NORTH DOWNS & BEYOND

One evening, many years ago, I was in a pub with work colleagues when out of the blue one of them stood up (slightly the worse for wear) and let rip in a strong, deep, Northern Irish voice: "It's alright for you feckers, you know where you come from. Me? I've got a Belgian father, a French mother, was brought up in Belfast and have lived most of my adult life in London. What does that make me? Who the feck am I?" He had a point. He didn't feel an affiliation to any one single place, let alone a country. It got me thinking, and 35 years later I still think back to that outburst and how, when I came to consider the question of belonging, realised that I too would find it hard to pin myself firmly to one spot. The more time I spent weighing up the past the stronger came the realisation that I had in fact attached myself to several. The ease with which I have done so suggests that I'm easily persuaded and that my patronage is not hard to secure. Shall we look at t...

Tring - a market town in Hertfordshire - was mentioned recently. My ears pricked up and, on hearing that town’s name, deep within me a warm glow of happiness was released. It was a reaction not unlike the salivation of Pavlov's dog to the sound of a bell, or Proust's relationship with the taste of a Madeleine biscuit. It was a physical and mental reaction in response to an unexpected trigger. Such reactions can come via a sound, a taste or, in my case, a word. And my word was Tring. It was my childhood home, the place where, between the ages of three and 12, I lived, a stone's-throw from open farmland and the Chiltern Beech woods. We moved away from Tring in 1970 - now 51 years ago - and my memories of those years are now becoming hazy. I can recall such things as the layout of our house, the garden, the roads close to home, my school and my friends. But they are largely snap shots, images that don't move, with no sound and no accompanying narrative. They are stills tha...