MEMORY LANE

I had been to Chelmsford before, 25 years ago. It was winter-time, late November, and my employers had chosen me to attend a month-long management course at Danbury Park. I think that they had drawn my name out of a hat. I wasn’t used to being away from home. I was only 33 and had lived a somewhat sheltered life. We all stayed in students’ accommodation, little cell-like rooms in the style of sleeper compartments in the train, albeit slightly less appealing. I spent most lunchtimes walking vigorously around the village. Day by day, preaching the need to my colleagues for improved fitness to counteract the effects of the strong local beer, I attracted more of them so, by the end of the course, a veritable phalanx of us were lumbering around the village, much to the consternation of the locals. Evenings saw us in one of the two pubs in Danbury or more rarely, one of the Chelmsford bars. I watched my first ever pop video in one – ‘Uptown Girl’ by Mr Billy Joel. I seem to recall this consisted of a very small man (Mr Joel) dancing in the maintenance bay of a garage with a tall woman in a white hat. He may or may not have been carrying what the Americans call a wrench but is more popularly known over here as a spanner. I was in the company of one James Sideborn, a man of limited charisma and a spectacularly diminishing chin, whose interests seemed to revolve solely around four-handed whist. We finished the course on the last Thursday at one of the two Danbury bars, the more bucolic one where you were frowned upon if you did not have a sheepdog by your side when you entered the bar. All the pictures on the lounge wall showed people killing defenceless birds and animals in a variety of ways. I drank rather too much ale, which precluded me from receiving my certificate the next morning and, in fact, kept me on the platform of Chelmsford Station until 3 p.m., utterly incapable of climbing aboard the train to Liverpool Street. And now I was back, to attend a meeting. As soon as I stepped off the train, I realised that my memory of the place was absolutely flawed, and I recognised none of it. Bitterly disappointed, I decided upon some lunch. I dropped into a café near the station. I ordered a bowl of soup and a roll, and settled down to eat. ‘I’ll just put some music on,’ said the woman behind the counter and before I had taken a spoonful of oxtail soup, out came the familiar strain of: “Uptown girl/She’s been living in her uptown world/I bet she never had a back street guy/I bet her mama never told her why.” I felt like I’d never been away.