Half term.

And we're off. Down the A77, down past Kilmarnock and Ayr, on through Maybole, possibly stopping off in Girvan for some lunch and then down, down, down to the edge of Loch Ryan and on to the ferry.

I'm going home. I still call Northern Ireland that. Even now. Even though I left in 1982 and never really went back. Even though I've spent nearly all my adult life in Scotland.

But travelling to the house you grew up in is always travelling home. Maybe it would be different if my parents had ever moved. But it's not so. My mum has been living in this house since the late 1960s. It's where marks of my childhood remain.

This evening I'll be in my old bedroom surrounded by my old things - things I don't really need or want any more. Clothes I wore when I was 11 years old. Old toys. Action Men and Subbuteo. Comics. Drawers and drawers of old Marvel and DC Comics - if it was published anywhere between 1974 and 1984 I probably have it [1].

Actually, I still kind of like the comics. If J is looking the other way I might sneak some into the car on the journey back.

J's here too. In person and in photographs. Photographs of her back when I first met her, when she was 19 and a half [2], when her hair was curly and she smoked like an obsessive-compulsive train. You can see the ever-present fag in the photographs. Alongside her dog Cash, a dog that scared the urine out of me when I first met it and for many years after, the dog that only started liking me when it got old and a bit doolally.

The room hasn't changed much. New wallpaper, new bedclothes. But the chest of drawers and the wardrobe are the same, aged, much-scuffed bits of wood. Seventies issue. All the posters have gone. I'm trying to think what I had up on the walls when I lived in this room. Some pop images, some comic book stuff (Spider-Man for a while but that would have been in my early teens). Oh and there was a Page 3 poster on the back of the door. I didn't have the wit to take it down before J's first visit and guess whose room she was given? Yes, I was that gauche.

"I was a bit shocked," she says when I remind her. "You told me your mum put it up."

"I told you what?"

"That your mum had stuck it there."

"Did I?" I can't remember now. Either way it doesn't reflect well on me. What was I thinking? What was my mum thinking? Who knows? The past is a foreign country. Maybe that's just as well.

FOOTNOTES

[1] Except the Incredible Hulk. I never liked The Incredible Hulk.

[2] I was only 19. She's always the older woman.