I am sitting on a train from Nottingham to Norwich as I write this. I have spent a few days at home, and now I’m thinking about my grandfather, though I’m not entirely sure why. Perhaps it is because of the old gentleman who asked me which train I was catching when I was stood on the platform, who mentioned in passing how he was stationed in Norwich sixty-five years ago, as an RAF pilot. My grandfather would have been only seven or eight years old then. Not that this man really reminded me of my grandfather, even if I could imagine him as one.

Perhaps too it is because the other day I saw a man, again completely unlike my father’s father, wearing an old jumper like the ones he used to wear; the ones which had that particular thick-woollen smell; the ones which I can still remember the coarse feel of against the skin of my little hands.

Today was also the day I sat on the flowery living-room settee watching Eurosport with my girlfriend and remembered, unexpectedly, that this was the same settee my grandfather lay dying upon in the summer of three years ago. That settee holds better associations too though, like the December we got it, when its fresh-cotton scent mingled with the anticipation of Christmas, or the afternoons when my cousin and I would lie languorously across it, eating sweets and watching children’s television.

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