On the Monday after the reunion weekend, when most of my friends had left Durham to return to their lives in various cities around the world, I walked up the hill past my old college and into the university’s ten-hectare Botanic Garden, which had been one of my favourite places to practise the ritual dialogues in my Japanese textbook, with only the trees listening.

I thought the visit might bring back some memories, but I wasn’t expecting a face-to-face encounter with my twenty-two year-old self. She was already there when I arrived, at the stone semicircle on the far side of the Japanese garden, rehearsing for her final exams. If she passed them, there was a job waiting for her in Japan. She was pretending to be in a business meeting, negotiating something or other. Then she made a mistake and pulled a folded piece of paper out of her pocket, checked it and started again. I could tell she was frustrated with herself for getting it wrong, and wanted to give her a hug. You’ll get there , I whispered. She turned her head to look in my direction, as if she had heard something, and then carried on.

As the ghost of my twenty-two year-old self practised for an exam I knew she’d pass, I told her what the next couple of decades would bring. How she would keep learning, and the more she learnt the more she would realise all she did not know, and that one day she would be okay with that. How she would travel the world, spend many years in Japan, make mistakes over and over again, write poetry, write books, write too many sympathy cards, and not enough love letters.