As some of you will be aware, I moved back in with my parents for two weeks before I go overseas. Living at home is a bit strange. I haven't lived with my parents, or even slept over at their house, for ten years or more.

My old room is a lot smaller and less convenient than it used to be. I never realised how important it is to have at least one power socket in every room. I also never realised that I apparently spent my entire childhood sleeping on a mattress which is about as comfortable as a slab of granite. On the positive side, the tree outside the window is a lot less scary than it used to be, or perhaps it just has given up trying to get me. In related news, the unspecified scary entities which always used to live way down the far end of the back yard at night have moved away. Indoors, absolutely nothing has changed, except that my mind now boggles looking at all the photos on the wall of me as a small child. I had straight blonde hair, and I was CUTE. I don't know what happened.

I have been spending most evenings walking around the area and seeing all the old places I used to walk to as a kid. I even walked through the grounds of my old primary school, which was hilarious. I remember it as being huge, and now everything is a size designed for six-year-olds. The enormous school swimming pool where we all learned to swim and sail is now revealed as being about three feet deep at the scary end where only the big kids went. They still have some of the playground equipment I remember swinging on. I swung on it. It isn't as good when you're twice the height you used to be.

My parents live on a small peninsula with a good beach on each side and an interesting walk around the cliffs at the far end, at low tide. Both beaches are the way I remembered them, except that the Hundred Steps up the cliff at the end of one beach have been replaced by newer and better ones. I must go up and count them, because I can't remember what the actual number of steps is. It isn't a hundred, I know that much.

I used to walk home from school that way sometimes, in the days when the Hundred Steps were a rickety plank structure guarded at the bottom by an extremely evil-minded billy goat tethered to a chain. Nobody was quite sure whether the chain was long enough to allow him to get you, but something in his demeanour led you to think it might not be worth the risk. Many a small child during the 70s and early 80s climbed all the way down those steps, looked at the billy goat for a long time, and miserably turned around to trudge all the way back up the steps again and go home a different way. There is no billy goat there any more. Another minor part of the magic of childhood goes blam.