I climbed the steps out of the tube station into the familiar. Streets I’ve wandered for 32 years, give or take. So much has changed that I can’t quite place everything. The Itsu that used to be a Burger King but was a Wimpy before that... or was that the Boots? The WH Smiths is now a bakery. The dodgy used record shop where I bought knackered old comics is still there, though. In fact, it’s multiplied and split off into several dodgy shops, each specialising in various used wares, all looking equally knackered and yet somehow still sort of desirable.

Every memory brings more along with it. Sometimes they’re specific, lingering, moments and sometimes it’s a flip book, a mental shorthand where several years are condensed and rush by in a flash. And sometimes it’s not the memory itself but the realisation that there’s a memory there, just out of reach, slipping between neurones, elusive, like a shape in the fog or a shadow under the water. It’s those that shorten the breath and brush the spine. Like you’ve been touched by a ghost. Tendrils of the past caressing lost corners of the mind, withdrawing before they can be seen and remembered.

It’s always been a little dirty here. Shabby, chic, but not a combination of the two. Somehow both at once. The mansions of billionaires and the council flats all stones throws away from each other.

It’s the end of winter but in my head it’s a summer morning thirty years ago, probably about 6am, the sun already up and blinding, my eyes red raw and crumbling to dust without sleep, but sobered up enough to make my way up from one of the squares next to Portobello Road back to Notting Hill, hoping that the bus is running. It’s probably a Sunday. The streets are wet from the thunderstorms the night before. We turned the lights off at the party and watched the lightning through the window and played Purple Rain really fucking loud. Tins of lager and Thunderbird and probably some other stuff kicking about. Stuff that gave me a wicked fucking headache. We thought the thunder would break the windows it was so loud. It woke up some of the drunks we hoped would stay asleep.

Some market stall people are just beginning to set up and the hill was so fucking steep. I could’ve just got the tube from Ladbroke Grove to Hammersmith but my world was smaller then.

Jump forward a decade and a half and I’m at lunch in a little Greek or Italian place across from where the posh wine merchant used to be, hoping to impress someone I thought I was in love with.

Then back again even further than the walk of shame to a lunch where we snuck a beer or two and then went back to school. Wondering if the teachers would notice. Wandering the canyons of grand terraced houses broken up into flats, some of them crumbling, some of them with fresh paint, made whole again by a wealthy developer hoping to attract a wealthier buyer.

From the tube I walked past the Coronet, now a theatre but formerly a cinema. I sat in the smoking section twenty-seven-or-so years ago for Clear and Present Danger and smoked too many Marlboro Lights and drank too much beer afterwards. It was a shabby cinema. It seems quite a chic theatre.

A year and a bit ago a friend of mine and I drank cans of Tyskie and ate tortilla chips on the corner behind The Gate cinema just back down the road. The pubs were not open. It was plague time. It still is.

Turning up Campden Hill Road I remembered a generous client taken suddenly ill and now gone who lived only a hundred or so metres away. The hills are steeper than I remember.

A night in the Windsor Castle, a restorative pint after the worst wedding ever, five years or so ago. It was only meant to be a pint but it was more. It started off as three of us but others joined. Just at that right time late on a Sunday afternoon when all the roast-eaters have buggered off and the staff look so grateful you just want a beer rather than to specify some terrible preference for overcooked roast beef. We kept getting rounds in. It wasn’t closing time but it was late and dark when we left and I didn’t go home straight away. One of us from that night isn’t here anymore.

It’s a pub with hidden corners. Ancient panelling and small passages from one bit to another. Almost every corner holds a memory, even the garden. The same with The Churchill Arms down the road, with its myriad tchotchkes and cheap, great Thai food. The two couldn’t be more different as pubs yet they bear about the same share of my ghosts.

I’m not back here that often anymore. I think it’s been a year or so, sipping those cans of beer on a street corner. And yet, in spite of all the things that are different, it’s still like walking into a set of all my lives before. As though turning a corner it might be 1990 again, or 1998, or 2005, or 2017. And so when I’m here, I’m not all there. There’s a part of me lingering in the past, tracing old steps, sipping empty pints with friends who aren’t around anymore, getting into trouble and wondering how to get back.

That’s the trouble with old haunts. They’re haunted.