The Old Address

Returning to a familiar place often promises a meeting not with the place but with your former self.

We remember the street before the redevelopment, the job before the change of management, the relationship before the grievances piled up. Memory removes the queue, the smell of damp and the man who started every morning with the words “just five minutes”. What remains is warm light, music and the feeling of a time when a lot was still ahead.

Going back is allowed. Sometimes it brings joy, closure or a new understanding. But you should travel to the current address.

What has changed: the place, the people, the rules, ourselves and the reasons we left in the first place.

Particular caution is needed when the offer to return appears only after the departure. A promotion, attention, a promise of change or a sudden willingness to consider our needs can be sincere. Loss does sometimes make a person or an organisation see what was ignored before.

But a counter-offer should be assessed not as proof of love but as a new deal:

• what has changed structurally;
• why it could not have been done earlier;
• how far the promise depends on this particular fright;
• whether the change will survive the disappearance of the threat to leave;
• whether we want to return or are simply afraid of change.

Leaving does not have to be irreversible. But nostalgia is a poor auditor of contract terms.

The classic case is the counter-offer. A person spent two years asking for a salary review, heard “now is not the time”, handed in notice, and the next day received the money, a new title and a promise to discuss the workload. The company had the money all along. What it lacked was an occasion. The returning employee gets a raise and simultaneously a reputation as someone who once got as far as leaving — and the next conversation about a promotion will be conducted with that fact in mind.

What is worth checking is not sincerity but mechanics: what exactly changed in the budget, in the rules, in the make-up of the management. If the answer comes down to being appreciated at last, what was appreciated was not us but the cost of replacing us. That valuation holds good right up to the day a replacement is found.