The suburbs

The bus dropped me off in the suburbs and when I got off, I felt like I was visiting another country. It was a wonder the driver didn’t ask to see my passport when I boarded and put my exact change in the hopper. It was strange to be on a bus again, it made me realise how rarely I take them these days. The free coach from the station to my office doesn’t count, that’s a different experience altogether, always full of people you know and have at least something in common with. Buses aren't quite like that - half the fun is that mixture of people you see every day and new people whose paths cross yours only now and again. To the regulars on that bus that day, that meant people like me.

And yet I was suddenly reminded of all those years on the bus - different numbers, routes and stages in my life. The 65 from the Brecon Road shops into town in 1996, living at home with my mum and my brother and working in Reading for the first time. Trips to the supermarket en masse on a Friday, totting up who owed what on the weekly shop in tiny columns down the left and right margins of the Waitrose receipt. The horrors of the number 17 from that miserable house on Talfourd Avenue in 1999 where everybody but me took drugs all the time. I remember the windows steaming up that winter and the breath of all the shivering passengers forming in thick clouds like cotton wool in the air. You could have reached out and torn it into balls. The number 20 from the university in 2002, living with someone I didn’t much like in an area where I was constantly reminded of the student I still wished I was, gliding down the long graceful tree-lined hill that was Kendrick Road, taking me into town at nights so I could drink with friends and pretend I didn’t have to go home at the end.

Just like Jason Bourne, even after he loses his memory, can’t help but scan a room for exits and suspicious strangers, my knowledge of buses is still the same. Back then, it was all about women; I actually got several dates on buses, back in the days when women were far more desperate and the internet had not yet taken hold of everyone. I always used to find a seat where I could look at someone attractive, either straight on or (for the advanced practitioner) by checking out the reflection in the window. Old habits die hard; I found a seat near the back with a good view of the only woman on the bus who looked like a human. Of course, she was easily ten years younger than me. Old habits, like old clothes, can become embarrassing.

When the bus coasted along the long road that bisects the suburbs, past the big unattractive supermarket, past the police station, it reached a stage where I could hear the percussive sweep of the top deck pushing the branches of trees aside. I hadn’t heard that sound in years, and I’d forgotten how calming it could be. The smallest leaf made its way in through an open window and landed on my shoulder. I didn’t want to brush it off.

Twenty minutes early to see the dentist, I had nothing better to do than to go exploring. The sunshine was vast and unhesitant, baking the streets and casting every building in the most flattering of lights. If the suburbs were ever going to be beautiful, it would be on a day like today. They still weren’t beautiful, though; every house looked exactly the same, every unfashionable UPVC window or dark wood door-frame probably had the same widescreen television, Ikea Billy bookcases and dining table behind it. I remember when this suburb was built it was the largest housing development in Europe. We used to tell that fact to visiting relatives as if it was something to be proud of (of course, back then we lived in the suburbs ourselves).

I was shocked by how quiet it was - school would surely have finished and yet there seemed to be nobody around. The occasional child would go past on a bike, heading for the cycle path that presumably went to the signposted BMX park. Even the reference to a BMX seemed dated, but that might just have been because I remembered them the first time around. Suddenly I felt very old.

The bus shelter was deserted, although someone had scratched an obscenity into it in the glass, presumably someone less enamoured with the facilities for local cyclists. Everything seemed green yet characterless, as if this place only really existed at night. Next to the shelter was a notice board advertising the usual sad mixture of events that passes for community life in places like this - raffles, church events, amateur dramatics performances, tribute bands at the community centre. I looked long enough to realise that the majority of the notices were out of date, which somehow seemed fitting.

My dentist is in a parade of shops - I suppose that’s what we had, before malls came along, parades or shopping precincts. When I grew up in the suburbs, going to the shopping precinct was the major event of Saturday, and the shops there were important. Beatties, the only games shop, where I could order Dungeons and Dragons books and lead figures that I would half-heartedly try and paint in the garage, all fingers and thumbs and white spirit. Milwards, the shoe shop that, every year without fail, supplied me with an increasingly clownish pair of huge black sensible shoes for the school year ahead. Hong Kong Garden, the Chinese takeaway we went to for special occasions on Friday nights, serving fish, chips, acrid brown curry sauce for the rest of my family and an apocalyptic orange sweet and sour sauce for me, with huge chunks of pineapple floating in it. The video shop, our main means of escape from the suburbs (the multiplex wasn’t to arrive for years).

