The first home I remember is 7 Oak Drive, the house my mum and dad built themselves. It was probably completed about a year before I was born. My sister, who is two years older than me, was actually born while they were still living in a static caravan on site during the build. I lived there until I was 22, when I moved to 93 Tannet Road.
Walking through the front door, the living room was to the left. It had a tall window overlooking the woods opposite, with the valley stretching away below and houses dotted up the other side. You could sit and gaze at the woods, and in the distance there would often be people walking on the far side of the valley. I spent hours on that sofa listening to music. When Dad was at work, I would sneak into his record collection and put on his Queen or Elvis records. The TV was in there too, so it was where we watched cartoons, and I would drag in my big sack of Lego and play on the floor. We spent a lot of time in that room.
Back at the front door, straight ahead past the living room was the kitchen. We had a farmhouse-style table in there with a bench seat around the corner. My earliest memory of it is cork tiles on the wall and blue-grey wood-effect melamine cabinets.
Upstairs there were three bedrooms: mine, my sister’s, and Mum and Dad’s. My room was the smallest, over the top of the garage. When I was at primary school I had a cabin bed with double doors underneath where I stored my junk. I was convinced there was a monkey living under the bed. There was also a built-in desk. The room stayed pretty much the same all the way through childhood. I remember still being in there with my first proper girlfriend when I was 18 or 19, still with the cabin bed. When my sister went to university I moved into her room, and I think it was around the time I eventually moved out that Mum and Dad cleared my old room and turned it into a guest room with a single bed.
My bedroom was painted blue. I loved playing in there. I remember one particular stretch when I was grounded for a whole month and I built a massive cardboard castle, cutting out all the characters and doing a really good job of it. The room had a small window at bed level overlooking the field next door, and growing up there were always kids out there playing.
That window is what I remember most about that house. On warm summer evenings, I would be tucked up in bed with the window open, the smell of cut grass in the air, listening to the other kids still outside. You never wanted to come in on nights like that. There would still be mates out in the field, and I would be lying there jealous. Those were such happy times. Magic, really.