As he walked home that Sunday Morning he heard church bells: a very 'Sunday Morning' feeling, indeed. He tried to think of the music most unlikely to contain such bells: and Pink Floyd came to mind. But he recalled they had – in their music somewhere – an alarm clock trilling and a football crowd chanting, so why not Sunday Morning church bells?

Pink Floyd were OK in their day, he thought. Their name meant a lot. See Emily Play and Arnold Lane seemed to be fixtures in his youth, and he even recalled with some significance the avant garde repercussions from those early beginnings when Pink Floyd started banging giant gongs in deserts. Or was that some other group he was thinking of?

Time to stop meddling with the past. The past was frozen and immutable: nobody could hope to return to the past. The past is a foreign country, as someone once wrote. A go-between it was: a sort of fixer of time zones as they were then and crystallising them again within today's present moment. A sort of nostalgia? But nostalgia was always wrong wasn't it? A false gift from a misunderstood past. The same went with the flooding-back of memories created by the music of Pink Floyd when re-heard or re-appraised – and that area of rediscovered time when he was courting and had his first kiss…

Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Times Past also had another title in English (when translated from the French): In Search of Lost Time. Which title was right? Probably the latter. Because searching did not entail finding. Whilst actual remembrance was a confident grasping of what one considered as lost time.

Eureka! There it is, in his hand. His past in all its crystal-clear and unalterable perfection. It was not perfect simply because it was perfectly ideal and wonderful as a period in his life. But it was perfect in the sense that he recalled it as it exactly was (bad and good alike).

"Wish you were here" – came back the postcard from the past. In his own childish handwriting – with a grainy mis-coloured photo depicting an ancient seaside resort as it then was. Walton-on the-Naze, with the unchanging sea and the pleasure pier just as long then as it is now. But everything else is different. Including him. This is further back even than early Pink Floyd. This is more nineteen fifties than sixties. He can sense it.

As a small child, he lived in Alfred Terrace, not far from Walton's backwaters. It wasn't called Arnold Lane. He also lived in a house in Walton called 'Olive Villa' not far from the pier. See Emily Play. He saw ghosts of people from the future. One of them may indeed have been a child called Emily – but he never went along the correct paths to meet her. Nor she him.

He met others. Emily passed on the other side of the road. He never saw Emily again, if at all. But she could have been that anonymous girl playing in the distance -- on that nineteen fifties beach at Walton -- a little girl who was probably Emily in person. Not that he knew it was Emily. If there was ever an Emily in the first place.

As he walked home that Sunday morning, he saw a middle-aged lady across the other side of the road. Wheeling a pram. Probably the lady's grandchild. He nodded and pointed to the sky as if the church bells were there – in God's Heaven itself, rather than coming from a nearby land-locked, time-constrained church.

He wondered why Pink Floyd had triggered such nostalgia. Their music had never really played any significant part in his past. He remembered clearly other songs, and other singers. It was a different person to him who had been brought up with Pink Floyd, someone younger than him, someone hippier.

He – I? – you? - was in his late fifties. Soon he'll be back in the sixties. No possible meddling with that.

(unpublished)