- We’ll always have...

Places become precious not through their intrinsic beauty or historical interest but because they collide with key moments or moods in our lives. What is the last thing a lover says to a lover – or the last loving thing! – when they split up? Don’t take your new lover (he or she says) to the place that was precious to us. Whatever it was: a pub garden, café, the corner of a park. These memories are intimate keepsakes. That’s why Manderley declares war on the second Mrs de Winter. It’s Rebecca, the first wife’s, domain: the place where she and Maxim were happy. Trespassers will be persecuted.
These whirlpools of psychic ownership are powered by deliriums of association. These deliriums, in turn, are a kind of synaesthesia. Just as some people see numbers as colours, or experience musical sounds as scents, places and emotions, with almost everyone, can interfuse.
More weirdly – it happens to me at least – I keep finding that places rhyme inexplicably with other places. A stretch of swampy, willowy embankment on the A259 between Bexhill and Eastbourne always evokes a commensurate stretch of scenery near the bridge to the Keys in mainland Florida. Why? Goodness knows. A bend in a road in Kent replicates a particular bend in a road in India. It’s as if they have the same DNA or have been cloned one from another.
The two locations, in each case, seldom have any special resemblance. So what has happened? I must have had the same thought or emotion at both places and this sutured them together.

FT.com / Columnists / Nigel Andrews - We’ll always have...