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Time definitely compresses as we age. My youth looms as an epoch in my mind, still occupying me all these years on. Recent decades, by contrast, just feel like minutes and days.

Between us, we share recollections of those early days of marriage in west London, returning often as if it was the neighbourhood which defined us. Yet, in truth, we only remained there for five years, before moving on like the whole world.

I was a lodger in a dismal 1970s terrace when we met, red brick walls set above double garages, on a rundown housing estate hemmed in between the Great Western mainline and the fine Victorian streets for which Ealing is known.

It’s so strange that I recall those months as an age, for I only resided there from the autumn of 2000 until we married the following summer. Perhaps those were defining moments. Defining in that they changed everything.

To think I nearly missed it, as I tried to set up lodgings close to my workplace in Maidenhead. I had a property all lined up, only for it to fall through just as I prepared to move. Alhamdulilah for that. For it was just then that I’d be introduced to my beloved.

Had I flown 1.3 miles in a straight line, east to west, from Allingham Close across the park to dinner on Atherton Place, I would have found her waiting. Our hosts will forever remember me as the clueless fool who turned up in scruffy jogging bottoms, pleased with myself for having bought new socks specially.

Still, she didn’t hold it against me, for we spent the next four years living together in West Ealing, back across Drayton Green. There we were, settled in that neighbourhood, happy and content. There our little world, expanding every now and then to encompass Regents Park.

There was our mosque, a mere walk away, past our local park, along the footbridge over the railway line and straight through the old council estates (all now gone). On Sunday mornings, I’d meet with my little band of friends for a cuppa on the broadway opposite Dean Gardens.

There were our close friends, a short walk down Argyle Road, Hastings and Hartington, to spend hours in their company, drinking green tea, overlooking the Uxbridge Road. Later we’d share an allotment together on the corner of Mattock Lane and Northfield Avenue.

There was our local Turkish grocery, Cudis, providing the fresh produce so essential to my new wife’s delicious cuisine, and the nearby Waitrose relied upon for everything else. On Friday nights, we’d rent videos from a local independent on the corner of The Avenue.

Then there was the journey to work. In the early days, by car, taking some ridiculous morning route through Southall’s traffic jams to pick up the M4 near Hayes, for the journey west to my office just outside Maidenhead.

Later, my own early morning journeys by tube to Green Lanes, Mayfair and Wembley, before I finally secured a proper job, three years a married man, catching the mainline from West Ealing to Paddington, then the underground on to Baker Street.

Yes, all of that seems like a whole era in my mind’s eye. But compared to the twenty years that followed, they ought to seem like just a moment. So strange that those years seem so elongated, whilst recent years seem to have vanished as if we barely experienced them at all.

Perhaps that’s the monotony of a career which hasn’t changed very much, or the absence of a daily commute. Or the routines of raising children and attending to their education. Maybe it’s just being more settled, less on edge. Or perhaps it’s just because everything was once so new, and now it is so familiar.

Here we are, all of us, hurtling at pace towards our terminus. By now we know with absolute certainty that when we are raised on that awesome Day, the like of which is fifty-thousand years, we will protest that we tarried on the earth for but a day or an afternoon or a few hours.

Yes, for even now, it’s beginning to feel that way, as weeks, months and years pass by as if they were just days, forgotten.