pa There was no gravel path. Nor deep green conifer synaesthesia. There was no laurel sheen in the sun.

paThere was no perfumed air. Nor cooling breeze. There was no view across vineyards to a road leading south.

paInstead it was a damp slum ripe for tearing down.

There was no Louis Quatorze drawing room. No embossed fleur-de-lys wallpaper in green and gold. No long corridors. Nor kitchen filled with the pungent aroma of fresh coffee. No walled garden. Nor sun-kissed terrace. No parasols. No cicadas. No promise of the sea.

paInstead, there was mould. On the walls and on the ceiling. There was the smell of damp in dark rooms. There were cobwebs in the corners of the dead spaces below the sink. There was cracked glass. There were rotten window frames. There were mouse droppings under the cupboards in the kitchen, under the sideboard that stood by the sofa in the living room.

paThere was a bare bulb. And a blackout blind somebody had left from the war. There was cracked linoleum, and worn mats. And at night the cockroaches came, an invading army in uniforms of black annexing the floor...

paAt this time of year, when trees wave last leaves like surrender flags, the clouds having won and the blast and its rain, thoughts turn to the past. Staring out the window over the cornflake box you become aware of where exactly you are, you arrive at the reality. And dreams focus miraculously and unexpectedly into shapes whose pattern you suddenly see.

paWhen you are born in a damp house in the back streets of some northern town, dreams are strong. They are in fact your only nourishment. They blossom, burgeon, duplicate and multiply. Until they fill up the windows of your life, blocking the view, cutting out the light. It is only years later sitting staring over the cornflake box at the bare branches scratched into the sky that they are miraculously and unexpectedly cut down, hacked away, gone in an instant, felled.

paYou see then as futile the actions of your past, the attitudes, the motivations you had. How foolish it all seems. It can't have been me, you are tempted to think. It was somebody else who had those thoughts, who dreamt those dreams. It was some poor fool who didn't know what he was doing, or where he was going - the idiot.

paSo this idiot hauled himself up out of a damp and terrible past. Across the land he scrambled mole-like, unable to see. And out across the path of the light of the world he charged blind, his dreams ballooning. Maybe it is only now staring in tranquillity over the wreckage of breakfast that one sees the reality of where he went, of how he got there, and what he did when he got there, or what he failed to do. And how the whole thing when at last he'd arrived and got his hands on it whatever it was he'd thought he'd dreamed of crumbled to dust.

paBecause life is an experiment. Or life after the point when you think you've taken charge of it. But how this semblance of taking charge sets in train a series of events, how it pushes one in a certain direction beyond going back, that is hard to take. Because at the time you thought it was all only a try-out, a what-would-happen-if. At the time you sort of assumed it would all be only temporary.

paNow, sitting here staring out the window, the scratched trees say the house is still there, it is still down there, incredibly. For years it seemed to exist only in a dream.

paYou could get up off your chair, get into a car, and set off. And in no time at all, or a few days at most, you could be there, you could stand there. Your eyes could scan the gardens and the turrets and the shuttered windows. And you could search for signs of the dreams you left there. And you could wonder why...