I just cannot bear my own company. Friends and colleagues might say it's because I'm so bloody boring.

Talking to myself is no good because I always know what I'm going to say next. So whenever I'm alone, I have to keep busy.

Sunday was a good example. Ten minutes after getting the house to myself, I decided to go on a nostalgic journey to the town where I was born and dragged up. Trouble is, I forgot to take the rose-tinted spectacles. Everything was in stark, harsh monochrome, not sepia.

My wife was out gallivanting at a wedding fayre (perhaps she was on a nostalgia trip, or perhaps she is planning something of her own) and my daughter was sleeping over at a friend's house - again.

So off I ventured to the home town I had not visited for many, many years.

It was like a visit to Lilliput. When you are a child the whole world - including your parents - seems so gigantic. I drove into this once-bustling inland port of about 20,000 people and it had shrunk.

As a boy, I would set out on a mammoth expedition to the riverside park and need essential provisions such as bread-and-jam sandwiches and a bottle of Vimto. It would take a lifetime to trek there. On Sunday I did it in two minutes in the car.

The huge acreage of that park - where the park keeper would chase us off for making dens in the bushes - seemed reduced to a postage stamp. How I found the place at the weekend surprises me because the streets had changed beyond recognition.

The allotments we roamed as children - where my brother would "borrow" a stick of rhubarb and eat it raw with salt - had given way to a housing estate. The lemonade factory where my uncle was manager has long disappeared, along with my old junior school which is now a shopping centre.

My infant school was still there, though, and largely unchanged. That's where I fell in love with my first teacher, Miss Waters. I remember grazing my knee in a killer game of playground hopscotch. She sat me on her knee and gently rubbed in some ointment. Nowadays, she'd be arrested as a paedophile.

In fact, as I stood and stared at the school remembering, it was a good job it was Sunday and there were no children or I would have been handcuffed and thrown in the same cell as Miss Waters.

I remember wetting my pants in class in that school because one teacher would not let me go to the toilet before lunchtime. I also remember my spitfire mum taking her gently by the throat the next day.

I kerb-crawled past every house I ever lived in in that town and they, too, had shrunk. I called at the house of an old school pal because he visits his old mum there every Sunday without fail and does chores. That sort of dedication has not done his marriage much good. We dredged up old memories together and I continued my sentimental journey.

The pub my granddad bought during the Second World War to escape the bombings in Hull with his daughters while their men went off to fight, was still there - but not so grand.

The old shipyard had long gone, the town centre was unrecognisable and I started to get depressed. Nostalgia ain't what it used to be.

So I went home to seek sanctuary - in the village pub across the road where there were familiar, smiling faces.

Goole was the place I was reared. There, I've admitted it. My dad used to parody the old Norman Wisdom song by singing "Don't laugh at me 'cos I'm from Goole."

He also used to say I'd go far. Yeah, I reached York - his birthplace. But then, who's complaining?