Last month, for a moment on Son Bou beach, I felt eleven years old. Largely because, thirty-two years earlier, I’d stood on the same beach doing the same thing.

We chose Menorca for this year’s summer holiday because of that memory. Eleven-year-old me, building sandcastles on the whitest sand I’d seen. The best family holiday we ever had. Just before teenage angst kicked in, and every holiday carried the cost of being forcibly separated from one’s friends. FOMO, a quarter of a century before anyone had a word for it.

Of course, I never intended to literally retread steps taken way back in 1994. How could I? There was no record of where we’d stayed. My mum could barely remember the holiday, let alone the location of our resort.

As we headed down the road towards southern Menorca’s longest beach, I had no idea I was heading back in time.

But when the coach came through a short tunnel in the cliffs and began the steep incline towards Son Bou, I tapped Laura on the shoulder to tell her about my growing sense of déjà vu. By the time we parked, less than 200 metres from the villa I’d stayed in as a child, I knew. Not only was it the same place, but in more than three decades, it had barely changed.

I remembered the prickly bushes lining the pavement. The monolithic hotel at the end of the beach. The mysterious caves in the cliffs on the horizon.

I remembered the Irish bar on the path to the beach. It was still decorated with football memorabilia. Michael Owen shirts. Wayne Rooney scarves. A poster for Chelsea’s first Premier League title. The irony being that none of these memories existed in 1994. Owen hadn’t played for England yet. Rooney was eight. Chelsea winning the league was the stuff of fantasy.

I remembered the sunbathers. Son Bou was the first place I saw a topless woman. I was eleven and did not know where to put my eyes. Thirty-two years later, precious little had changed.

Most of all, I remembered the quality of the sand. Perfect for sculpting turrets, tunnels and trenches. Back then I was building with my mum; now I was building with my four-year-old son. And yet somehow, like the sand, I hadn’t changed at all.

I’ve been trying to write this piece for a month. I still don’t know exactly what I’m trying to say. Only to marvel at the fact that we have minds capable of holding onto things with a precision that shouldn’t be possible over such ludicrous time periods.

We live so entirely in the present that we fail to notice the ever-growing distance between who we are and who we were. When we do afford ourselves a backward glance, the past starts to feel like a fever dream. Something we’re no longer sure of, or that we made up entirely. So it’s a strange mix of wonder and relief when it turns out to still be there, unchanged, waiting at the bottom of a cliff road in Son Bou.