I have never liked going backwards. It has always seemed to me to be a direction fraught with difficulties. After all most of our anatomy is designed in a forward direction and it works rather well that way.

Nonetheless I found myself travelling backwards in a number of ways last week. Two long train journeys in seats facing the wrong way (ie to the back of the train); a visit to my old University City (the first time in 30 years); and attending a conference and staying in a hotel in a building in which many years ago I used to spend many a long hour drinking coffee and putting the world to rights through the night. I might add that it was next to a theatre which all those years ago was a favourite place, and a concert hall and pub full of good memories. It was the city in which I survived the Cuba crisis and the city in which I discovered so many things of lasting value.

Much has changed of course, but less than I imagined. The unique smell of molasses and coffee that used to greet you as you left the railway station. The bomb sites, barefoot children in the street and the old houses with windows bricked up against the Victorian window tax. I wanted to replace an old University necktie, but the shop has moved to London and you have to order ties over the internet.

But the people are the same, thank goodness. More of them of course, and more prosperous, but the same sense of humour and the same amazing accent which as a callow youth born only 20 miles away I found so impenetrable.

The past is really a different country. So many things are lost forever. Some we don't miss, but others we do. Two days is too short a time, thirty years too long.