When I was 7 or 8 years’ old my parents purchased a building in the little village of Stewartby, in Bedfordshire, England, from where they would run their furniture design company for less than a decade before selling up and retiring before I left school.
Although we never lived in Stewartby, it felt like home to me. I would go there every weekend, every evening after school, all of the school holidays – virtually every day but Christmas and Boxing Day it felt like.
My childhood and earn teenagehood days were spent playing football, computer games, tag, hide and seek and whatever else we got up to, in this little village that had my parents’ factory and a big ol’ sports field. In fact, I watched my first-ever American Football game there. The referee of that match would later become my flag football coach in my final year of school!
We had many adventures on Stewartby Lake as children – tag, cycling around, watching powerboat races. It was more beautiful than anything in my hometown.
After my parents sold up, I never went back to Stewartby for well over a decade, until I randomly decided to visit in 2018. Things had changed a lot – the sports field renovated, a whole new hosing development, another planned, and the famous brickworks set to be demolished in the coming year or so. A waste incinerator has been built, a wind turbine is now on the lake, and a sixth form college has been built.
But the lake remains virtually the same as I remember it. A beautiful place to come down on a hot summer’s day.
Sleepovers were very rare for me as a child – largely due to my diabetes and my mother being worried I’d have issues. That’s fair enough. So when my friend’s suggested camping on Stewartby Lake I was gutted I had to miss out.
That memory came back to me in 2018 and I found a friend to make it happen with. After a meal out and evening together we popped up our tent and spent the night together camping on Stewartby Lake on a warm summer’s night in July.
Maybe it wasn’t talking about what we want to do when we grow up, planning college or university, or where we want to live when we grow up. But for someone now in my 30s, it felt just right.