13 July 2007 London. Catherine Place.

One cupboard per day is gone through. Ten days of work. Everything is taken out, examined, touched, smelled, remembered. The purpose--the original purpose, before it became a flood of memories--was to put the house on a diet.

The dusty LPs summoned up an era, a place, a person, even an instant in time, like a match struck in the darkness. Little moments, long lost, lived again. Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn recalled rainy, grey days, boarding school in England, youth and vigour, the countryside, broken by stone walls. The names of the schools, those phantasmic incantations, still echo with dread.

That famous song 'I Can't Go For That (No Can Do)' Fiona--marble-white skin, high cheekbones, piercing blue eyes, perfectly straight blonde hair--my first love. During this song we had our 'first look'. We captured each other, sailed through school, navigated the rocks of a long absence. Then we died. In a chapel, by chance, years later, her familiar, curling script blazed from the visitors book like a flame, in letters that seared my heart and made me pace the streets for her in vain.

. . . A big stone, painted in three colours. It held open the oaken door to an enchanted room which produced the happiest memories of childhood.

The room would stream with a white, miraculous light that fell upon everything like a benediction. The big windows had silk curtains that sang out when the wind caught them and carried them aloft. The floor, that blond ocean of parquet, broke into magical crackling at the slightest footfall.

For hours on end, I would wait for the legions of green goblins to issue from the dark crack in the wall, and when they failed me, I sat in the middle of the floor and wept, feeling anguish long before I came of age. The room was everything to me, and it seemed that everything in the world was in it.

As I clean the cupboard, the dust-cloth splits apart on the jag of some forgotten bauble. Should it go? Be thrown away? Its potential, its vast structure of life lost forever? Or might it break free from its moorings and expand into some cherished vision from the past?

My kindergarten lunchbox, that squeaky wicker pannier, joined me when I escaped, squeezing through the iron railing, past the feinting teacher, I chased down the steet, just ahead of the big shoes, which never caught up with me. That day, an angel bore me home, through the traffic, through the twisting streets, right to my door.

Each thing in the cupboard seemed to be posessed by a little dead soul that came back to life, that unpacked its mysteries as it traveled into the light, that cut a luminous window out of the dark, hailed out the past and made it live again.

In the end, everything stayed, the fatness stayed and the diet was forgotten. The LPs returned to their sleeves, the painted rock went back to its corner, and I put the souls to sleep behind the heavy door.

Only the bauble remained untouched, at the front of the cupboard, waiting its turn for another chance to live.