One of the things that amazes me most about life is that it never feels like it changes much from day to day, but somehow it does. Where? How?

The first place I ever called home was a small town called Rickmansworth, where we lived until moving down the road to Watford in 1989. Our house was a 1960s sand-coloured semi right on the edge of the town, opposite a huge golden field. In the distance, we’d see the planes taking off from Heathrow. Fireflies in the night sky.

You’d think, given that I only lived there until I was 3 and a half, that I wouldn’t remember it much, right?

Yet I do. I remember lots of things about it. The glass dining table I’d stare at from my high chair throne. The dark green curtains I enjoyed wrapping myself in. The reddy brown leaves of the beech trees that lined the lane. The wooden box in the living room that would often beam images of an unusual place called ‘Ramsay Street’.

I lived in that house with 4 giant jelly babies who kept calling me the same word I later realised was my name, and a four-legged fluffy thing called Muffin. Beyond all that, I knew of very little else.

We moved away and never really had any reason to return. Just an occasional drive past in the immediate years after leaving to nosey out at whether the latest incumbents had painted the garage or changed the front door yet. They hadn’t. They wouldn’t.

But I do revisit properly in September 2026. Pulling up outside at 40 years old in a car I can only drive because I spent several years battling for a license after too many tests to count. The last time I took a vehicle down this road, it was a rusty old go-kart that had a brown washing up bucket for a seat.

September sunshine beats down onto the dashboard as I work my way through a Tesco meal deal and try not to look too weird as I stare at the house. My house. Our house. The front door hasn’t changed, but the garage has been painted. The car sitting outside on the driveway looks like it has a built-in cassette player and smells of Benson and Hedges. It must have parked up there straight after we left, and been there ever since.

Once I’ve finished wolfing down the Salt and Vinegar Squares I decide to take a hop out and a wander. My legs are a little longer than the last time they stepped out on this pavement, but they don’t move as fast.

In the front garden of a house a few doors down from ours, a lady is pruning the front bushes. Her monochrome mane suggests she may have lived in her house for many decades. I’m not sure entirely what compels me to make myself look like even more of a weirdo than I already feel, but I decide to ask her how long she’s been there.

“Oh, since it was first built, 60 years?”

I’m relieved that she answers the question as opposed to launching the shears in her hand in fear of this random woman with her random questions. Nonetheless, I feel the need to explain why I’m asking.

“My family lived here in the 1980’s! My mum, dad and big brother and sister. Do you remember us?”, I ask, excitedly.

“No.”

But she does go on to tell me her name, and within minutes I’m sharing this with my family on WhatsApp.

“Oh I kind of remember her. Her son sang in the church choir.”

The chat eventually reaches that unspoken point at which continuing would feel awkward for both parties, and so I leave my new old friend to prune whilst I carry on walking. Across the lane, and through a well-trodden gap in the bushes and into the field. Still golden, even after a cycle of some 37-odd harvests.

A new secondary school has been built in the corner of the land, but otherwise it feels much the same as it always did. Still big. Planes still taking off from Heathrow in the distance. Much snazzier ones now though. Boeing Dreamliners with fancy screens, on their way to the glamorous cities in the Middle East that have sprung up since.

I’m finally getting the chance to walk through this field alone. No big brother or sister to keep me within parental eyeshot. My first ever chance to walk to the other side and see what’s there. Maybe I’ll reach that wooded area we walked to as a family in 1988, when Grandma needed to turn back swiftly on account of desperately needing the loo. I had found it very funny.

“What a beautiful panoramic this would have been to look out at every day”,  I think to myself, as I advance along the field’s edge.

“Is any of our stuff still hidden deep below this surface? Old Coke cans from Summer days in 1987. Empty packet of Discos?”

As I walk further along, my mind flits between topics and tenses in the way it often does. Work on Monday. Life Admin for the week ahead. What time I need to leave here to arrive at the birthday party of a friend I met sixteen years after leaving here for the first time, in another place – many miles away – that would also be home for a while.

The M25 hums in the nearby distance.

That sound.

I’d forgotten that sound until now. Constant, only ever dimming in the deepest hours of the night.

A WhatsApp message tells me it’s time to leave. Again. But it feels unnatural.

“You mean I can’t just go through that door and sit at a glass table for a BirdsEye beef burger and chips whilst the smallest of the jelly babies tries to teach me to paint?”

Where and how did life change? Well I don’t know.

But somehow it did.