Dolwyddelan am byth

I feel all nostalgic all of a sudden, having spent quite a bit of time back in my tiny hometown in Snowdonia recently. All those mountains and hills, forests and rivers, and the little village pubs.

I survived growing up in a place like this the same way any other normal, healthy teenager did. I smoked hash, I fucked any guy who showed the slightest bit of interest in me, and I played a lot of pool — which I was always really good at. But, as my brother pointed out to me, being good at pool isn't a sign of great sportsmanship, it's just a sign of too much time in the pub.

The biggest problem with growing up in the sticks is getting to the pub in the first place. The local in your own village is bound to be shit, plus your parents will be in there waving at you and offering to buy you some crisps. Public transport stopped at 7pm, and Glyn Gin's taxi service was unreliable at best. "Dolwyddelan?!" he once screeched when I called to book his cab. "I've been to Dolwyddelan once already this week, I'm not going again!"

So the only way to get anywhere was to hitchhike. Hitching was always dangerous, especially in our village, which had the road to bleak slate-mining town Blaenau Ffestiniog running through it, but so what? Spending the evening pretending to be 18 with your friends in the next valley was well worth the risk of being abducted by some desperate nutcase along the way.

This was all back in the days before sugar-flavoured alcopops, of course, so as a child I had no choice but to drink Stella Artois. At 5.2% ABV I liked how hard it made me feel when I ordered it. My friend Jo always drank Guinness and my friend Sally always drank Strongbow and I knew that when they ordered their pints they felt just as hard as I did. It didn't matter that a couple of hours later we'd be staggering over Betws-y-Coed's village green throwing it all back up again.

I'm not sure that I'll ever live in Wales again, but it was fun growing up there.