Royal Visits and Possible Stabbings: thoughts on my hometown

• I arrived here a few days after I was born (a hospital a few towns over) and have stayed ever since. I don't quite know the rules: am I supposed to wait til I've left this place long enough to feel homesick before I give it a write up? Or is it when I come back and realize there's just not that much to feel homesick about?
• I love all those 'I gotta get outta' this town, it's been keepin' me down too long' clichés - I plan to leave first chance I get. Make it next September. I've left it only infrequently over the last almost-18 years, usually just to bordering towns. Lying in bed I can see one of the plane routes from a nearby airport through my window (all going West so I'm guessing to America); I'll lie down and watch people escaping this place - like some romantic real life mise en scene. 
• I'd call Cramlington a nowhere town but that brings to mind sandy, deserted dust bowl America town, when really it's moderately busy, usually cold and rainy Northern England. Everybody doesn't know everybody. 
• The entirety of my knowledge of "The History of Cramlington": it used to be a mining town and helped, to what extent I don't know, in WW2 - housing a medical center that would become my middle school. 
• During the time as a mining town the coal was thrown onto one huge, main heap - this eventually formed into a hill, Nelson Hill: Cramlington's sole natural beauty. 
• The five main estates (and corresponding stereotypes of anyone who lives there) are as follows: Beacon - the rough neighbourhood, good if you want drugs or stabbings, good anecdotes from everyone there; Northburn - the "posh wankers" with the big houses and fancy cars, the model image of suburbia, "The Burn" river runs through it, hence the name; Parkside - where I live, in the middle of everything, and too small to have any discernible characteristics; East Crammy - a mixed bag, class wise, there's run down neighbourhoods a few streets down from houses I know that house Ferraris; Cragside - where the school, park and football fields are, hence used by everybody too much to be given any bad judgment, although I have seen some drug arrests there.
•  I girl who lived, possibly still lives on my street once told me that one night during a family and friends get together at her house, her dad's friend went out for a smoke and while outside was stabbed by a hoodie walking past. I don't know if this is true, but ever since I've told people that someone was once stabbed on my street. Because, y'know, that's the image I want to send out about my street. 
• ...a further example of my street: I was working the other day, just a patch of grass from the stabbing house, when a door opened, a woman's voice screamed "DON'T" and then a pregnancy test flew out of the door, which then slammed shut. It had a lighter atmosphere to it than it comes out as in writing. 
• I've heard stories about the Queen visiting years ago. She apparently opened our Concordia. My year four English teacher once said when she was younger - I'll take a stab this story dates the 50s or 60s - the Queen went past the school in a fancy car and all the kids ran to the fence to wave at her. I can't think of any reason she'd visit now.
• Everyone I know who lives here, or went to school here, gives this place a much worse rep than it deserves. One of those moderately decent towns - maybe you know the type - that you just want to make seem worse than it is. 
• It always perplexes me a little how adults end up in nowhere towns like this. Kids are stuck where they land; I thought the freedom of adulthood was all that grasping the nettle stuff - finding something in the world. I don't know what is to be found here. 
• I do wonder how I'll write about this place when I'm old and living some place else. I couldn't stay here. Then again, most people can only see what a place is once they've left it.