Just Down the Road and Twenty Five Years back

I spoke to someone today at work from Elgin. I immediately recognised the area from the postcode, or rather, the first two letters of the postcode :'IV...' That Highlands accent, that imagined sense of space behind the disembodied voice of the listener down the earpiece. 'I used to live near there, at Forres!' I said. 'Just down the road! Its nae changed much!' came the answer. The man seemed delighted someone knew his locality. 'I imagine not...' (my voice now sounded ridiculously English. '...it was twenty five years ago I left'.
Twenty five years ago.
After the call, I let these three words roll round my afternoon mind. Twenty five years. A quarter of a century.
A lifetime ago.
As I get older, the more I seem to actually nurture an almost physical longing for the Moray coast, for Forres and Kinloss, where I spent the ages between 6 and 13. Home sickness for a place I only lived in for seven of my (admittedly) formative years? I suddenly think of someone back in 1985, the year that we left Scotland, longing for a place that he (or she) lived in 25 years before, and that would be 1960... Playing with time like this makes me realise how much time does actually pass. Fifty years? A half a century?
Of course I am mythologising and romanticising my childhood. I imagine that everyone does it, and far easier to do so when the place that childhood was experienced in is not readily accessible by travel. Mostly I feel lucky that I can mythologise to such a degree. An intimate and haunted Asgaard, a miniature galaxy, a frozen city.
I had actually thought, that on a return trip I took there, five years ago now, that my nostalgia for the place would inevitably still. I thought that confronted with the reality of it, I would see it through adult eyes and the place would lose that resonance I had built up over the previous fifth of a century.
Interestingly this was not to be. I found the landscape as mesmerising and timeless and mysterious as all of my dreams over the intervening two decades. The woods and forests were as deep, the summer-light clear and refined in a way that I have not noticed in the south. Kinloss seemed as haunted, and the nearby town of Forres still exuded that mysterious dream-like provincial / industrial air it had way back then. Even the black woods on the top of Cluny Hill still dominated the town, as inscrutable and watchful as ever.
Nelson's Tower still there, Sueno's Stone on the outskirts, now encased in a glass tube, and our old garden in Drumdian Park still with the fence that my parents put up when I was 11.
Over the last five years I find I am dreaming of it frequently, most notably Southside, the Sergeants Married Quarters in Kinloss. In these dreams it is usually the first hour of darkness, or the beginning of dusk. I am attempting to find my way into the heart of Southside, to near where I used to live. I attempt to reach that fence where I would stand with my best friend Carl Haslam, fingers curled around green wire, and stare into that small clump of trees we called a wood by the railway line. Looking for ghosts.
When I went back that wood -a clump of trees really- was still there. In direct opposition to that oft-quoted maxim that childhood places seem smaller when returned to as an adult, the trees seemed to be larger, as sinister and beguiling as ever.
Still, I suppose they have had twenty five years in which to grow.
Anyhow, in these dreams, I rarely succeed in reaching the place I seek for. Southside is often subtly changed; there is a river running through it, the streetlamps are larger, there is a cafe where a house used to be. I am not sure whether I am meant to be in Southside, particularly after dark. Often, Southside has some kind of rumoured rivalry with Burnside, the Officers Married Quarters, where I also lived. If it is dusk in these dreams, the air is heavy with a surreal miasma of otherness. A sense of deep and profound timelessness which I cannot describe when I have woken, but stays with me throughout the following day.
'Just down the road'.
The man I spoke to doesn't think twice about Forres, or Kinloss, any more than I might think Portslade or Rottingdean anything special. To him it is 'just down the road' and to me it is a lifetime away. A quarter of a century back, and yet, a place that is still here.
One day I imagine I'll go back again.
I wonder if I'll find what I'm looking for?