The Geography of a Life.

I have lived in two cities.

This is not particularly impressive.

There are people who have crossed oceans, continents and borders. My mother has travelled more of the world than I have.

I have managed Dundee to Edinburgh, a journey ScotRail can complete in approximately an hour and twenty minutes, provided nobody has had the audacity to put leaves on the track.

But I think saying I have lived in two cities is inaccurate.

I have lived in hundreds of places.

Most of them don’t have addresses.

My Childhood Bedroom

My childhood bedroom at my mum’s house was the first place that was completely mine.

There were posters on the walls and pictures I had drawn in art class. Things I had made before I knew whether they were good. Things I liked before I knew whether they were cool or not.

Children are quite good at interior design in that way.

They put something on a wall because they love it.

Then you become a teenager and suddenly your bedroom becomes an advertisement for the person you would like other people to believe you are.

I don’t remember when that happened.

I don’t remember the last night I slept in that bedroom while still considering it simply my bedroom.

There are lots of lasts like that.

You rarely know when you’re having them.

My Granny’s Flat, West End, Dundee

I learned how to use the potty in my granny’s flat.

Eighteen years later, I went there on my birthday and sat two metres away from her.

It was 2020.

I was now legally allowed to buy alcohol but temporarily prohibited from hugging my granny.

Growing up is strange.

For much of my life, her flat was one of the few places where my entire family seemed to exist at once.

People arrived.

People left.

Someone was always telling a story I’d already heard.

The family grew.

I grew.

And the flat remained where it was.

There should probably be a plaque outside.

HUGH LEARNED TO SHIT IN A TOILET HERE.

Perhaps Dundee City Council has higher standards for historical significance.

I don’t.

The Dining Table

At my Auntie Deirdre and Uncle Michael’s house, I discovered that my mother had once been a person.

Obviously, I understood biologically that she had existed before me.

I had seen photographs.

But mothers arrive in your childhood fully formed. You don’t imagine them at university. You don’t imagine them travelling. You certainly don’t imagine them making questionable decisions.

They’re just Mum.

Around that dining table I heard stories about a woman who shared my mother’s name but whom I had never met.

She travelled.

She went to university.

She had stories.

And I listened to adults talk to each other like they actually liked each other.

They laughed.

They interrupted each other.

They remembered things differently.

Perhaps that table was one of the first places I understood that adulthood wasn’t a destination where everybody suddenly became serious.

Adults were just people who had been alive longer.

This was both reassuring and, frankly, concerning.

Fairfield Sports Club

At fifteen or sixteen, I drank pints of Sourz and smoked approximately eight hundred cigarettes.

I thought this was adulthood.

In fairness, I had correctly identified several of its least impressive features.

There is a peculiar geography to being a teenager.

The world is tiny.

A sports club can feel like Ibiza.

A park can feel like somewhere your parents could never possibly find you.

The distance between home and wherever your friends are drinking feels like an international border.

We were desperate to get older.

So we drank things that tasted like radioactive confectionery and stood outside smoking cigarettes while pretending we weren’t cold.

I don’t know why I was in such a hurry.

The Smoking Area

Years later, in student halls in Edinburgh, I started going downstairs every night for a doobie.

There I got to know two people who would become my best friends.

I did not know this at the time.

This is the inconvenience of important moments.

They refuse to announce themselves.

There was no music swelling in the background. Nobody turned to me and said:

You should probably pay attention, Hugh. These two are going to matter.

We were just getting stoned.

I wonder how many people who changed my life first appeared to me as someone who happened to be standing nearby.

Years later, I would name the thing I write after places like that.

I try not to think too hard about this because it starts sounding like fate and I become unbearable.

Magdalene Green

My ex and I had our first kiss on Magdalene Green.

I could show you where.

That’s strange.

Love is supposed to be abstract, but mine had coordinates.

You could stand approximately where something began that would eventually rearrange enormous parts of my emotional life.

And you’d just be standing on some grass in Dundee.

There might be a dog shitting nearby.

This feels unfair.

Surely the council could have preserved the area.

HUGH HAD HIS FIRST KISS WITH SOMEONE HE WOULD LATER LOVE HERE. PLEASE KEEP OFF THE GRASS.

Instead, people continue walking across it with absolutely no respect for my personal history.

Which is probably healthy.

The Earl of Marchmont

There was a period when my life felt like it was going up in flames.

And there was a pub.

The Earl of Marchmont didn’t fix anything.

That’s important.

My problems remained exactly where I’d left them when I walked back outside.

But inside were my three flatmates.

There were drinks on the table.

Someone was talking shit.

For a couple of hours, I didn’t have to decide what came next.

There are places that change your life.

There are other places that simply give you somewhere to sit while your life is changing.

I think we underestimate the second kind.

Indigo Yard

£5 Cava.

Not every landmark requires an explanation.

Barra

Barra was different because I knew something was ending while I was still inside it.

I was in the water and could physically feel my life changing.

There was a new life waiting for me when I got home, and every beautiful thing we did brought me slightly closer to it.

This should have terrified me.

It did terrify me.

But Barra kept interrupting.

Just as I could feel myself beginning to think too much, we’d pull onto another beach.

Blue water.

White sand.

Nobody around.

For a moment there was nowhere else I needed to be.

Then we’d get back in the car and move again.

Closer.

I don’t know whether places can prepare you to leave them.

Maybe some can.

Here

I am writing this in Edinburgh.

There are about sixty miles between here and the bedroom where I started.

That’s what a map would tell you.

It seems wildly inaccurate.

The actual distance is considerably longer.

Between those two points there are bedrooms, pubs, kitchens, beaches, stockrooms, parks and smoking areas.

There are people I didn’t know existed when I left that bedroom who I now cannot imagine my life without.

There are people I thought would be beside me forever who now live entirely in places I occasionally walk past.

There are buildings containing versions of me that no longer exist.

A fifteen-year-old is still drinking Sourz at Fairfield.

My granny’s flat still contains a little boy learning to use the potty.

Two strangers are still becoming my best friends in a smoking area.

Someone is being kissed for the first time on Magdalene Green.

Someone frightened is sitting in the Earl with his flatmates, laughing despite himself.

Someone is standing in the water on Barra, knowing he is about to become someone else.

At least, that’s where they are in my head.

Maybe that’s why returning somewhere after years away can feel so strange.

You aren’t only returning to a place.

You’re visiting somebody you used to be.

And now I’ve reached the edge of the map.

I don’t know which places come next.

I don’t know which room I’m going to fall in love with.

I don’t know which pub will become our pub.

I don’t know which kitchen I’ll eventually be able to navigate in the dark.

I don’t know place I haven’t even entered yet will that someday become somewhere I desperately miss.

And that’s perhaps the strangest thing about the geography of a life.

You never know you’re making a landmark while you’re standing in it.