What takes you back?

What takes you back?

Frying onions; to that grimy roadhouse in ’83?

‘Another Brick in the Wall’?

Cold feet? Walking to work in the winter?

Chanel No.5? Old Spice?

The crunch of gravel underfoot takes me back to the late ‘60s. My mum was a maid for the family of a retired Rear-Admiral. They had a proper gravel avenue up to The Manor; your actual avenue—with lines of poplar trees. Landed gentry, don’t you know? I was too young to resent inherited wealth then, but I remember trudging up that damned drive in late February, after getting off that cold, draughty bus. What really pissed me off was that there were discarded Christmas presents; one of the three public-school boys had a Revell model of ‘The Spirit of St Louis’, still in the box. Bastard.

‘When the World was Mine’ by Ronan Keating has me flat on my back in a sweltering hotbox of a hotel room in the Namib desert watching multi-coloured lizards getting frisky.

The smell of cut grass takes me straight back to playing cricket at school in Wales. Straight back. I was pretty good, you know? If I hadn’t worn glasses, I might have been something. Then again, if pigs had wings, they’d fly.

Josh Groban’s ‘Gira Con Me’ puts me back to a time not long ago when, whilst perhaps not quite perfect, then things were as close to that as they’ll ever be.

And you?