Phil W. Bayles

Or: How I Learned To Look At Old Haunts Through New Eyes

Have you ever noticed how a place seems smaller the longer you’ve lived there?

The more time you spend walking back and forth among a certain set of streets, the more tame they become; the asphalt under your feet warping and stretching like used chewing gum. Streets that once seemed infinitely long can be walked in the blink of an eye. All the blank bits in the map – the bits that used to contain ominous sketches framed by the words HERE BE DRAGONS – are filled in by corner shops and pharmacies and cafés that do those really nice brownies you like.

I’ve now been through this process twice in the same city.

The first time I came to Sheffield I was 18, and only newly acquainted with strange new notions like Looking After Myself and Acting Like A Functional Adult. I already knew I loved the city – it was why I’d applied to study there in the first place – but the place I found myself in now was not the same place I remembered from the prospectus and the open days. It was like I was playing a game of grandmother’s footsteps. I’d turned around for a second, and now that I was looking back everything had shifted into new and unfamiliar positions.

Luckily, it didn’t take me long to get reacquainted. In a few short weeks I had the run of the campus and most of the buildings once again. I knew the fastest way to get to the train station while lugging a heavy suitcase, the little shortcut to get from the Students’ Union to my favourite coffee shop just off West Street, the easiest (read: least hilly) route home from the little independent cinema. By the end of my Masters, five years later, I had well and truly tamed the Steel City. 

I came back again almost exactly a year ago, after five years living elsewhere, and while I’d like to say it was like I never left that’s not strictly true. As I unfurled my trusty mental map and blew away the cobwebs, I realised to my dismay there were huge swathes of it that still said HERE BE DRAGONS. For one thing, I’m living in a neighbourhood that’s beyond the budget of most students. For another, my priorities have changed. Now know the nicest route to our local Sainsbury’s or the flattest route to take to visit my in-laws, who live just around the corner.

Even though I work at my old alma mater, the pandemic has kept me working at home for the most part. The parts of campus I used to walk through every day now fly by the window as I drive to corners of Sheffield I had no reason to visit during my university days. Last week, however, I found myself walking to campus for a trial day in the office. As I worked my way through the streets, excited to meet all the colleagues who had been confined to my computer for so long, I looked around and realised my feet had brought me to the same path I’d trodden god knows how many times as a fresher heading for the first lecture of the day.

I found myself waiting for that Proustian moment of clarity, the headrush of diving headlong into my youth. But it never came. Instead, like Bilbo Baggins returning to the Shire after his quest, all I could think of was how much I’d changed since I first walked nervously along that road, following the stream of equally-confused looking new starters.

I wonder how 18-year-old me would react if he saw me walking that same street, heading to work, with a wedding ring on my finger and a child on the way? Would he be amazed that I was still here after all this time? Or would he be baffled that I ever chose to leave?