Location, location, location

Not so long ago, 20 years if that, I'd arrange to meet a friend a few days in the future and a little before the appointed time, I'd take a jacket with my keys and wallet in the pocket and set out. It feels brittle now - no means of communicating to repair or even improve plans on the fly. You'd stick to the plan, or stand your friend up. No other choices.

The first one to arrive would wait because how else would we find each other? Some people would wait longer than others, some would be more punctual than others. If someone didn't show up at all, you'd assume something quite bad had happened, although you wouldn't be able to call and find out till you'd definitely given up on them - because in order to do so, you'd have to leave the meeting point to find a call box, and the longer after the meeting time that was the more danger your friend would arrive, and on seeing you not there, assume you'd already left and leave again too.

Now we can communicate with anyone we know wherever they are. We carry all our contacts with us all the time. It's great.

But experiences still happen in specific places. I was in the rose garden at Mottisfont Abbey when I got a call telling me about my father's heart attack. That was over a decade ago and he recovered well, but the memory remains in that rose garden, part of what flits through my head whenever I'm there in that part of the year.

I covered a box file with woven paper strands while listening to a really moving afternoon play on the radio. I eventually had to get rid of the file, because I'd woven the story into it and it was much too harrowing to be reminding myself of on a daily basis.

We often holiday in the same town and have built up a patina of happy memories in the place: we all relax when we arrive. It's as if there are ruts worn into the place which make it hard not to be happy there.

I find it difficult to do certain parts of my day job from home, because my contact with the details of the meetings, calls and emails is much stronger when I sit at the desk or make tea in the kitchen where I had them. It's as if part of my memory is encoded outside my skin, perhaps in the arrangement of post-it notes, lego and paperclips on my desk.

Everything happens somewhere, and it leaves a mark on both the thing and the where, at least as they exist in the minds of the players. Everything may well be connected, but it isn't all here. If you google 'living in the present moment' you will find thousands of considerations of the importance of attending to now rather than losing yourself in regret and nostalgia for the past or plans and anxieties for the future. But just try looking for 'living in the present place': it's clearly not an issue.

Regardless of mobiles and the internet, we are still creatures, and we have a location. Where we are is meaningful. It's hard to talk about the importance of proximity without sounding parochial - the very word has become negative, when it used not to be. We know of a bigger world, but we live in a small one. No matter how much we travel, we are only actually in one place at a time. We may stay in one place long and deeply, or flit and skitter over a wide area, and that will affect the thoughts we think, but not how many hands we can hold at once, and what that holding means.