I’m sat in a room whose floor I have vivid memories of crawling over. I have returned to a house in north west London which I have visited since infancy: a house which my family has owned since the sixties. A lot has changed, of course: my grandparents are no longer with us, and the place has been extended and renovated and redecorated. Yet these rooms have somehow kept the same aura.

Much of my family is here including my Brazilian cousins and their young children. The three kids are about eight or ten, and still fairly uncertain and clinging to their parents. The strange thing is, I remember doing exactly the same thing in these very rooms. Whenever we visited this house every few months during my childhood, I remember feeling similarly uncertain, with the adults all talking together about things I didn’t understand. The strange thing is, I am now one of the adults, talking about complex, boring adult things.

Time is time, unstoppable and relentless. Things will always change. I now walk across a floor I remember crawling on, having come across the city from my own flat on the other side of the city. Yet, somehow, something is the same; something about this house has a timelessness to it. It is still the house where my family comes to meet, to get together and enjoy one another’s company. Entering earlier I came through the same front door which I was once helped through as an infant; and I felt exactly the same feeling of warmth and welcome today that I felt as a child.