I find it hard to look at my son and imagine what it’s like to be his age. This is primarily due to the insoluble problem of memory. I hold a vaporous grasp on my early childhood, little more than a vague timeline of birthday parties, summer holidays and random interactions in primary school, mostly from eras so indeterminate they could be from any year before I turned 10.
His life is also so different from mine I’m not sure if transposing my own childhood on to his would be much use. At his age, my entire life had been lived with my massive family on Derry’s rural border, a place he only knows as a sort of pleasant agrarian theme park that’s been good enough to let his grandad live on site full-time.
