As our annual series of end-of-year musings continues, Malcolm Anderson contemplates the changing face of his home county.
Thirteen years ago I wrote some words about the holloways of the Dorset of my youth, and at the urging of my brother I hesitantly sent them in to Caught by the River. To my surprise they published them.
Fast forward to 2025 and gloss over the intervening house moves and floods, divorces and marriages, deaths and new beginnings and once more I find myself home. Back in the Dorset landscape that, deep in my heart I guess, has always been home.
Thomas Wolfe suggests you can never go back, that people and places change with time so nothing is as it was in memory.
That’s true to some extent and, as I wander round the old lanes and see the tumbledown farms of my youth now all done up with ubiquitous grey painted window frames and a sparkling Land Rover Defender in the drive, it’s obvious that the Dorset I remember is gone and in its place exists a far wealthier, busier, yet somehow emptier place than it was.
There are signposts to ‘The Holloways’ at the bottom of Shutes Lane. Too many village pubs stand empty, stone and thatch ghosts of community and conversation long gone. There is no longer a Forsey in the farm I grew up around, something I never thought I’d see, and the countryside seems bereft of corrugated iron and baler twine-decorated hedgerows. That old eccentricity has dwindled, the slight crazy somewhat homogenised.
Yet all is not bad, change is inevitable and can’t always be for the better. Bridport feels alive, thriving in part because of the money that has come into this western edge of the County. It has its challenges, but every high street does. The market feels busy, pubs and bars in town busy. The town is multi-cultural and accepting in a way that it never was. I vividly remember back in another life being shouted at for not dressing the same as the others, for listening to different music, for having a skateboard. Growing up in small Dorset towns often felt like wearing a straightjacket, something to be wrestled against and escaped.
Community builds community, and as I sit here with my notebook and pint of Isaac’s cider in a corner of The Woodman, bustling with pre-Christmas Friday night energy, I let the noise of life flow over me: this here is the beating heart of my Dorset.
People define this home as much as hill, river or sea and sure, I love a silent empty space as much as the next man, but as I age I find myself getting almost as much pleasure from the sound of the kids on the rope swings on Lewesdon, remembering my own time in their place, and the times I spent there with my son. I take pleasure from seeing other people enjoying low tide Charmouth. Even the caravan parks of Burton Bradstock no longer fill me with dread, I now see how they give an access to this coast, this nourishing landscape, that otherwise would be unaffordable to huge parts of the population.
The other week I dropped Joe back at the train station in Yeovil and, as I was coming back over the hills towards Evershot, the clunky old CD changer in the car — a relic of the pre-streaming age — clicked over onto a new disc. The first bars of PJ Harvey’s ‘Oh My Lover from Dry’ kick in, Vaughan’s rattly bass guitar shakes the car speakers horribly yet as the deep hedges flash by, the sound just fits the space. I’m back home.
It’s not 1992, but that’s OK.
You can’t go back, but as it turns out you can go home, because as Maya Angelou suggests, you never actually leave it behind. Home has been with me all along.
