It’s just about forty years since I was a student living in Agard Street in Derby and for some reason this week, I went back there — in Google Maps. I want to say that Google Maps and Google Earth are a metaphor for our modern world, with their unimaginable brilliance in photographing every street in the world being marred only by Google’s unimaginably awful design.

But anyway, for some reason I looked up Agard Street this week and it turns out to be just about the perfect time to have done so. Take a look at what I saw first, please.

Actually what I really saw initially was way up the other end of the street but this was the point where I first recognised my old place. That building in the middle, it’s three small houses glued together and looking at it, I can picture maybe half the rooms inside. I can remember the party where I watched two men I’d never heard of standing in the back yard, drinking lager at the same time they were pissing into the drains. There was something about the flow of liquid in and out, much the same colour at either end, that made me fine with not knowing them.

But memory is faulty and so here’s Google Maps, showing me exactly how it really is. Until you look closer. Now, this is subtle, I don’t know that you’ll be able to spot the tiny difference that you get when you take one single click nearer to those buildings.

Told you, it’s a fine difference.

I’ve cropped in the images to just show you the house — or where the house used to be — but if you looked at this on Google Maps, you’d see that the two images were both taken in July 2022. House is there, house is gone. Same month. You’d have imagined the two shots would be taken seconds apart: this one spot in the whole city is not an obvious place for the map photographers to have packed it in for the day. And it’s not as if there’s a lot on Agard Street to distract them while my old house is demolished.

It’s also not as if I miss it. I can picture maybe five of the people I lived with, but I could name only two.

It is the startling surprise of destroying the place with a single click on Google Maps. It’s also the surprise of realising that this has just happened, that I have by chance chosen to look back only a couple of weeks after this part of my past was erased.

The entire world is just a click away, just a scroll away and at most just a desperate search for the right Google button away, too. The entire world is on the screen yet I choose to go where one photo has right now become a Before shot, while the very next is suddenly an After image.

You can imagine how I went wide-eyed as I made that last click to look closer at the house that isn’t there anymore. But I also felt it in my legs. I felt it the way you might when you’re standing on a building, the way there’s a sudden drop in front of you.

It was a house of no importance, no particularly special design, and not even what I’d say was all that significant to me. But still, I wish I could go touch its walls just once more.