Torquay (2009)

Twenty years had done remarkable things to the streetscape.

New architecture shone in the weak sun, tall and ostentatious. Glass and steel and advertising shouted silently that the world had changed.

And so it had.

His childhood memories were still remarkably vivid and could be laid now over his vision, showing the past as a transparency. It seemed almost as if there were faults, rifts, in time and space so that the past and the present could co-exist; his childhood and his adulthood side-by-side. Some things had remained stubbornly unchanged. Next door was a restaurant. It specialised now in Mexican cuisine and possibly always had. There was a pet supplies store down the street in a building which he remembered always having associated with animals. The post office at the corner, the unpaved footpath, the white papery bark of the tree on the nature-strip, all these shared their existence between memory and reality, but across the road the old school-yard was gone and in its place a commercial monstrosity of car-parking and brand-names and flavoured coffee. In his transparent past he could still see a sun-browned oval, crooked goal-posts, chain-link cricket nets, and his childhood self running manic after a tennis ball, or a remote controlled car.

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This is a reflective piece on the importance of place in how we frame our lives and our memories