That’s how I wanted it to start. The story I never wrote, maybe because someone had already written it and it was called Maybe I’ll Come Home In The Spring, or it could have been called Two Lane Blacktop, or it could have been Jeff Buckley singing Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, or a 17 year-old’s winter afternoon at the Cross Keys and the Red Lion and what from here looks like a phantom cavalcade of BSA A10s and Vauxhall Vivas, a Renault 5, a Bonneville Triton, a couple of Minis and A-roads that killed people back then.<\/p>\n

We knew where the crashes had been, the place where the car burned, the turning the car had come out of in front of the lorry, the spot where the road was covered in Maltesers one morning going to school, Star’s field, the dead cats by the road now and then, half something to feel sorry for, half something to be afraid of. The sports field where the\u00a0flower show was every year, where the puffball mushrooms grew, where we kicked them thinking they were poison, the tiny muddy medieval lane stiled with stones each end where adder berries grew shining red against the grass. The place I grew up. The place I’m still from, even though I can never go back there because it isn’t there.<\/p>\n