This parade, though, was a far more threadbare collection of establishments. A couple of almost stereotypical estate agents, with spiky haired spivs in cheap shirts swivelling idly in their chairs waiting for the day to end, collapsing under the weight of their immense tie knots. A gym called “Curves”, clearly hedging its bets in a way I didn’t know whether to find shrewd or endearing. “Caffe Med”, an Italian restaurant which looked a lot like a leisure centre with a menu in the window full of spelling mistakes. I spent a couple of minutes considering how frayed squid would actually taste.

The shops were even more forlorn. The chemist had a slogan saying We care! in a tacky cursive script, and as I took a photo of it the woman behind the counter scowled out of the window at me. “Mike’s Waterfront Warehouse” was long closed down, probably on the basis that it was nowhere near water of any kind. “Booze Bargain” threatened exactly that, though you could tell from the outside that it just meant cheap booze, which was hardly the same thing. The only other shops seemed to be trading on their inability to spell; “Pet Fayre”, “By-Wise”. As I slouched around, taking it all in, a couple of schoolkids wandered past. The uniforms said they must be around fourteen, the hair and makeup suggested they were in their early twenties and from the look they gave me, I might as well have been the wrong side of fifty. If I’d asked them to take me to their leader, what would have happened?

I’ve never been so pleased to walk into a dentist’s waiting room in my life.

On the way home, intact and undrilled, I sat at the front and pretended to drive the bus. I was too old for eyeing up women, and there were no women on the bus anyway. Besides, you are never too old to enjoy driving the bus. I watched out the front as the roads slipped by, an identikit maze of houses, cul-de-sacs named after cars, or local dignitaries, or other towns somewhere. The bus went past Sellafield Way, a clear sign that a local authority had run out of ideas. And slowly, the streets got less leafy, the driveways less long and the off-road parking less plentiful, and the world started to look like the world I knew. But I was still thinking about the suburbs.

Because the truth is that for many years of my life, I lived somewhere like that and I looked around me and thought This is enough. There was a park to walk the dog in, and a hill to go down in a sledge, and a video shop if you wanted to be somewhere else, and fried food covered in orange sauce on Friday nights. And there was a back garden, and a barbecue, and a garage with a lawnmower in it, and a driveway lined with lavender bushes. And there were only three pubs, and one of them involved a walk across the park and along the lake, and the other was right on the edge of town. And there weren’t restaurants, because we didn’t eat out back then, there was the pub at the edge of town and the Indian takeaway and that was all. And that was enough.

I don’t know when it stopped being enough. I don’t know what enough even means any more. I can go out whenever I like, do whatever I want, eat wherever I fancy. The world has changed so completely that, for me at least, the suburbs are like a living museum of how things used to be. It’s as odd for me to think people still live that way as it would be if you took me to Eastern Europe, or an Amish village.

On the bus home, I thought about the suburbs and I wondered why I didn’t feel sad. And I wondered why I did.

The unlucky ones

When the phone goes off early in the morning at weekends I always know it’s my mother-in-law. Nobody else rings us on the landline, or not much anyway. More to the point, anybody else would realise that nine a.m. is an unacceptable time to receive telephone calls. The first time it happened I was convinced that there must have been an emergency, that we would be throwing on our clothes and rushing to an Oxfordshire hospital, but I soon realised that we just had different ideas about these things. Similarly, if you know what’s good for you, you don’t ring her when Coronation Street is on. Those have been the rules for far, far longer than I have been on the scene: it’s the only bit of the television schedules I know with any degree of certainty.

They talk on the phone a lot, more and more these days, and it’s always a cheerful chatter, often about nothing much. Sometimes Rose rings to get things off her chest, and I see Kelly curled up on the sofa moving the conversation along with a volley of quick, gentle syllables, a “right” here or an “uh huh” there. On the very rare occasion she’ll say “mum, you’ve told me that before”, but never with any frustration. It’s just nice to hear the voice of someone you care about, even if they say what you know they’re going to say. Sometimes knowing what they’re going to say is part of the comfort.

