I live in Dover. Have done for a few years now, after nine years in Folkestone before that. Sadie’s here, Reggie the three-legged cat is here, work’s here, half of my adult life is built on this particular stretch of coastline. And yet if you read enough of what I write — the screenplays, the novels — you’d be forgiven for thinking I’d never actually left Grimsby. Or possibly that I’d quietly relocated to Pontypridd without telling anyone, including myself.

Neither is true. I’ve lived in Kent for thirteen years. I’ve spent a grand total of two weeks in Wales, ever. And yet my imagination appears to have filed a permanent change-of-address form with both places without consulting me first.

I find this mildly ridiculous, so naturally I’m writing a blog post about it.

Grimsby: Explainable, At Least

Let’s deal with the sensible one first. A novel called Small Fish, set in a fictionalised version of the town I called Grimhaven, twenty-four chapters deep, seven of them actually written, which for a writer is basically a personal best. A chunk of my zombie novel, End of the Line, is set in Grimsby too, because apparently even the apocalypse has to start somewhere familiar. Ideas that keep wandering back up the A180 whether I’ve invited them to or not.

This one I can explain. I grew up there. The better part of thirty years, give or take, versus just over a decade in Kent — so when my hands go back to Grimsby on the page, that’s not nostalgia, that’s just basic arithmetic. Kent is where I live. Grimsby is apparently where my subconscious still has a season ticket.

Small Fish became Grimhaven rather than literal Grimsby, mostly because I wasn’t trying to write a documentary about a real place that’s continued existing without my permission since I left it. I wanted the feeling of the place — the grit, the football, the very specific grey of a sky over the docks — without having to be accurate about, say, whether a particular chip shop is still open. (It’s probably not. They never are.) End of the Line, on the other hand, just goes ahead and uses the real place, possibly on the basis that if the dead are going to rise anywhere, it might as well be somewhere I know the geography of well enough to write a decent chase scene.

So: Grimsby makes sense. Moving on.

Wales: Does Not Make Sense, At All

Here’s the bit where I lose the plot slightly, so bear with me.

I’ve been to Wales twice in my entire life. A week each time — once in 1992, when I was a child and had approximately zero say in the itinerary, and again in 2025, as a fully grown adult who really should know better by now. Of that second trip, exactly one hour was spent in Pontypridd, the town where my grandmother was born. One hour. I’ve spent longer than that queuing for a gig.

And somehow, that one hour appears to have rewired something. Not the two weeks of general, perfectly pleasant Welsh holidaying. Not the scenery, not the castles, or the Blaenau Festiniog Light Railway, not whatever I had for lunch on either trip, which I genuinely cannot recall. Just the hour. In Pontypridd. Specifically.

I have no rational explanation for this, and I want to be clear that I’ve tried. My grandmother was from there, which is the only actual evidence I’ve got, and on paper it’s not much to build an entire emotional attachment on. People meet their actual living relatives for longer than an hour and feel less moved by it. I’m half convinced my own ancestors are mildly embarrassed on my behalf — “he was here for sixty minutes and now he wants to retire here, bless him.”

Because that’s the other thing. Sadie has mentioned, more than once, that when we eventually retire, Wales might be the answer. And the genuinely baffling part is that I don’t immediately laugh this off. Some small, currently unsupervised part of my brain goes “yeah, alright then,” based entirely on an hour I spent there once, in a town I couldn’t confidently find again without a satnav.

I have, if I’m honest, more feeling toward Wales as a concept than I have toward England, despite having lived in England my entire life and visited Wales for a combined total of roughly two weeks. This is not a sensible ratio. I am aware it is not a sensible ratio. I have made my peace with the fact that my sense of belonging apparently does not consult a spreadsheet before making decisions.

So What’s Actually Going On Here

I think — and this is very much a working theory, subject to change without notice — that creative work, and maybe identity generally, doesn’t care all that much about how long you’ve spent somewhere. It cares about whatever’s load-bearing. Kent is where my actual life happens: the bills, the cat, the theatre, the back pain, the whole functioning-adult operation. Grimsby is the thirty-year foundation underneath it, fully explicable, no mystery required. And Wales is just… in there. Uninvited. Unexplained. Possibly ancestral, possibly just a really good hour, possibly both.

I’ve stopped trying to force a tidy answer out of the Wales thing, mostly because I don’t think there is one, and partly because demanding logic from your own feelings is a famously losing battle. Some places just get under your skin regardless of how much actual time you’ve clocked there, like a song you’ve heard once and now can’t stop humming, except the song is a Welsh valley town and the humming is a vague but persistent desire to live there one day.

So if you ever read something of mine set in a windswept fictional fishing town, you’ll know where that’s from. And if, decades from now, you hear I’ve retired to a small house somewhere near Pontypridd having visited the place for a cumulative total of sixty minutes, please don’t act surprised. Some of us were always going to end up exactly where we couldn’t logically explain.

Does anyone else feel inexplicably tied to somewhere they’ve barely been? Or is it just me, romanticising a single hour like it owes me a mortgage? Let me know in the comments — I could use the company.

If you enjoy what I do, consider supporting me! Every little bit means the world!

Gary grew up in Grimsby, lives in Dover, Kent, and has a worrying amount of feelings about a Welsh town he’s visited once, for sixty minutes.