'A bustling Asian megacity was my dream. Why did I miss Leeds so much?'

How do you get excited about the place you grew up in? Over the years, I have seen the city through different lenses, shaped both by where I was in my life and the fluctuating fortunes of Leeds United. Yet whenever I’ve moved away, to another city or even another country, it never takes long before I feel the pull to return. Back to the familiar, drizzly backdrop of West Yorkshire. 

I spent the first 19 years of my life on the Otley Run. Well, just about. Our family home was at the top of a cul-de-sac in between the New Inn and the Original Oak. When I was born, Headingley was a prime location for families, but the houses on our street were gradually bought up by landlords and sublet to students, with the sound of children playing Tig 123 gradually replaced by the constant thud of bad house music from our neighbours, who were wannabe DJs and, given the nocturnal comings and goings, almost definitely drug dealers.

Things came to a head when my dad, a mild-mannered librarian, had an on-street shouting match with our GP-turned-landlord while still wearing his slippers.

“Why do you need any more money? It’s just greed. Pure greed!”

Predictably, the GP did not back down, but we moved to a different doctor’s surgery.

So that showed him.

I have always respected my parents for refusing to be forced out, though, because Headingley was a magical place to grow up.  On match days, it is soundtracked by the stadium, and with the roar audible from our back garden, I never had to check Teletext to see whether Leeds Rhinos had scored a try or Yorkshire had taken a wicket.

I went to Headingley Primary School where, on my first day, I bumped into a boy with long blond hair in the toilets, asked “Aren’t you a girl?” as my winning opening gambit, yet still, improbably, hit it off, and he would go on to be best man at my wedding a quarter of a century later.

We then went to Ralph Thoresby High School where, after being initially terrified of the older lads with facial hair who did things like smoke cigarettes and kiss girls, I formed a solid group of mates, was lucky to have some great teachers, and escaped relatively unscathed aside from that time a lad in the year above walked over and punched me in the stomach for no reason whatsoever.

“Why?” I asked, spluttering. “Why would you do that?”

“Just because.”

“Right, glad that’s settled then.”

After hours of trying (failing) to replicate Tony Yeboah’s goal against Liverpool in the back garden with my brother, I joined Kirkstall Crusaders and held down the role of second choice right back/occasional linesman with aplomb for several seasons. My teammates and I would go on to navigate our formative years together, graduating from post-football Panda Pops to getting a friend’s brother to buy us bottles of White Lightning cider from the local corner shop and paying him, honestly, an outrageous commission for his efforts.

Beckett’s Park was the arena for my underage drinking days and early attempts to engage with the opposite sex. For my pals and me, romantic endeavours involved laying the groundwork through emoji‑heavy MSN Messenger conversations, before approaching the girls we’d been chatting to in-person on Friday nights to find our white‑hot internet wit had deserted us.

“So, um, did you know there used to be a Woolworths on the Arndale Centre?” “No.”

Eventually, though, having bonded over a mutual appreciation of Lambrini and Dido’s debut album, I met my first girlfriend.  Over the next few months, we would meet outside Safeway and stomp around the streets of Headingley and Meanwood, holding hands, unperturbed by driving wind and rain, and talk about, honestly, God knows what. One Tree Hill maybe?

I afforded my weekend frivolities through a Saturday job at Jack Fulton’s Frozen Food, where I was paid £2.01 to help with the delivery, which involved a man with an eyebrow piercing lobbing heavy boxes of frozen food at me from the back of a truck while saying things like “Man up, soft lad.” I got a sizeable pay rise a couple of years later when I found employment at the newly opened Subway, only to discover that my supervisor, who had a chequered past to match his chequered shirt, had once nicked my phone at a bus stop. We both knew this had happened, but never mentioned it.

“So, um, are you ok to chop some onions, Andy?”

“Sure.”

As children of the nineties, musical tastes were shaped by Kerrang! and MTV2, which led to a rush of aspiring punk and ska bands in Leeds. Some were genuinely good - Mr Shiraz and The 42 Tones were big on the local scene at the time - but many, many others were not. My own, for example.

After spending countless evenings at my mates’ houses eating Super Noodles and listening to Enema of the State, the natural progression was, of course, to form a band of our own. We had four songs that were influenced by Green Day and Blink 182, which was enough to get us some opening slots at gigs on the local circuit. Despite being not very good at all, we had some wonderful nights playing really, really short sets to sparsely populated rooms at The New Roscoe and Joseph’s Well.