The phone calls can be for the strangest reasons – to ask Kelly whether she can pick something up from the shops, for consumer advice, for tips about the computer Rose now almost knows how to use, or just to say tell her to change the channel because there’s something on television Rose wants Kelly to see. The curious network that holds my in-laws together seems to work like that; many’s the time that Kelly’s phone has pinged with a text from her sister Heidi. “Put Radio 2 on! Put Radio 2 on now!” it will say, and Kelly will, and the soundtrack of their past will seep from the speakers into the kitchen like the incense of nostalgia.

My mother in law rings on Saturday morning and when I pick up the phone the first thing she says, apart from “It’s only me” (she always says “it’s only me”, even though it’s a special occasion for Kelly every time she calls) is “I didn’t wake you up, did I?” That counts as progress, I suppose. This call is to finalise Kelly’s visit – she is staying overnight and taking her to hospital the next morning for an MRI scan. I sit up in bed tapping on my phone and waiting for my tea to cool down, half listening to the back and forward of the two most organised members of a family which is not good at making plans, trying to do exactly that. It happens every time but that’s part of the comfort for me, too.

At the end, Kelly passes the phone back to me. “She wants to talk to you” she says. So we chatter away about my recent visit to the specialist, the latest in a long line of doctors to declare me beyond the help of conventional medicine. This one was private, which only really seemed to mean that the diagnosis was preceded by a wait in a nicer room and delivered across a more attractive desk. As so often, I found myself considered well enough not to require treatment, even if I was not well enough to find that helpful. “There are some experimental methods used in other parts of the country.” he’d said cheerfully. “But there’s no evidence that they work.” I hadn’t minded that so much; experimental and medicine, in my book at least, are not words that belong in the same sentence. At the end there was an embarrassing moment of expectant silence. I was waiting for him to come up with something else, he was waiting for me to thank him and tell him that I felt reassured. I can’t imagine he would have been anywhere near as disappointed as me.

I don’t tell Rose all of that, I don’t want to burden her with her MRI on the horizon, so instead I say “They don’t really know what to do. I could have the tests again and see if they’re different this time.”

“At least it’s nothing serious.”

“Well, I suppose so. Don’t worry about the MRI by the way, I had one last year and they’re nothing to be scared of. You just have to lie still and try and forget about the noise.”

“I don’t understand it. I was never ill, not for the last thirteen years, and now it’s all come along at once.”

I smile, because she’s not alone; I have exactly the same problem. We’re the unlucky ones where it’s one thing after another, and they’re always things – my RSI for example, or her tinnitus – that are the very edge of medical science, things nobody understands, things that just “go away” or that you’re supposed to learn to ignore. (“You’re a special case, aren’t you?” Kelly had said as we drove away from the hospital. If only it was the right kind of special). If you go to a doctor with a tangible problem with an obvious cause that they know how to fix, they’ll fix it. They may tell you off about your lifestyle first, but then they’ll fix it. But for the people like Rose and me, at the fuzzy edge of the graph where there are no straight lines and nothing makes sense, they don’t want to know. They don’t even consider us a challenge. Medicine is so clearly the creation of men.

”I know exactly what you mean, Rose.”

“I take so many pills now it’s a wonder I don’t rattle. There’s the ones for my dizziness.”

That’s another problem Rose has that they didn’t know how to fix. It’s a problem I used to have that they didn’t know how to fix either. I briefly remember the awful sensation of being at the middle of a giant turntable, looking at the computer screen and being unable to work out why it wasn’t moving the way it felt like it was. Perhaps I should offer her the rest of the tablets in the cupboard in the bathroom.

“I used to take those too.”

“And then there’s the ones for my cholesterol.”

“Yes, I’m on those as well, every night.”

We race through the contents of our medicine cabinets playing snap, me saying a mixture of “Yes, I take those”, “I tried them, they didn’t work” and “You should stay on those as long as you want”. Kelly looks on and smiles because bonding is bonding, even if you’re bonding through adversity. When we have finished comparing repeat prescriptions, I hand the phone back so that Kelly can administer the Love you, bye! that always marks the end of a phone call from Rose.

”What are you smiling at?” I ask her.

“You two. You’re sweet when you talk about your ailments.”

Later that morning, I throw my clothes on head out for my acupuncture appointment, another experimental treatment a specialist suggested to me when he ran out of ideas. Rushing through the leafy streets I pass the Polish church looking splendid in what little sunlight has forced its way through the clouds, if maybe a little too clean and new. The weather is confused; hot and muggy yet not at all bright, as if it hasn’t decided what it wants to be. I can identify with that.

