Living among the ghosts

In sleepless nights, I live among the ghosts of the past. There are the ghosts of the person I once was: the happy child playing with my brother on the floor in the living-room on a Sunday morning while my mother cooked a roast dinner; the ardent young man romantically proposing marriage to the wrong woman in a ruined abbey on a small island in the only lake in Scotland; the lonely divorced man striding across the hills of Britain and France; the much wiser man proposing marriage on the Prince of Brittany to the right woman; the head of a happy little family travelling further and further afield, from Cornwall, to France and Spain, Hong Kong, Canada, Australia and New Zealand; the retired senior lecturer, glad to have escaped from commuting each day to the university rat-race. There are also ghosts of places that are lost: the quiet streets of my childhood in Shirley, now packed with traffic and parked cars; the stream where I fished for stickleback, now a culvert in a housing estate; and much later, my daughter playing with a friend making houses from straw bales in a field now covered with houses.

As we get older, the ghosts accumulate, which is why we could not bear to live forever - the ghosts of our past lives drive out any dreams for the future.