I would know. About ten years ago I visited the town I lived in between the ages of four and twelve. I swear Emsworth was a village in the Nineties, all Sue Ryder charity shops and a millpond you could skate on in winter. Now it seemed big and sprawling, fancy with its upmarket pubs and shiny cars. Time changes your relationship to other people's wealth.

I stayed with my godparents a few doors down from my old house. I couldn't bear to walk past it in case it had changed from the place I visit in my mind. So we took the dogs on a walk to the millpond, up and round the loop and back via the Lord Raglan for a pint. I think we took the canoe out too, although I can't be sure.

It's as if my memory has cannibalised that weekend, as if it cannot deal with two versions of home at once. Only the long shadows of girlhood remain: grass snakes in the paddling pool, the dog's-breath smell of the aquarium on the corner, 10p Freddos from the One Stop.

There was nowhere else I could have stayed but my old street. I'd remembered it as impossibly long and straight like a Roman road but in fact it was quite ordinary. Over the years I've walked down it many times on Google Street View, that democratiser of travel. I've tried to enter through my old front door via Rightmove House Prices, where newer estate agents' photos are stored. But the last time it changed hands was when our family sold it in 2001.

* How to use Google Street View to your advantage in property

A digital homecoming isn't available. Only the analogue experience will do. So why couldn't I walk past my old house? It's just a red-brick semi with a long, thin garden -- nothing grand. But on the inside it's a palace with its yellow-wallpapered morning room where we'd watch Gladiators on the boxy TV and be handed squares of Dairy Milk on a Saturday night.

So much living went on there. Maybe too much for this brain to come back to. I don't want to see that the wallpaper has been removed or that Julian, the vegetable-grower next door, has moved on. The past is easier to compute as a static object.

Like my friend I'm also a tourist, to my memories of home and my physical relationship with it. I don't know if there's another option. You cannot go through life holding on to everything you touch or that touches you.

The brain performs tricks to keep itself safe, dissolving what was real into suggestion. Hence the canoe. Hence the village and the summers of childhood when it was sunny every day. Only some of it can be true. I choose to hold on to the nice bits, although it's not as conscious as a choice.

A city you leave can't be returned to you but it can become something else. My own year living in Edinburgh -- 2017 -- was pretty grim. I felt lonely almost all the time. It wasn't the fault of Leith, where my flat was, but a storm from homes I'd left behind.

* Being from two places is easy -- until the law makes you choose

When I visit now I drink nice wine and attend book launches and stay over in a fancy Airbnb. It's a different Edinburgh to the one I remember and not just because the city has changed. I force it deliberately. This time memories can be replaced.

In the end it doesn't matter where my friend stays. It won't feel like it did before. That's a good thing. Sometimes you have to bend a homecoming into a new shape. I don't pretend to understand exactly how it works. Strange magic glues yesterday to tomorrow. Even stranger magic removes it.

@palebackwriter

Kitchen objects are scattered like crumbs through The Heart-Shaped Tin, a memoir of food, home and love by Bee Wilson (£18.99 Fourth Estate). To order, go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members.