I reach the main road, lined with grand houses. At the top of it, the church and the funeral director sit on opposite sides of the junction, seemingly in cahoots. The sun chooses to come out at this point and ribbons of floaters dance in front of my eyes; they are always there, unless I am looking at something important. Apparently they will eventually go away or I will stop noticing them - failing that I am told there are some experimental methods I might want to consider. I am just about to cross when I am brought to a sudden stop. In front of me an ambulance hurtles past, a dayglo streak, wailing sirens cutting through the thickness in the air. I watch it for a second, on its way to somebody with real problems.

The shops

Blogs are like shops.

At the heart of it, that’s what we all are; a virtual nation of shopkeepers. We carefully choose what to put in the windows and what to place on the shelves, the best of us, the bits that we want everybody to see. The rest, what’s left, the things we aren’t proud of or stock we know we couldn’t shift is stuck out the back, out of view. Sometimes, when you come in, we may have made a mistake and left that door ajar so you can make something out that we’d rather you hadn’t seen, but never for very long.

And once we’ve got shelves and cupboards full of pieces of us, we all stand nervously behind our counters and we wait for something to happen. We look out of the window at the world going past, hoping that people will come in and like what we have put out on display. The busy days are the best days in the world, with people milling around, rubbing shoulders, talking to us and talking to one another. The slow days are the most horrendous torment. We know people are out there, and we don’t understand why they’re not opening the door and making that bell ring.

Some of us take to the streets, stopping at other places, handing out flyers everywhere we can find people who might like our wares. Some people practically dust off a megaphone, but we can all hear them coming and smell the desperation. Some of us stay indoors, confident that our time will come. And some of us advertise. Some people say they really don’t care and it’s just a bit of fun, but they are the lucky ones - dilettantes, probably doing it as a hobby. They’re not even full time, most of them.

Blogs are like shops. But the generalisation ends there, because there are as many different kinds of blogs as there are kinds of shops, if not more. They sell everything. I mean, everything. There are people dealing in music, films or art. You can see beautiful photographers, great musicians, wonderful chefs and people with an instinctive eye for fashion. Then there are people selling you a crisp, bright vision of the future or carefully, painstakingly recreating and packaging the past. You can learn something new about your neighbourhood, or visit somewhere you have never seen. You can find whatever you want.

It’s not just about what they sell, but what kind of wares they sell. You can find beautiful artisans, crafting small limited-edition pieces. Every one is a gorgeous miniature, a glimpse of something important. Or you can find shops where the goods are churned out on an assembly line, each one almost identical to the last one and the next one. They will fall apart in days, but they’re so easy to make that it hardly matters. But then there are big shops and small shops, too. You get the huge faceless franchises and chains where everything looks the same. They are bafflingly popular, with hundreds of people milling around, but every time you leave you find you’ve taken nothing away with you. And then there are the small friendly places where they seem instinctively to know what you need. Why don’t I come here more often? you think. They remember me, they know me.

If blogs are like shops then what they sell are brands, and some of these are more successful than others. Some are a particular type of shop - we’ve all been in them - where everything is too perfect. The way it’s arranged is like art, all precise lines, but everything is sterile. Maybe you are greeted as you go in, in that officious way that makes you feel awkward about looking around. You feel terrified of touching anything, and so nothing touches you. And then there are the places where you know you belong the moment you go in. But we have a complicated relationship with brands; some of them reflect the person you wish you could be, some highlight the person you really are. That is not always the good thing we wish it was.

The outsides are like shops too - some are beautiful but too perfect, some look dated, some have a comfortable, classic feel. Many are crying out for a facelift. There are some where all the signage is in a font that sends you running for the door. And of course the golden rule applies to blogs and shops - if the outside is blacked up, you’re unlikely to find much you want inside. Sex blogs are like sex shops - you have to prove you are over eighteen before you go in, but once you’re there you wonder why you bothered. You are surrounded by people who either never have sex or badly need to get laid, because everybody who does is at home doing it. They have no need of such things.

I wonder what kind of shop this is. It’s been two years and I still don’t know. The stock changes a little less frequently than it used to, and you might feel like you’ve seen it all before. The opening hours can be unpredictable, and some days my patter isn’t what it was. I can be a bear with a sore head, some days. But I still love it. I love that feeling when I have new stock in, that sense of anticipation when I see it perfect on the shelf. I like that moment when it’s all laid out and I can survey my work and wait for the first customer to come in. Because when it’s all there, as yet unperused, it’s perfect. It’s my favourite thing I’ve ever made, and I know you’re going to love it - or at least I want to think you will.

