This is still my stuff.

I remember having, as a young child, a red t-shirt with the Coca-cola logo emblazoned upon it in Arabic. I don’t know where I got this t-shirt; maybe an equally small visiting friend left it at our house and I “inherited” it, as there’s no way my Dad would have sanctioned its purchase, unless he really didn’t clock what it was. At any rate it feels like his very lack of realisation was part of the shirt’s attraction to me, making it somehow more mine than all the other oh-so-explicable stuff surrounding us. I loved it, anyway. It’s quite an early memory: I remember wearing it on a warm day in the main hall at my infants’ school, and we moved our house (and hence my school) in December 1978, so at the latest it would have been towards the end of the summer in that year, making me six years old. Thirty years ago. It feels like it could have been earlier, but of course recollections of childhood can be deceptive. I reckon it must be close to every time I’ve seen a tin of Coke with its writing in a language other than English since then that I’ve thought of that t-shirt, or at least my memories associated with it. It's a well-worn mental path for me now, meaning sights like this can evoke easily the excited sensations provoked in an inquisitive child by the possibility of some arcane knowledge to which he and he alone might be privy.

I’ve been meaning to write this down for a while now. I think it was in early October 1989 that I was sent on an errand which involved picking up a box of now–forgotten materials from a printer’s premises somewhere around this area; Tabernacle Street rings a distant bell. Memories fade, memory confounds, and close on twenty years have passed since that atom of happenstance flickered in and out, but I know I have an image of this place, forged by the place it then was, on that sunny autumn day.

I remember the old Tube station — I feel like it was Moorgate — as having an agèd wooden bridge over the tracks, and I remember looking, as I wandered through this maze of biblically–inspired street names, down into still–forsaken gaps in the buildings, gouged presumably by the intrusion of V2s decades earlier.

I remember that pinch in the air, that welcome snip of coolness slicing through the tail of an Indian summer’s breath. I remember the shimmering, thinning quality of the light, borne of our angle to the sun at that autumnal point; and as I remember, the years gone by conspire to spin webs of tangled connections in my mind between that glistening, concrete day in which I lived, and others, similar, but merely conjured from the minds of writers I read as a child. I remember popping in to The Castle Sandwich Bar on my way back to the station to buy a toasted sandwich: ham, cheese and pepperoni, a recent concoction, and by far my favourite at the time.

I remember so clearly how good it was; not just the butter and grease oozing out of the edges of the burnished floury white bread to soak into the bitty texture of the coarse white paper bag as I walked excitedly yet somehow deflatedly back down Paul Street to find my way home and back to the grind of the familiar, but the whole sphere of presence and determination, of an expanding vista of thus far elusive but soon–to–be graspable possibilities opening themselves to me — the thrill of the new, the budding comprehension of the enormity of it all. It felt good; it was good.

I remember the friendly faces in the Castle and the easy, matter–of–fact bonhomie of the people who worked in this oasis, alongside its even–then ageing décor; and I remember, fondly, one of my first solitary tastes of a hitherto completely unknown city.