A return journey

The view from my train window is obscured by heavy fog.

I am reminded of a day many years ago when a friend's grandfather took us fishing – two boys with fishing nets, scooping tiny fish from a canal. It was a foggy autumn morning. The sun was a sickly ball of yellow dim light, reminiscent of a pale full moon.

I think it happens to children at different stages of their development – they will one day notice something commonplace as though seeing it for the first time and the memory of that moment stays with them.

And so it was for me that day. I looked up and saw, as though for the first time, the sun enfeebled by the thick, thick fog that had draped itself across the sky.

And so it is for me today. And I am transported back in time.

I'm writing this while travelling by train to the city where I grew up and in which I lived until my teens.

If asked, I would probably describe the manner in which I left that city as a phased withdrawal. I moved elsewhere, and came back to visit friends and family increasingly infrequently. And although I once returned for about three months, over a period of four or so years my visits to that place fell to just once or twice a year.

The street where I grew up no longer exists. It was flattened as part of a housing estate clean-up project in the 1990s.

But I still dream about the places where I used to play as a child. The streets, the buildings, the gaps between buildings, disused factories, the railway yard. The view from my bedroom window, which faced due west and afforded me a mesmerising tableau, night after night, of the sun setting across a post-industrial landscape.

Scenes revisit me while I sleep, mocking me like a latter-day out-of-season Scrooge.

Much like the street, the view and the bedroom window, my childhood is long gone.

But the sun, of course, remains.

And this morning it is the very same sickly-looking yellow ball I remember from that one particular day so long ago.

I shall shortly be alighting from the train at a railway station where I last walked as a young man with his life before him, a head full of dreams but already by that stage a heart weighed down with disappointments.

What would I say to that young man, I wonder, if I bumped into him on the platform of the station? Which direction would I advise him to take? Would I tell him that never looking back over your shoulder isn't the panacea he will come to hope it is? Or would I let him find that out the hard way?