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During the summer of ’89 I spent most of my days hanging around with Andrew who was a year older than myself and whose mother had been friends with my mother for the past decade or so.

We’d often go skateboarding together and I remember being drawn to him as he seemed more alive and exciting to be around than many of the other children in the neighbourhood. His crazy stories filled with larger-than-life exploits and some of the antics we got up to fed my need for friendship and connection at that age...

It’s strange how certain memories that seem insignificant in terms of the events they represent manage to stay with you and strike a chord even decades later.

I can’t remember too much about Mr Smith now. I have a vague picture in my mind of what he looked like but I can recall that he was a kindly gentleman of a bygone era who was bespectacled, retired and lived with his wife a couple of doors down the street from my friend at-the-time Andrew..

Talking the talk is not the same as walking the walk...

Some small video footage of me skateboarding in Stafford back in September 2012.

I hadn't been skateboarding for the previous 14 years and had only been back on a board a few times since May of that year...

It's pretty harsh returning back to the town that I grew up in carrying lots of great memories from those times only to see certain reference points from back then become degraded with the passage of the years.

To return to various locations in and around the town that were scenes for some of the best memories of my life only to find they've now become inaccessible, unusable and, in some cases, even erased from existence is downright saddening. The people I met there, the experiences we shared and the sessions that went down that were never caught on camera but remain fresh in my mind almost 2 decades later made for some of the most intense and unbelievably enriching experiences of my life.

The following are some of the landmarks anchored to those memories that have now become lost to the past...

I was twelve years old when I got my first ‘proper’ skateboard, a pacer pharaoh from the local skateboard shop, Blythes. It was the spring of 1989 and I had fallen in love with a sport that would come to closely define the next 10 years of my life and continue to exert an impact on me for long afterwards...