I close my eyes and listen to the tractor working in the school field at the bottom of my garden. The gutsy diesel engine sounds like a thousand baritone bees with emphysema. It’s a good sound. It’s the sound of mowing, ploughing, and harvesting. It’s the sound that moves into the distance, forgotten, and then comes around again a second time again and again and again. I am lulled into a false sense of time and some to spare. I am transported to a green Nisan hut, my grandfathers shed. The ‘Cot’ at the bottom of their garden in South Wales. It is an Aladdin’s cave of timeless wonders. The biscuit tins with rusting nails. The rummage draws with bits to fix the world. Small ball of string, French chalk, a wooden handled screw driver. Jack stones. Dubbing and a bicycle pump. A heavy green tobacco tin its lid rusted tight. A blue cardboard boxed bandage. Pink ointment and a bicycle repair kit. There are spindles, sprogs and splazers. An oil stone in a box sits beside a cricket ball. I spot a Spider the size of a spade lurking in the semi darkness resenting the intrusion of a small boy in short trousers. The aroma of linseed oil and ancient air befriending the allusion of carefree wonder. The tractor comes around again and I am a hundred miles away and four decades later. We have all got those semi dark places, those childhood haunts. They helped shape our impression of the world. At the right moment a certain sound or smell can evoke those memories summoning them back into the forefront of our minds. Every home needs a junk draw, a place where we put lose change, bits from our pockets. Spare thingamabobs. When life seems to overwhelm us, go to that draw and rummage, sort out, recollect. Create some more space, rake back time from this time starved age.