EDITOR'S PERSPECTIVE: Strangers in our own towns

Childhood memories stay with you the longest and those suffering from dementia will often say they remember parts of their childhood but not what happened the day before, and to a degree that can hold true for all of us.

Things change in our lives and we don’t recognise what is around us, don’t recognise ourselves, and we feel isolated, and that can include places in which we spent most of our lives.

I can go to Skipton with my mum and not necessarily see anyone |I know – except my mum – but I don’t feel alienated because we visit on a fairly regular basis. Similar shops, usually the same pub. It feels familiar even though a lot has undoubtedly changed my childhood and that’s because the alterations have been gradual and I have kept up with what has been going on.

A walk around Keighley though is a different matter. I hadn’t been in a while and though I could go up the helter skelter of an entrance to the multi-storey car park, park up and trot down the stairs and out of the exit as if from muscle memory… after that I was an alien. Or maybe that was the town.

The bus station is different, better than I remember it as a simple row of stops with the numbers of the buses and their intended destinations. You can go inside now, so that’s a plus.

I would always head straight into the main shopping centre, where there was a record shop – two or three, in fact – a huge department store, a couple of decent places to buy clothes, a Marks & Spencer and a Woolworths. Out the other end was the market, in which I would buy books, and there were two sports shops. The market, a sparse affair these days, clings on, and there’s a Boots, though that can’t be longed for Keighley’s world; the rest are no more.

Best of all was the old Victorian arcade of Cavendish Street, with Reid’s bookshop down the bottom end and the magical world of Conway’s arts and crafts on the other side at the top.

There was, and still is, a decent chippy, and some of the pubs survive, though most have closed their doors, as has the newsagents I would always call in before leaving town.

A couple of the older pubs have tidied themselves up and there’s a Wetherspoon’s – of course there is – but the picture house has gone from the main route in, and the club in which the Sex Pistols once placed disappeared long ago.

The rain is familiar as are the pigeon droppings and I know the walk down once lovely Cavendish Street would take me to the still lovely railway station – I decide not to go there though – but many of the old buildings, beautiful though many still are if you look above the tat below, are empty and it’s that word that sums up my feeling.

I think that applies to many people, even those who stayed in their home towns, whereas a day exploring somewhere new kills the longing, the nostalgia.

The 12ft high statue of the giant Rombald is still there, though, like most things, he’s not where he used to be. He still threatens to hurl the huge boulder he holds above his head, but he’s never thrown it, not yet. He’s not the one who has smashed the hopes and dreams of this once thriving mill and market town. He looks sad, standing there naked, waiting for what he probably doesn’t even know.

It has always been said the real giant Rombald would return to roam the moors again and there is now talk of moving his statue as he “looks sad and out of place”. I know how he feels. Maybe we all do.