I had an hour or two in Uxbridge first - a nowhere town at the very end of the Metropolitan line. Places don't change that much I've discovered - a building may get knocked down here maybe, another one gets put up there perhaps.
Places from the past are a lot more consistent than people.
Well, nearly.
I went into W.H.Smiths where I used to work from 1990 - 1993, but because it has been refurbished, it felt completely different. I stood in the newspaper section, pretended I was still putting out the magazines from 23 years ago. I went back into the Pavilions shopping centre. Now this place never changes. The book stall in the middle is still here. I worked a couple of shifts here, but wasn't offered the job because I was ' having problems with the till'. That must have been back in 1989... I remember when Louise and Helen both worked here. Helen was going out with Edward, and with Craig and Simon, we would congregate here in Saturdays. I used to fancy Louise, but never told her. The closest we would get to anything would be holding hands.
I rifled through rows of old 1980s paperbacks.
Slight echoes here.
I wandered into the new shopping centre, along the street to the Civic Centre then circled back again, via Uxbridge College, where I failed my art A-level over 1990 / 1991.
Back in the town centre I went for a coffee as Costa, sat looking out toward the tube station entrance.
I was thoroughly spooked.
I'm not sure why I was spooked, but there was something edgy and wrong about Uxbridge. I can't put my finger on what it was - it wasn't just being back in my own past (though that might have been part of it) it was an air... of something untrustworthy about the place, as if something bad was going to happen. I wanted to be out of there. I could feel an inexplicable panic building up.
Luckily my coffee was decaffeinated.
When that was finished I strolled slowly up to the big Sainsburys, got a sandwich and some apples. I munched on my sandwich at the entrance, looking out over the car park, thinking I used to live here and felt twilight begin to gather.
I walked up Belmont Road, passing by no 83 where I lived when I left home, from 1993 - 1994. A rented room that never saw sunlight on the ground floor. Saw the outside wall of that room. Just got back from Langley College, 21 years old, popped into Sainsburys for dinner, time for a joint and some artwork...
But I couldn't.
20 years ago is too long.
Uxbridge Common was just around the corner.
It was twilight proper when I got there.
And something began to happen.
I don't remember this feeling from when I lived in the area - eight and a half years is too long for a single emotion to cover everything - there were happy and sad times here, all lain over with a sense, at times, of isolation - my friends tended to live miles away from where I did. I had noticed this sense of serene mystery before, when I came back here two years ago, and also the first return I did, way back in the January of 2006.
Another interesting thing is that when I came here in November last year, that sense of serenity was missing. Perhaps this was because it had been daylight. All I found was a sense of unpleasant melancholy and loss, a geography of regret, a suburb of a city built on depression and sadness. It seems that the mystery and peace, the recompense of this place, is entwined only in the evenings and nights out here. When I walked up Woodstock Road, back over 2011, I thought that it seemed a very kind place. There was an implacable air of benevolence about this road where I lived when I was a teenager.
I felt too self-conscious to take any photographs of my old house, so I passed by slowly instead, searching the blank windows for something, noting the willow tree in the garden was still living and voluminous (I could have sworn that it had died). I noticed that the back door light was on. Do I remember a back door light or has that been a recent addition? Oh what I would do to knock on the door, say to whoever's living there now that the house has haunted me for twenty years and more, and that I have frequent dreams of being back in the house at twilight or sunset, that the empty rooms are haunted by something that knows me...
Walking by the house, in the surreal twilight, felt like I was actually in one of those dreams. A nostalgia for a place that doesn't exist, but is somehow real. I couldn't ever imagine living here.
I walked up Swakeleys Road, passed by the Swakeleys Park, Swakeleys Manor, a trinity of Swakeleys. I glance down the overgrown path that led to the rope-swing that was there over the summer of 1986. I brush fingers over all those still familiar landmarks from walks back home from school. That tree, that crooked street lamp, that front garden. A sense of euphoria crept into the darkness, a sense of rightness. There is something beautiful about a suburban night; houses lost and comfortable in their front gardens, the rumours of vast back gardens hidden behind trees, a lane leading to a tennis club (floodlights above the chimneys), avenues curving off into safe darkness. Suburbia - or this suburbia at least - has so much more potential for mystery and secrecy than Brighton does.
I got to Hillingdon tube station, waited for the tube back to London and to home and the present day. Behind me was an unlit footpath, muddy and lost, and I couldn't work out where it came from or where it was going to.
