Back in sunny Essex

That wasn't too bad a trip actually. I sat next to quite a cute guy on the train to London and we did the whole accidentally elbowing each other thing like you do on trains. The tube was easy - took my usual route of northern line to Bank and then Central to Liverpool Street. Then I caught a train full of Essex children back to Billericay.

The walk from the station was perfect though. Walking down paths that I've walked for over 20 years, seeing how things have changed and also how they haven't.


Noticing the new graffitti on the fences and the new railings in the park (designed to stop children falling in the lake). Trying to decide whether to take the "new" path round the lake (that's been there 10 years, easy) but in the end taking the same route home, past new and old things that just all come together to say HOME.


I don't know if I'll ever feel this way about anywhere else, don't know if I'll ever live anywhere for as long (although allowing for uni and living it Wolves it's probably only been about 17 years....) but I know what there are certain things that just seem to come together and sing in my mind. There are so many layers of memories associated with each place and each walk both adds another layer and refreshes the old ones.

The house is the same, new things in it of course but essentially still the same house where I remember sitting on the pearl-divers trunk in the corner of the living-room on the day we moved in. I had a moving bag containing a box of Maltesers (big treat) and Puffin's Stories for Seven Year Olds (I was five) with a Shirley Hughes illustration on the cover.

It's good to be back, tensions I didn't realise I had all fell away during that walk home.

Now I am going to play some cheesy Neopets games until my mum and sister get back from work (Dad's watching golf downstairs so I'm leaving him in peace) and then Emily will probably help me set up bits of my new pc.

I'm going to drag Emily around with her camera tomorrow and get her to take lots of pictures of things and places that I thought I'd forgotten but that my heart remembered.