From The Archive: You Can't Go Home Again

In November 2021 I was back up St Albans for the first time in years.

‘You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood … back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and of fame … back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting, but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.’

You Can’t Go Home Again, Thomas Wolfe (1940)

My life can roughly be divided into three homes. Fifteen years in London, fifteen years on the south coast, and nineteen years in Hertfordshire, just to the north of London, and elsewhere. Regular readers of this site will be fully aware of my football life here on the south coast, where no team has quite fitted and the internet has made keeping up to date with the teams of my younger years possible in a way that I wouldn’t have imagined possible when I was younger, and I’ve wittered about my formative years in North London on these pages before, too. But what about that other part of my life?