Time travelling (with coffee and buns)

What happens when you go back to the place where it all began

I spent August 1988 here. It changed my life.

Today I’m sitting in the seat I sat in for the best part of a month in the summer of 1988. Not the exact same seat, of course. The bench is different. The decor is different. But the room is broadly the same. And the view is identical. The Bowling Club opposite still looks like it’s been dropped there by mistake, the traffic lights like they’re stuck on red. The woman sitting in the seat is very much not. But here is where she began. I realise now.

Time travelling is such a strange sensation. And the strangest thing about it, if you really think about it, is how rarely we do it. How rarely visiting a place we’ve been before evokes not just memories of who we were then but the spirit of that person. But here, now, there’s no avoiding it.

I first sat here, as I said, in the summer of 1988. Back then, the building on Edinburgh’s Abbey Mount was home to the Mandela Theatre and the Gateway Exchange, a charity offering art therapy to recovering addicts and former offenders set up by “Glasgow gangster turned writer” Jimmy Boyle and his then-wife psychotherapist Sara Trevelyan.