Deaths and entrances

It's very strange to return to a place where you have spent many years of your life, to walk in your vanished footsteps and to find your gaze striking sparks of memory in every direction. Here in Oxford there's no street or shop or bus stop or playground that doesn't have some association, nowhere I haven't walked or biked or wheeled a pushchair: my route to school, my route to work, the way to the library, the nursery, the vet, places of meetings and marches, parties and partings, deaths (my parents) and entrances (my sons).

The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there. Absolutely not: the past is right here and it's full of people doing exactly the same things: going to school, holding hands, carrying books and babies, shopping bags and financial burdens, getting old and sad and lonely.

This is the house where I used to live.