I’m building a bank of special memories
Going back is a strange feeling. Not going back to somewhere that you return to regularly, but going back to a place that holds specific memories for you, memories that, now that considerable time has passed, you’re not sure will hold up when it comes to the new reality.
I know Istanbul fairly well having visited a number of times, most recently and most often over the last 12 years or so. Before my first return visit, however, it had been 20 years since I’d first set foot there in 1983. So I was both excited about going back, and a bit apprehensive that my memories were about to be knocked on the head.
As it turned out I still loved the city and was still able to make my way around with my decades-old map in my head. There were some new modern shops, of course, a few roads were now pedestrianised, and the famous Pera Palace hotel, where Agatha Christie stayed and the place that was once journey’s end for those travelling across Europe by the Orient-Express, had had a considerable facelift.
I was determined, though, to find the hotel I had stayed in originally. I remembered that it was in the Old City, that you walked in a certain direction from the Blue Mosque, then past the Grand Bazaar, and you just kept on going on and on through the Sultanahmet district. It was along there, on a broad pavement awash with people that a young man approached me and tried to sell me sweet-scented perfume back in 1983. Within a minute two armed soldiers appeared beside him and he was given a clear message that it was time to move on.
The hotel, I recalled, was off to the left on a side-street further along from the perfume-seller’s pitch. So, dragging my husband with me (who wasn’t part of my life on my first visit) we set off in search of the hotel. I was just about to give up when I spotted it – it was the building itself that I recognised with its distinctive shallow steps up to the entrance door. ‘That’s it,’ I declared, delighted with myself. ‘That?’ queried my husband. ‘But that’s not a hotel.’
Nor was it anymore. Rather it was some kind of clothes market, the front of the building festooned with racks of replica football shirts, from Barcelona to Man United to the local Istanbul team of Galatasaray.
I was pleased I’d found it but disappointed it was no longer the hotel it had once been. I really wanted to go inside and wander around the lobby where, all those years ago, I had sat every night sipping a Coke (there was no alcohol in the hotel) and watching the Arab world on holidays. With Iraqis and Iranians making up most of the hotel clientele, Istanbul was swamped with them that summer because their favoured destination of once-beautiful Beirut was then a war zone.
The thing about memories of places, though, is that you never really let go of them. Although I stood in front of that Istanbul clothes market that day, I could still picture the original hotel – the interior layout, the clientele, the shish-kebab shop across the road. And while those images haven’t diminished in my mind, I now have new memories of Istanbul, ones that I have formed from visiting in the past decade.
It’s four years and three months since I’ve been to Paris. Not that long, you might think, but it’s a city that my late husband and I visited at least once every year. The last time was in early December 2013, just a few months before the cancer diagnosis that would take him from me in the summer of 2015. I haven’t been back since Gerry’s death. Oh, I’ve booked to go – twice – thinking that I could deal with being alone in the city that he adored. But in the end I couldn’t handle it, simply couldn’t picture myself having coffee outside Brasserie de l’Isle SaintLouis without Gerry. Or sitting in the little square in Place des Vosges without him by my side.
‘I couldn’t do it,’ I told a friend, having failed to turn up, yet again, for a Paris flight. ‘Don’t beat yourself up,’ she said. ‘You’ll go back to Paris, but not for a while, maybe not even for years. When you go again it might be with grandchildren. You’ll go back all right, but it will be a different Paris. You’ll make new memories.’
New memories. Not replacements. Just new memories to mingle with the old. Like in Istanbul. And other places I’ve returned to after a long hiatus.
Like Liverpool this weekend, a city I left in the summer of 1981 having spent six years of my life there. I’ve never been back. But now, as a Christmas present, my sister and my niece are taking me on a trip down Memory Lane.
I can’t wait to roam through Sefton Park again, see if the cinema is still in Aigburth, and have a look at the city’s famous waterfront. The Albert Dock wasn’t even developed when I left.
New memories await. Not better memories. Just new ones.
Maybe I’ll find that, apart from a few things, Liverpool hasn’t really changed at all. I might even have a Nelson Mandela moment. ‘There is nothing,’ he said, ‘like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.’ Indeed. I’ll tell you all about it next week.