Home Sweet Home. Sweeeeeet. Home.

I'm going home this afternoon.

One morning in the next week I shall wake just after sunrise, creep down the stairs trying not to wake my parents, to the entrance hall where I will have laid my equipment.

Picking up my rod and landing net, and my tackle box and a small lunch, I shall climb up through the streets of Ventnor and out along the rough road behind the Crispy Fry up onto the paths which criss-cross the 9 hole golf course on top of the downs, and I shall follow the flinty paths through the gorse bushes. You can see clear across the Island from up there, over the Solent to the mainland. You can pick out the grey stones of the church at Godshill, with its gold and blue clock face picked out by morning sunlight at about 8am in the summer and you can see it gleam for miles above the hazy fields and trees. I shall start coming down off the hills, through the cow fields and over the watermeadows to a small farm overlooking the village of Whitwell, where I have fished since I was twelve years old.

From the benches by the water you see the colours of the country change with the hours of the day, but the best time comes as the afternoon wears on and the sun hangs just above the next set of downs, sending the old distant pepperpot and the radio masts into silhouette. The light becomes a golden orange and settles on the western sides of things and the tops of trees, a slow rich, easy glow which lifts a cooling haze from the grasses and trees of the hedgerows and blurs the sharpness of the village into a dream-like vision which sits in the memory because of the feeling it gave you rather than the picture you recall.

I will walk along the shingle and sand beach where I spent my childhood summers, nod to the agéd longshoreman who became a family friend, look for the old pier supports in the sea front of the new Victorian style bandstand which sits proudly at one end of the promenade, wander into the Gaiety arcade, and see the kids' rides they've had since I was small enough to go on them, the pool tables with saltwater marks from the great spring tides five or six years ago.

Then of course there are other things to look forward to.

I have a horrible feeling these may involve ganging up with a load of people from my old High School and going to Colonel Bogey's.