Back to School (365 Ways With Words)

"£5"

"Five quid?"

"Yes."

For a bottle of bloody beer!

On the rooftop bar of Selfridges, I sit and read Bukowski's poetry from the 1940s, awaiting the arrival of someone who will not turn up. The clientele are all posers: nails and slit backs, three-days' growth and last-minute emails – false dilittantes of cuisine and cup who rely more on the respect of a skinny waiter than the touch of a hand.

The security is overwhelming – black-suited and badged, they brook no softness, aspiring to remove the unclean, the unwanted, the infuriating that get under the skin of the average Audemars Piguet purchaser.

So I leave, happily. to cross Oxford Street and find the door of the place where I lived – I and my late mother and late sister. It is smaller; less imposing. Like everything else in this town, except for the wallets. I didn't bring my bike in through this door and down the stairs to the basement. I didn't play tennis with the wall. I didn't try to beat the lift to the top floor, spit from the balcony, watch too much TV than was good for me, or play guess the song with my sister from the number of knocks on the wall that divided us. That was someone else. It had to be.

Back past Marks and Spensers, where mum sometimes worked, opposite Selfridges Food Hall, where she bought chicken hearts for Jenny dog, there is the stretch of Baker Street – the beginning of the route to school. I met Kate Bush outside EMI (she's a shortie, but lovely), like it was destiny, and I wanted to tell her how much I loved her, but I was shy – way too shy. Up further, past the Everyman Cinema, where I saw the great Papillon, it was a street full of travel agencies and swanky carpet salesrooms. Now it ends, without fuss or great notice, on the busy Marylebone Road. Across is Baker Street tube, beside the Planetarium (where my sister worked – she would pass me Mars bars if no one was looking) and the boring Madame Tussauds. Further still is the Royal Academy of Music, the institution that appeared beyond my ken, in terms of skill and attitude.

Upon the Uxbridge-bound Metropolitan up to Harrow, to the great art deco station that functioned as departure point for the beaten-up, seatbelt-free school bus driven by Ted, as kiss central for me and Claudia, meeting point for me and Funmilayo. Then up the hill, that green open space, past the place where I was shot at, one summer night: they were only kids, from the famous school – I heard the airgun pellets whistle past my ears, turned and the cowards fled! Past the point where on a freezing night I held Anne-Marie (and more). Past the romantic graveyard with enormous yew trees. Until at the top there opened up the view across the many-tree'd urban landscape, the one beloved of Byron. His infant daughter is buried somewhere beneath the heavy trees and tendril ivy of St Mary's.

The church was always shut – prone to the vandal's care. Now, it becomes a village much removed from red buses, traffic slowing and urban planning. The School was always pompous, and has lost none of its unabashed cash-caché. It will be there in a thousand years' time. The Purcell School, however, upped and left in the last millenia, for a new site in Bushey, and with it went my connections with this corner of London.

Along the High Street I deviate, and stop at West Street, the home of Dan and Suzannah and John and Miriam, their mum and dad. I lived here. I lived with Dan, my eternal friend. We would go out on Sunday mornings to take photos of the graves in St Mary's, be inspired by old abandoned squash courts in the school, play two-man cricket on the field at the bottom, talk about love and lyrics, talk into the night about all the girls and what it might be like to touch them, climb on walls and scale brickwork, and be alive and glad of it. And I remember the party we had, when parents were gone, and I fell down the stairs, and Gary and I proudly bought a barrel of beer from Fullers, and we ferried it back in the Anglia, and the tortoise in the garden that slowly munched, and the steps where I sat and snogged a drunken Catherine after she'd been sick, and the enjoyment of endless warm summer nights without beer or fags, and of pressing wet newspapers for winter fuel, and sitting around the kitchen table drinking frozen orange juice and being a fully-paid up idiot full of bullshit (but it didn't matter), and painting myself purple, and falling into someone's house because Sam and I were pissed and leaning against their front door, and meeting Dan's magnificent grandfather, and of feeling part of a family of love. For all that, I have nothing but a heart full-to-bursting. And I give it back. Without reservation.

And tonight in The Castle I will meet others from that time. I will not survive. I will die. 30 years is too long – far too long.

Life moves on. We only live in the present. But the trip back to school, a school that is no longer there, gives form to ghosts, a sparkle to eyes and a fullness to the heart. I'll always want to go back to school.