If you don’t like it, that’s okay. Because the other thing about shops is that they form areas and districts, little enclaves. And if you don’t find something you want at my place, you just need to try slightly further afield. Look at the sidestreets on my sidebar, and the streets beyond that. I’m proud to be in a virtual city of people who love what they do, and make terrific stuff. Don’t just stand here being disappointed by me: go exploring! You are bound to see something you’ll like.

The saddest thing, I always find, is going past the shops that have closed down.

We all start these enterprises with the best of intentions, of giving people something they might want, but not everybody makes a go of it. Sometimes there is a sign on the door. “I’m off.” it might say. “I’ve had fun, but enough is enough. Keep in touch.” And there will be some responses, and you’ll read them and think All those years, and it amounts to that? What will they do now? But the ones that get to me are the ones where they just stop - no goodbye note, no forwarding address, no future plans. These are derelict - sad monuments to a life that changed direction when we weren’t looking. I wander by every now and again, just to see if they’ve reopened, renovated, relaunched, but it never happens. They are boarded up, and all the while graffiti is appearing on the outside. Whole swathes of our virtual world are like this, sad and unloved, with broken windows, shutters down and doors locked and bolted forever. And sometimes, just sometimes, when I see those empty shells I think I liked that place, I wish I’d been there more often. And now I never will again.

If I think about it too much, it would make me sad. But every time one closes another two open - there is always somebody willing to give this a try, though it’s not a lifestyle for everybody. You are always on duty, always wondering about footfall, or rotating your stock, or deciding what to try next. Sometimes there are things on order for people, special requests or new visitors to impress. Besides, I can’t afford to get downcast, because I have work to do. I have new stuff going in tonight, and it has to be just perfect. I think it’s almost ready, and I can see in my mind how it’s going to look. I hope people like it.

Counting

I’ve noticed recently that all the bus drivers have a different method, when they count us.

The dour-faced one at the start of the day has a handheld clicker which he presses as every head bobs past and every body descends from the step on to the pavement outside our reception. The number on the side of the clicker clocks up, the sound like a cricket, an incongruous echo of warmer climes amid the beige of the office blocks that seem to have fallen on to the landscape at random, clustered round the grotty junctions like concerned residents gawping at an accident.

At home time, it is the little Eastern European who says “thank you” without enthusiasm in a thick accent when I tell him to have a good evening, every evening without fail. I mean it, he doesn’t, and if he carries on like this I will stop. He has a clipboard on his lap and the paper fills up with five-bar gates as he tallies each of our escapes. Every line corresponds to one meal, one front door, one set of evening plans, one cocktail of disappointments and frustrations. Usually, I am the adjacent line to Mikey, or to Phil, united on a page if not in any other way. On Fridays the lines are reassembled in the pub - or would be, if anyone was doing a roll call there.

Today it was the grumpy man who resembles a Toby jug. As we all trooped past him I saw him counting on his fingers, repeating the running total to himself out loud, almost under his breath. I thought how easy it would be to distract him – to talk loudly on the phone at the top of the steps or call out random numbers and throw him off so he had to start again and could never finish. I was tempted to, but then I thought some more.

Because the thing is that none of us getting off that bus were counting the things that matter. Granted, we knew how many days were left until the weekend, or how many more rides there were until that first drink on a Friday afternoon, that next long weekend or long-awaited holiday. But I don’t think many of us had stopped to think about how many times we’d made this journey, or how many more times we would, or whether there were better things we should have been doing all this time.

We did what we always did as if we were sleepwalking - which some mornings we probably are - and you can’t complain if, while you are sleepwalking, you get reduced to a line on a page, a finger in the air or a revolving number on a handheld device. So I didn’t interrupt him because I appreciated the irony. He was counting us, and we were acting as if we didn’t count.

Hugh

In my worst nightmares, I am like Hugh from work.

Hugh has been promoted twice in the time I've known him, but he still wears the same clothes as when we first met: mustard coloured pullovers, polo necks, moleskin trousers. He seems to pick his clothes purely on their ability to trap and hold the dandruff that drifts, in slow motion as if in a snowglobe, from his greasy dark hair. It is beginning to go grey.

