like summer around my way was like saying you were tired of tits, or stolen booze, or the taste that a John Player – shared three ways – left on your teeth. But the truth was we knew no different. One bus rolled through every week. It travelled between cities. We watched it from the canal bank bridge. The better spitters could reach the wheels. I like to think that if we'd known there was a whole world of adventure out there, we would have got on board but people who grow up in small, rural towns don't make for the best travellers. It's all the mud on the ground. It binds them to the place.

Once in a blue moon one of us would buck the trend, normally after some strong-arming from a parent, and take off for the summer. They'd come to us on the canal bridge with the devastating news.

"Have a John Player," we'd say.

"But I was sure I was going to get the ride off Brigid," they'd say.

"There's always next summer," we'd say.

Secretly, we were thinking of Brigid. If she'd let him, maybe she'd let one of us, too?

They'd go off to France, or Germany, or America, or what have you and we'd stay behind where we got jobs at either the golf club or the pizza factory. The golf club was badly paid but you were outdoors, you could smoke and if the mood took you, you could tug all you liked in the bushes. The pizza factory threw real money at you but the work was hard and your skin turned into meringue after a fortnight. In and around our jobs we'd find time to jump into the canal and hang bicycles on stop signs and chase the girls who'd been turning us down since the days of velcro shoes for those who couldn't tie laces so well. We'd talk about our buddy abroad but only with regard to what he was missing out on. The case of flat Stella we found. Brigid in a skirt. The day Nialler spat ten yards. Brigid in shorts. The dead badger on the backroad with yellowy maggots where his eyeballs used to be.
 
Whenever our friend would get back, he'd be changed. He'd have a tan. He'd have a new accent. He'd be wearing Reebok instead of Asics. His T-shirt would say Sonic Youth, while ours was still the same old 'Maiden. He'd have new curse words: "wankstain", "pissbitch", "cunthole". He'd have found a girl. Maybe they'd have fucked. He'd show us the pictures and even if she wasn't that pretty, we'd all die inside because we knew she liked him back and that was a million times more important than looks when you're growing up in a place where the only girls who talk to you share your surname.

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We'd look back on our own summer. The long evenings spent in the company of the same people. The girls who'd eventually let you kiss them but not from love, from attrition. They'd grown tired of telling us to fuck off. And we'd make secret resolutions to get out of there by the time next summer rolled around. We kept the resolutions secret because it was easier to bullshit yourself than to bullshit other people.

Photo by Glauco Canalis

What none of us – apart from the odd one who did get away – realised was that none of the things we thought mattered, really did. That a hometown was only home until another place substituted it and as soon as that did, we'd never want to go back again except for Christmas when the booze would make you all starry eyed for a youth that forgetfulness had swapped for The Wonder Years. The dull jobs we got could be got anywhere. Really, it was like the world was created out of earth, rock, water and minimum-wage opportunities. And the girls we nagged, well, they were everywhere too, and the further we went from our home the less they'd tell us to fuck off until we'd reach a place so far away that our redneck ways, our jumble sale fashion and the way we spoke English like it was something rusted and mechanic, jammed between our tongue and our throat, sounded exotic. Sounded sexy.

I can't understand a word you're saying and you dress like my dad. Come home with me.

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What none of us understood was that the world was a good-sized bucket of opportunity and summer was the time to dip our heads in it. Summer is a real beginning. It's not like January, which, if we're honest, is no more a beginning than waking up in your clothes with vomit on the sheets is a beginning. January's the end. The end of all ends. The end of Christmas, the end of being loose with your money, the end of people acting decent to each other because the TV schedule is depicting a world where everyone else is. And the end of pretending that winter is cosy when it's not, you know; it's just cold and long and if we had even half the sense of plants, we'd sleep through it.

Summer's the real deal because summer's a time when you can make brave decisions and the weather and people in general support you.

The difficult thing about making a brave decision is that it wouldn't be brave if it was easy. It's hard to not do what your friends are doing. It's hard to not take the prescribed route. It's hard to say, no, actually, you don't want to spend summer drinking warm cans of piss on a canal bridge surrounded by people you've known so long the vibe isn't much more exciting than Sunday lunch at your gran's.

And somewhere in the middle of that prescribed route, a girl might say "yes", and even though you weren't that into her the relationship could be saved in that cruel and nasty and country way by saying, "It's better than a wank." Even though that wasn't true because three long months of dry-humping because both of you are too scared to talk about sex is not better than a wank. And it does nothing for your development but wear out the crotch on your jeans. And when it all falls apart, as it must do, she'll break your heart unintentionally by going out with a friend, and you can't blame the girl, although you will, because in towns with small populations where they all share the same smells and shadows, even the dogs are your friend.

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Those long summers in my hometown taught me many things. Things that have stuck with me. I can whistle with my fingers in my mouth. I can identify any countryside animal even after it's been split in pieces by truck tyres, and I can spit farther than you. But if I could go back to the 15-year-old me sitting on a bridge on a damp June evening, wearing Primark and Asics, wondering how much masturbating is too much masturbating, probably cradling a Strongbow and waiting for his turn on a cigarette, I'd tell him that the world was made up of millions of bridges and he didn't have to sit on this one.

More on summer:

A Girl's Guide to Not Being a Dick this Summer

A Boy's Guide to Not Being a Dick this Summer

Summer's Here and Everyone's Looking for Sex