There’s the somewhat dilapidated apartments, greyspeckle aggregate, each with a car a quarter century old sat outside proud as a badgepin for Pupil of the Month at the funny farm. The carpark still surprising in its expanse, like a greasy tarmac lake, and the quarry cliffs looming mebbe a hundred feet all around. Where we made the den in the bush is now impenetrable, we burrowed in there like maggots; clay dirt ‘paths’, roots pulled at frantically, broken red bricks dug up like discovered species, carving out a space in the world with nought but tiny hands for tools.

The road in is much, much more narrow than I remembered, hardly enough for a single car. We rattled down there three apiece in a single person go-kart – writing it down sounds like a Charlie Brown comic panel dream – and everywhere we ran, with clean hearts, all skinny wrists and ribs. Spider-vein side alleys running off the road, memories of my sister probably ’bout 13 walking a spaniel for someone there for 50p; it stank outrageously, and dozens of shits smeared the tiny concrete courtyard. The dog, Gypsy I think she was called, had mats behind her ears big as golf balls, a foreveropen mouth, squirming pink tongue, breath rancid; from memory she was fat, and, of course, now at least a decade dead.