He never seems to clean his clothes either. We spot an odd stain on a moleskin jacket, and track it over many, many weeks. It does not disappear, and we are disgusted by that but not surprised. We speculate about what it is; the charitable guesses involve food, or baby drool, the less charitable ones don’t bear repetition. Initially, we think he doesn't own a suit but we are proved wrong one day when he turns up in one for an important meeting. It looks as if it’s a lightweight polyester blend and it probably cost less than my cufflinks, though he earns considerably more than I do. Ironically it may well be machine washable, though he will never find out.

His chair smells; it never takes too long for people to notice. When he’s in the office, the person at the next desk starts to complain within fifteen minutes.

When he talks about his wife he never says her name, it’s always “the wife” and when he talks about his child it’s always “the baby”. You could be forgiven for thinking that he has forgotten his child’s name. It all sounds functional and efficient, as if their courtship was a merger or an acquisition. There isn’t even the slightest hint that there might be a life for him outside this network of meeting rooms and corridors, organisational charts and project plans.

We all assumed he was happy but then at one Christmas party he told one of us that he wasn’t, in a way that makes the listener feel uncomfortable. It's a secret that should never have come out of the box, a box we didn't even know he had. Now we all know, and he doesn’t know that, and everything has an extra dimension which is hidden to him. It makes him make more sense to us, it makes everything more sad.

He seems boyish, he has an almost endless desire to please and that puppy-doggish quality is most obvious at lunch. He is a messy eater. There is always something caught in the corner of his rubbery bottom lip. I have a feeling he eats with his mouth open, though I try my best to look away.

He likes to hold court when we sit round the table. He will talk about something that was on television the night before, or something in the news, and he has some jokes prepared on the topic of the day. It feels mechanical, as if he’s learned it from a book on how to relate to people. You can hear the grinding of the gears, or you would if he stopped talking long enough.

Perhaps the most painful thing is when he regales us with his impersonations. He can impersonate former bosses, former colleagues, famous people. Every lunchtime he finds a way to bring them into the conversation and it doesn’t matter whether it's relevant to what we're talking about, because he’ll showcase his skills none the less. His public expects it, and he can’t disappoint them. And because we can’t disappoint him either, we all laugh - not because we love his impersonations, but because he thinks we do. We are also doing an impersonation, but he doesn’t realise that.

It must be terrible to be Hugh. He has no idea that none of us like him.

Stopping writing

I stopped being a writer during my holiday in Greece. It’s harder to do than you might think.

I used to think that being a writer was all about writing, simple as that: I write, therefore I am a writer. Provided, of course, that you’ve also fought and won the battle with yourself which makes you comfortable with describing yourself as a writer, but let’s not talk about that now. No, it’s all about putting in the hours physically writing - the “sit at a typewriter and bleed” school of thought popular with so many who are bleeding useless. It’s no surprise, I suppose, that I thought that way too, back before I started writing myself.

What I didn’t learn until much later on is that writing is just as much about what you do when you aren’t scratching at a notepad or scratching your head in front of a blank screen, if not more so. It’s also about how you look at the world, what you notice and how you try and connect it up to something, anything, everything else. It’s about having a sticky mind; the kind that images and ideas snag on to and can’t be shaken from.

If you start to look at the world like that, and think that way, the world is a very different place. It can be exhausting, hyperactive. Painful too, sometimes: every encounter, every conversation, every passing stranger gets appraised against the constant background noise of questions. What do I think of that? What do I really think? Can I use this? How will I describe it? When your attempts to live in the present are hijacked by thoughts of how you might package up events in the future, it’s a hard carousel to step off. So, for a week in Greece, I tried to give it up. I put down my pen, and I picked up my camera instead. I read words by other people, rather than turning over in my mind how I was going to choose my own. I lay on a sun lounger, only slightly uncomfortable on several levels, wrestling with the sort of thick, crowd-pleasing paperback I would never have considered at home. If you saw me in passing, you might have been fooled into thinking that I fitted in.

It was a partial success. What it means is that my memories of Parga - a beautiful, quiet, well-mannered harbour town - are a jumble of disjointed images, photographs rather than paragraphs. Lemons on the tree by the dusty roadside, seemingly the size of footballs. A field of long grass filled with abandoned pedaloes, once bright primary colours now faded and forlorn, haunted by the fun people stopped having in them. The fractal coil of grilled octopus on a plate, the slightly blackened outside giving way to the firm white core. The crackling dance of fireflies, seen through a wire fence on a dark walk home.

