Walking Through a Museum of Painful Ghosts

There are parts of London that still make me feel as if I am walking through a museum of painful ghosts. Given they are areas such as St James, the Law Courts and Bell Yard, avoidance is not usually a problem. However, today as I trudged towards the ITN building to record an interview for Channel 4 News, there was no way of evading Chancery Lance and Grays Inn Road.

Sometimes I wish the huge holes in my mind gifted by old traumas were more complete. Instead of the jumble of three-month gaps, I long for whole years of erasement. The blessing of a decade of oblivion.

Yet memory is not static. Our own inner maps linking emotion to place are constantly being redrawn. I am a different person to the scared, hurt and idiotic man that last walked this way. Each step I take allows me to create new associations. This street can be either a Sunday in 1999 or a Tuesday morning in 2008. I move between worlds; walk the temporal line and make my choices.

I choose to focus on the now. Ignore the cicatrix and relish every fresh moment of life. Light rain on my face. The enticing smell of choux pastry and patisserie cream escaping from a briefly opened door. Arguments I will deploy when staring down the lens.

Later in the day, I make a second journey to 200 Grays Inn Road to pre-record an interview for the ITN evening news. This time my thoughts drift only towards which Victorian gas holder we will use as a backdrop and being back canalside tonight. The prospect of homemade soup is heavenly when you stand behind King’s Cross, battered by wind as the cameraman tries to compose a shot of the elegant industrial skeleton which manages to hide the Post Office Tower.