IT IS through wistful eyes that I write this column.

Wistful that with only 23 months and 28 days until my 30th birthday (and not 48 months as stated in last week's Just Jamie, thanks Alex Dawson of Sudell Close Darwen for spotting the deliberate mistake. Look out for more in forthcoming Just Jamie's!) my youth is behind me, and wistful that this weekend heralds my last in Sunny Rochdale.

The One Bedroomed Flat shall be my home no longer as I and the Long Suffering Marjorie pack up and head off to pastures new. Well Lancaster actually.

The LSM has got herself into teacher training college and, honouring a pact we made if her application was successful, we are moving on.

Thankfully the drunken pact we made when we first met has long been forgotten. Otherwise I'd be sitting here writing this is my mother's dress.

As it is I sit here surrounded by cardboard boxes, variously marked with "books" or "CDs". And I must admit I am rather sad.

I have lived in Sunny Rochdale for all of my 28 years - actually being born in the house where my Folks still reside - although I never thought I was a fan of the place. Familiarity really does breed contempt.

Apart from a year at university and a couple of months in Holland picking tulip bulbs (I'll save that for another column) I have always been in Rochdale and frankly, itching to get out. The LSM 's admission to college provided the perfect excuse and I have counted down the days to this moment.

But now it is here, it is a moment of anxiety. Not one of regret I hasten to add but definitely anxiety.

It's the upheaval of it all I suppose. I am leaving a comfort zone for an alien environment. The man behind the bar at my local pub will be a stranger and the walk to the papershop will not be a well trodden path.

What makes it worse is that I am a sentimental old fool at the best of times. As a kid it was always a wrench to say goodbye to pals I had met on holiday and had only known for two weeks.

And - as the Big Sis revels in telling people - I shed a few tears when my dad traded in his brown Chrysler Horizon for a Mazda 626. I loved that car.

I have great memories of living and growing up in Rochdale. I frolicked in the local parks, played football for the local team and attended the local schools.

I have stood on the football terraces of Spotland (although quickly relegated Rochdale for Man U!), got drunk for the first time in a local pub and even worked for the local paper. But now I am off.

Like Gracie Fields (Capri) and Lisa Stansfield (Dublin) before me, I am abandoning my home town for somewhere new (Lancaster). The thing I will miss most is the people. The hardcore group of pals I did all of the above with has long since disbanded with some either in other parts of the country (or indeed the world) although most are just in different parts of Rochdale.

For the past few years I have lived in a different village to the one I grew up in, but there was always the chance of bumping into my old pals in the supermarket and catching up on old times.

There's not much chance of bumping into them in Lancaster.

Not that that's a bad thing mind. A new move is a new start and meeting new people can only be a good thing. And discovering new surroundings should be a pleasure and not a chore.

In a couple of weeks the man behind the bar serving my pint will no longer be a stranger and the walk to the papershop will be one I know only too well.

I will make new friends with whom I will share a few laughs and no doubt bump into at the local supermarket.

And when I go back to Sunny Rochdale to visit the Folks, Big Sis, Billy Boy, the Golden Boy and the Mite, I will do so appreciating what I left behind.

So it's goodbye to all that and hello to a brave new world!