What was Found in an Old Notebook

When I was getting ready for work this morning, I picked up an old notebook that had been lying around my room lately. This is just one of a legion of notebooks and sketchbooks that follow me around everywhere. They pop up, disturbed for a while because I am sorting through some old drawer or a cardboard box, then vanish again, until the next time they are disturbed. Sometimes I open them, sometimes I don't.
I had noticed the red A4 notebook about a few times over the past week or so. I think it was disturbed from it's resting place when I was looking for wage slips for the students loans. I knew it dated from 1999 - and as I opened it, I was expecting to see song lyrics from the days when I would try to write songs back in Worcester. I found a story instead, and reading it made me feel oddly nervous - a nervousness that only makes sense if you read yesterday's post about Worcester and why it continues to haunt me. I wrote in there about how Worcester - in the 'heavily mythologised' guise of Clovelly Heath - used to feature frequently in the stories I wrote in my first few years of Brighton.
The story that is in the old notebook is one of them. It is called 'Vanished' and starts with a description of the view outside of my then window up in Moulscoombe in Brighton. The narrator in the story (obviously myself) begins to remember:

'Clovelly Heath - walking along the paths of the river Nerve in an autumn only a handful of years - the dark red of an October night - a raw cold clutching him - clutching them, for he had not been alone then - underneath the brooding curves and angles of the vast cathedral and the boughs of trees that probably remembered Oliver Cromwell and civil wars...'

In my post yesterday I asked 'what is it that brings me back again and again to that place?' There was another passage a little further on that spookily seemed to answer that:

'He was not fooled by his memories into believing that he had been happy then, but he did believe that he had felt more alive then. Life then, though certainly more difficult, more painful than now... seemed to have been full of a potential ...'

I wrote that story back in the autumn of 2000. I was 28 years old. I wonder what I would have thought had I known that I was writing an answer to a question I would ask twelve years later when I had just turned 40?
As I wrote yesterday, only Clovelly Heath is real.
Only Clovelly Heath will continue to be.