Didn’t mean to. I did have to mark an occasion of sorts yesterday, but that was for later. Mid-evening I was driving to a familiar place through a less familiar route and at unfamiliar time.

Also, there were quite a lot of roadworks, including one set of temporary traffic lights that caught me outside what is now a Subway, but was once a bank. Through dusk and red lights, I could just see me going to that bank as a boy. It wasn’t to do any banking, you’re not looking at any kind of fiscally responsible man then or now, but instead it was part of the very best and certainly the most elaborate school trip I got to go on.

No, not part. Whole. That was the entire thing, a geography trip to this bank. It was a trip that in round figures was a stroll, easily contained within a single lesson. But last night, I could again see why we were marched off to it.

For down very low on the bank’s wall, where thirty of us once had to take turns crouching down to see, and where last night I had to sit up a bit to see over a bollard, there is a crow’s foot mark. It’s an Ordnance Survey marker, and it’s to do with establishing a base line in order to measure the height of hills and buildings.

Before I could remember what height I would’ve been back then, traffic moved on now and – perhaps not surprisingly – I was then driving by my old school. We didn’t get on, my school and I, but there is something about it still being there that is practically haunting.

As there was with this. The reason for the new route was that I was required to pick up a fish and chip supper. The chip shop I was directed to turns out to be very proud of the fact that it opened the year I was born. The year is on signs and everything.

So for every minute I have lived, for every thing I have done and thought and said, this chip shop has been a living business, a going concern, and for a moment it felt like it had been expecting me for all these years.

That’s probably not why a woman working there said “Sorry for the wait”.

Much later last night, I marked this occasion that I needed to mark and if I did it without looking back quite as far as school afternoons, still it was a whole bunch of looking back. I did this thing by watching Alan Plater’s “Doggin’ Around”. You can catch that on YouTube if you look in the right corners but – get me – my copy is from the BBC’s own archives. Which doesn’t sound relevant, does sound suspicious, but turned out to be poke-in-the-eye relevant for literally every second of the film.

For the BBC archive’s viewing copies of shows from the 1990s are effectively ROTs, Recordings of Transmissions. You don’t just get the show itself, you get the continuity announcements either end because BBC just recorded the whole output and later chopped it up into the shows. So it’s like you’re back watching on the night.

Except BBC archive viewing copies also have a timecode burnt in. I’m used to that from preview tapes, but this was not a clock showing the running time, it was a clock and a calendar showing exactly when “Doggin’ Around” aired. Precisely.

It was on BBC1 starting at 22:06:30 and on, it says here and throughout the film, the date 16-10-94. Ended 23:36:17.

By chance, I watched it at pretty close to those same times now, 27 years, 4 months and 26 days later. I watched it now on an iPad in my bath and simultaneously, it felt, in 1994 on a Mac in my rented London flat where I appeared to live on pizza bread, waffles and sweetcorn.

At about 23:36:18 on 16-10-94, I know I phoned Alan Plater to say how much I had enjoyed it. Three decades later on 10-3-22, I know I wanted to phone you to say the same thing.

But.

I’m also really not ready to look back in quite so much detail. It seems that the past can be a more lovely place to visit than I’d have thought, but, god, I don’t want to live there.

With or without a timecode.

So let’s you and I consider this as occasions marked and moved on from. It’s time to do something new.