Through the act of living itself, sadness piles up here and there.
– 5 centimetres per second

I had not visited the Angel, Islington, since we moved to Bristol in 2003. London, certainly, but I never had time or reason to visit the place I grew up.

The greasy spoon opposite the South Library (which I always knew as “Cafe Open” from its sign) was full, so I bought some chips from Mike’s Fish Bar instead. The tiny meanders of the New River park had changed, the strange old fountains and ponds ripped out. The benches under the little tent-like ladder and slide that we used to sit on and eat chips were gone, the paint on the bars was pale green instead of old red.

Names and memories came back in a great rush. Sew Fantastic (haberdashery), Get Stuffed (sold stuffed animals, always seemed to have policemen nosing around), SX (for Essex [Road], hardware), Sea Dragon Aquarium (tropical fish shop, which I once went into thinking it was a real aquarium, and emerged highly disappointed). Cross Street, Packington Street, the Queen’s Head, Criterion Auction Rooms, the South Library; places I knew inside out, places I remembered only as scenery. So little seemed to have changed. Jo’s Market Garden, an ugly graffiti-esque basket of fruit obscuring the name of its founder, was still there. So was the fishmonger. The school on Colebrooke Row was not.

There was Duncan Terrace park, upmarket and different, all fresh pine posts and imported grass. Even the layout of the roads was different, more crossings where they were needed, more bollards where they were not. I wonder whatever became of Bob the lollipop man. I remember the caterpillar he once gave me in a round plastic box, which grew fat and pupated and then burst out a huge grey-brown moth and flew away. Noel Road, the gutters of which I had scoured for a week or two every morning with Oliver before school, looking for discarded rubber bands to add to our ever-growing ball. The copper on the spire of the Catholic church still hadn’t corroded to green. Becks, the fabulous, solvent-smelling toy shop in Camden Passage, had been replaced by some disgusting designer fashion shop called “frost french”.

The Regent’s Canal hadn’t changed, though there was ice along its surface. Nor had the lock gates. Nor had Joe and Amy’s old house, behind the weir and the weeping willows. Along the canal, beside Hanover Primary School, I found the mural that my class had made almost a decade ago, an illustrated map of the canal made from tiles painted by children. Some had been broken, smashed by vandals, but many remained. I recognised the names on the tiles: Sam Margerison, Nina Sorenson, Alec Jagodinski, Theo. I found what remained of my own tile, just a corner, with the drawing (I forget what it even was) long gone. All that remained was what I had fancied a signature back then: an almost runically angular JL covered in a frantic sort of squiggle. This, thanks to some vandal, now means nothing to anyone except me; a corner only I recognise, a signature only I can read.

I went to our old house. Number 10, Vincent Terrace, N1 8HJ. 0207 833 8135, learned by rote, burned into memory. The Murrays bought this place from us, more than five years ago. I don’t know who lives there now. I recognised the letterbox, the green-painted door, the old chip in the doorstep my mother had made good, the strange wizened lump of a tree still clinging to life by the kerb. Our coal-hole, our lamp-post. Like everything else, it seemed smaller, older, dimmer.

This is why we forget: because even one street is built up of so many human experiences, people who have changed it and shaped it and lived and died in it, that if we remembered everything we would be destroyed, spend forever wondering at what had gone on in a hundred metres square of pavement.

I left the broken tile and a tiny palmprint in the concrete near the school. I remember this place. It does not remember me.

But I have another memory to add: here and now, at the dawn of 2009, the boy who is now a young man, walking the streets with his eyes everywhere. And while nobody is beside me, I am not alone, for I walk with memories and ghosts.