Home, sweet Formby

By Jill Carruthers

It's funny looking back on my teenage years and remembering how desperate I was to learn to drive. I needed freedom and way of getting out of Formby, the funny thing is now I use my car as a means of getting back there.

I see now I took growing up in Formby for granted. I wanted nothing more than to be old enough to move away. Formby was boring and twee as a teenager but it wasn't until I moved to land-locked Leeds that I realised how much I missed the sea.

So many of my University friends were jealous when I told them about growing up only a mile from the sea. I assumed all children experienced that feeling of sandy toes and socks on a daily basis, and having peanuts at the bottom of your pockets from feeding the red squirrels.

The Formby pinewoods are one of my favourite places; the smell of the trees, so tall in stature but windswept forming a ceiling of branches overhead. And the soft, bouncy pine needles underfoot would give the sense of being in a cupboard full of coats; quiet and close. This feeling is something I have not found anywhere else in the world, creating a calmness inside of me that I always go back for.

Arriving home after a windy walk with rosy cheeks and hungry belly, there is nothing better than the smell of Mum's casserole in the oven.

I may have left Formby, but Formby will never leave me.