Muscle memory takes you most of the way. Small segments of the city act as signal points. You cross by the café with the blue-painted shutters, turn at the corner shadowed by the overhanging balconies, where music and cigarette smokes float down through the railings. At the tram stop you pass the line of silver birches which border each platform. The soil between their ghostly trunks is cracked and dusty, scattered with a blanket of wrappers and packets, leaves of foil and plastic. Once every forest has been felled this will be what’s left, you think; in some far future the woodlands of the worlds end will be replicas of this, weak and monotonous, smothered by detritus. You turn again at the corner, just before the road begins its steady rise to the sloped back of the bridge across the green canal waters. This cut through offers the final silent stretch, to be savoured, before you join the packed pavements leading into the centre of the city.

So far you have drifted through the motions of walking. Each signal point was registered in a passive list, indistinguishable from the hundreds of times you have passed them before. Without needing to look, to map, your mind wandered freely elsewhere. You pull up short now. A blockade spans the street in front of you. Boards, twice your height, create a fortress of the space beyond. Emblazoned across their surface are garish images of the street, teasing you, looney-tunes style. Except no – on closer look it’s all off, the uncanny valley of what you once knew. There is the straight line of the road leading to the river, the indent of parking spaces on the right. And on the right too is the façade of the old bank that has stood empty for as long as you remember. But it’s been gutted out; a glistening glass block rises behind its vacant front. And the same on the opposite side you see now; gone is the short run of terraces, and in their place protrudes the wide doors of a hotel, complete with a smiling couple walking across the threshold, suitcases and blurred child in tow.

You will never see that street again, at least not as you knew it, you realise. The city around you shifts, out of reach again, unrecognisable. You turn away and retrace your path back to the bridge and cross there instead. Behind you the glossy future glistens, promising a place carved away and remoulded, lined with a pale avenue of silver birch trees.