You have to think in a tunnel, in any kind of tunnel. Your legs are moving, blood is pumping through your body, through your brain. You have to think.

I took the long route home from Little One’s via my first flat and Crouch End. I passed the road He used to live down, three years ago now, and duly kept my eyes to the ground. Then I bought some hair dye from Boots, waiting patiently in the queue and smiling serenely as an irate mother with a bad perm screamed at her loose change next to her screaming child.

Through Parkland Walk my mind began to hop from one thought to another - half considered couplets and memories. I thought of Toby, my beloved little black miaowing monster who broke my heart at 17 when he died. I thought of little three legged Hector who broke my sister’s heart when he died several years later. I remembered the voices and dimples of old flames and considered how congenitally incapable I am of maintaining a normal relationship with someone. I wondered which I disliked more - emos or rabidly single-minded feminists. Then I thought about Larkin, wondering if he originally titled This Be The Verse as Original Sin. What ifs and never weres were dangling in front of me like caterpillars from silky threads by the time I snuck across the road into Queen’s Wood.

If the anachronistic Victorian lamppost in Parkland Walk is fantastic, then the route from Priory Gardens is perfect. It really is like something out of Narnia. You turn off this pretty suburban street into A WOOD. It’s just there, a wood of all things behind the houses, so quiet and dark - all damp earth and birdsong. Swinging my little plastic Boots bag about like a kid swings his legs sitting at the end of a pier, I made a conscious effort to lose myself in the trees. Wherever there were people, I’d go in the other direction, if there was a path leading into somewhere dark and overgrown, I’d take it. I found myself walking happily through so many different clearings - little nooks where life was teaming without the clumsy footsteps of people in nylon coats, crunching twigs over toffee coloured earth and getting high off the scent of oak trees.

But I didn’t get lost. I got home quicker than I could have done, hungry to start tapping at the keyboard again. Legs tired from walking, lungs aching from the cigarettes Little One gave me, brain overdosed on the scent of nature, itself having woken up to its own cup of tea and clumsily rolled Golden Virginia.