A lie obviously. When was I with Em and and nearly caught in the rain? Monday, Tuesday? It was at Mad Hatters, the coffee shop down Western Road. A post-work coffee, watching the walkers outside. Remember Em asking me if I wanted her hat when I walked back, to not get my head wet, but by the time I had finished my coffee it had stopped raining.
Out last night at the ice rink with Em for a birthday drink. A pint of Scandinavian Cider that tasted pleasantly of childhood and medicine. Inside a summer wedding style marquee, watching the skaters go round and round, most people surprisingly proficient. My favourite was a late middle aged man who seemed mildly surprised that he was on an ice rink at all. He smoothly drifted across the ice, occasionally scratching his chin in a disinterested way. He seemed lost deep in thought, as if he were having distinctly un-ice rink thoughts, which should only consist of Christmas films set in New York.
Keep picking up resonances of this time last year - resonances being those strange Proustian moments that take you right back to a past time. Western Road tastes of the bedsit, and those narrow evening watching DVDs and thinking about horror comics, that cold yellow light and unhomely air. The dark unfriendly corridor to the bathroom in which the shower sometimes worked and sometimes didn't. Then the waking in the morning and peeling back a corner of the curtain to look at the industrial Edwardian landscape outside. Remember the pink of unwelcome dawns over the houses opposite. I enjoy these memories, and, at the same time know absolutely how unhappy I was living there. The strange corollary of remembering; that nostalgia is not limited to those times we were happy in, or to even those times that were particularly interesting, just for those times -any time- that has passed. Not strictly true of course, any more than my earlier statement about not seeming to have rained for weeks. I may be nostalgic for last year - but not for two years ago - but then may be for three years back. Living through the last season of Wilbury Crescent, the smell of polished rooms and freshly vacuumed carpet, staring out of the window at that wide winter sky, the railway landscape, the magpie tree, steamy pipes in the alleyway across the tracks...
I look about the living room now though, in a flat reminiscent of Wilbury Crescent, the same thick curtains and living room layout, Andy lying on the floor instead of Joe, the same landlady, and I wonder sometimes how much has changed at all.