There are dozens more. The rain - on the solitary afternoon when it rained - pricking the glassy surface of the sea like goose pimples, as we all cowered under umbrellas which were meant for a different, happier purpose. The obscenely fat woman on an adjacent lounger, her lower back shaped like a fougasse, lifting a fold and picking something unmentionable out of it. The cocktail swizzle sticks at the Blue Bar - a naked nymph for me, a Greek god for Kelly, in brutally vivid colours. But when I think of all these things, there seems to be nothing to connect them and join up all the dots. The writer in me, the me that was missing, would have been able to do it, but I left him at home.

I say it was a partial success because one image snagged on my mind and I couldn’t shake it off, that of the woman on the steps.

We would see her as we climbed up the perilous road that took you from the glittering lights of the harbour to the castle that was the best place to view it from. There was a chair outside every house on that road, and each would be occupied come nightfall by a local taking in the evening air and watching the parade of out of breath tourists heading for the summit. I never worked out whether they liked or resented us. As you went past you could see, through open front doors, real life going on in the living rooms beyond; a family eating round a table, a man in a vest hunched over a bowl of something, bathed in the light of a television transmitting something incomprehensible. And halfway up the hill was the old woman in black.

She was there every night, and although it’s hard to describe her properly I suppose the right word might be grotesque. She looked hunched, for instance, though I never saw her standing up. She was always alone, and her door was closed so I had no idea whether there was any company for her beyond it or whether her days of company were far behind her. Maybe it was the latter, because in all the nights we walked past her I never saw her with a friend or caught her speaking to the others outside. I couldn’t have even guessed at her age, but there were plenty of lines on her face and hundreds of memories traced there. But what really made her hard to look at was the rug of thick grey hairs on her chin. I suppose I would call it a beard, though I would stop short of calling her bearded. For some reason, that seemed to be an important distinction.

The other thing was her eyes. They were cold, clear and mournful, and she peered at you as you went past in a way that wasn’t pleasant. I had a feeling that if I looked in those eyes for long enough I might have understood all her sadness and all her losses, and I didn’t want that. But when you climb up a steep set of steps and go past a woman with a beard and the saddest eyes you have seen, it’s difficult to know where to look instead.

On the first night, Kelly and I both seized the nettle, saying kalispera to her. She said it back, but I couldn’t decipher her expression; it could have been amusement, bemusement or the complete absence of understanding. There was something about her that made me feel uncomfortable, and I hoped that she wouldn’t be there the following night - but she was, of course, and we had to walk in front of her unnerving gaze again. It was impossible even to tell whether she recognised us, but there was a silent nod on the evenings when either of us greeted her.

Greece seems to specialise in mournful widows, because we saw a lot of them during our week in Parga - big, solid, black-clad woman, usually alone but sometimes in pairs, always looking as if they were waiting for their lives to end. Being just the right side of middle age, walking side by side with a woman who makes me feel like my life has only just started, they were a side of the coin I didn’t want to see. The woman on the steps seemed to be the embodiment of that; I hated seeing her, but I was ashamed of my reaction, too. On our final night I was relieved, as we went down the steps to the waterfront, full from dinner, to see that her chair was empty.

Out on the harbour, the night was still warm. Every restaurant was showing the football, tourists and locals angling their seats round the tables so they had a good view of a wide screen, united by the sport which succeeded where Esperanto had failed. There were cushions on the harbour wall and the teenagers sat there drinking and smoking and chatting in a buzz of syllables I couldn’t understand. The girls - all huge hair, makeup and cigarettes - were dressed like hookers, with their arms round what I suppose were their latest boyfriends. Their eyes didn’t hold even the slightest flicker of doubt or unhappiness.

As we walked past them, I thought about how these things really work. They seemed so impossibly young, and I wondered whether one day they would turn into widows on steps somewhere, or whether that generation had escaped that cycle and would turn into something different. At that age, nobody would have been able to explain half of this stuff to me, because I was so convinced that I already understood everything. I thought about how the thirty-seven year old me might seem to the me of twenty-one years ago, and I found I had more in common with the woman on the steps than I wanted to admit. So I thought for a second about what I had turned into, and what I might turn into one day, and then I stopped myself and it was time to go. But in the back of my mind, if I'm honest, I was also thinking about writing this.