Globe, compass and passport stamps on a shoulder

I'm writing this on the train because I couldn't sleep after Saturday, and because you were the only one who didn't pretend to remember Gavin's speech. Do you remember the Year Eleven geography room, and the globe with the cracked stand that Mr Ashworth spun until someone was sick? Dean drew a compass rose on the inside of his folder that same week and announced he'd walk every line of it before he turned thirty.

He didn't, obviously. He got as far as Helsinki, a two-winter job in a lab, and then he came home to Stockport and sold insurance. But on Saturday he pulled his old passport out of his jacket to show Gemma, and she turned the pages like a museum guide. London in blue ink, Hong Kong with its tidy circle, a grey mountain at Machu Picchu, every date printed in the same tired font. Gemma asked whether they were all real. Dean said they were the only proof he had that he'd ever left.

I keep thinking about that. You and I stayed put, and we never minded it much. But he kept talking about the dotted lines on his folder, the ones that ran out from the compass toward places he never reached, and I wonder whether a map is harder to bear when you've been to all of it or when you've only ever stood in the middle, turning the globe.

Write back soon. Tell me whether the Helsinki stamp was really from that winter or whether he's got the dates wrong again, the way he always did in the register.