Yet simply by living here I am building new layers of experience, memory and association across the city, like a sedimentary rock. Life is a constant state of change, even in a city as medievally static as Oxford. And so I am changing what this place is, for me and my new crew. I may greet old shopkeepers like lost friends, I may look at lamp-posts the way other people look at family albums, but I am also introducing my son to a city that has never existed before, for him, or me, or any of us. A city where I no longer wear hair mascara or carry a Walkman. A city where we go to a dinosaur museum and eat Pom-Bears nearly every weekend. A city where I can buy a navy spotted handkerchief for my partner from a men’s outfitters that keeps its merchandise in wooden drawers. A city where every Wednesday afternoon my son pretends to be a pirate with a milk moustache. A city where I am both child and parent, drinking by the river in my swimming costume in the evening and packing a nursery bag full of wipes in the morning.