- You’re loyal to your supermarket. When you live in a small town there is no shopping around.
- Since everyone in your street/town basically shops in the same supermarket everyone always picks up the same sale bargains.
When you’re young everyone has the same half price snacks in their packed lunch box and when you’re older everyone brings the same 1/3 off bottle of Prosecco to a party or the same two for one bottle of wine.
Small town savvyness at its finest.
- When you’re abroad or at the airport you get really excited when you see people from your home town.
It doesn’t matter that you live three streets away and never bother to talk to each other because you haven’t bumped into them in Tesco but at an airport in Tenerife. WHAT ARE THE CHANCES?
You must embrace them like they are your brother returning from war and make obvious statements to each other like ‘the weather is so much hotter than home’ and ‘the food here is so different’.
- If your house goes up for sale then everyone from your postman to the lady at the corner shop, who you discussed the weather with once, will be straight on the estate agent/solicitor’s website to find out how much it’s worth and to look at pictures of your house.
They will then make comments on your home interiors.
- There will be other families in your town with the same second name as you but you’re not actually related in the slightest – not even second cousins.
But everyone will think you’re related and your family backgrounds will be merged together.
‘Hello Sarah, sorry to hear about the passing of your granny.’
‘Actually my granny is only 63 and lives in Manchester. I think you have confused my family with the Goldies who live on Annandale Way. I’m Sandra and Bob Goldie’s daughter. We’re an entirely different family.”
- People hang around in car parks. It’s actually a valid meeting place. People arrange to meet there and then stay there into the early hours of the morning.
- People complain about people hanging around in car parks.
- Stories appear in local newspapers about people hanging around in car parks.
- If you graduate from university, get engaged or do anything of merit everyone will come up to you or your family members and say ‘I saw you graduated.’
They will then walk away and you will stand there thinking ‘who are you, I have honestly never seen you in my life.’
You will then never see them again.
- School teachers will have taught all your siblings and cousins and maybe even your parents and will constantly compare you to your family.
They will also get quite annoyed if you’re not related to anyone.
- When people move to your small town and they have no prior link to the town you are going to want to question their move and their motives.
‘Do you have family here?’
‘No.’
‘Did you get offered a job here?’
‘No.’
‘Why did you move here?’
‘I just thought it was a nice town.’
‘Really?’
- It annoys you when people move away and every time they come home they say ‘nothing ever changes here’ but they are so wrong as the Town Hall actually got painted last May – that’s a big change right?
- You’ll also be annoyed when people move away and then come home for a weekend and complain that a shop/pub/restaurant has shut.
‘But I loved that pub!’
‘You couldn’t have loved it that much if you moved away and never spent any money there Diane!’
- There is no shop or supermarket or pub where at least one person who works there doesn’t know you and so there’s no real need to carry ID, even if you look about 12.
- When people can’t pronounce the names of small towns and villages near your home you feel really smug and intelligent BUT can you pronounce Via Dolorosa?
No you probably can not. So calm your smugness!
- Nothing is more annoying than when people have visited a small town ‘near’ your small town and they ask if you know so-and-so.
‘Um that’s actually a small town 80 miles away. I don’t know everyone in Scotland, there is no Small Scottish Town Association (SSTA) that we are forced to enter.’
- When people say they know people from your home town you can’t help but ask who they know.
You’re pretty sure you’ll know the person too – chances are they’re a second cousin – and you want to prove that you know everyone worth knowing in your small town.
- Lastly you might dream of escaping or have already left but regardless it will always be your home town and – no matter how small or seemingly insignificant it may be – you’ll never let strangers say anything bad about it!
