The blog is back. This new journey starts with a bus ride from London to Bucharest one unseasonably warm January night. The bus is full of Romanians returning home to renew their papers or stock up on jam, but there are two other young English people on board who have decided to take a principled stand against flying. Our journey takes us across France, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Hungary and finally Romania, but by Frankfurt a heavy fog settles that stays with us for the rest of the way.

Punctuated only by 10 minute breaks at motorway service stations every few hours, the ride is smooth and dozy. Gradually people start to unwind. A man insists on spending the entire journey sleeping in the aisle, and nothing anyone can say and no amount of people stepping over his sleepy corpse will move him. One of the drivers bids a passionate and highly unprofessional farewell to a passenger in the morning, and by the afternoon has seduced a new one (he does this journey twice a week). There are only four people left on the bus for the final leg of the journey, most of which is spent trying to work out who the undocumented extra passenger is: it is not the old man wearing dirty flip flops and carrying a plastic shopping bag of clothes who got on in a frosty Budapest and mutters continuously in a strange mix of English, Romanian, Russian and German, but the smart young woman with headphones.

The Bucharest I arrive in is without snow. That it is almost twenty degrees above the average temperature has been accepted as a natural anomaly. Cars now rule the city: not in the chaotic noisy way they used to with horns and alarms, but with a choking jumble of double or triple parked cars that make every corner blind, block entire lanes of traffic and push pedestrians into the roads. As I wait for a bus, the only reassuring mode of transport, a taxi driver pulls over, opens up his boot, retrieves a thermos and starts cracking open walnuts with a glass bottle on a nearby bench.

While the Italian facades and bars of Lipscani have been spruced up beyond recognition, streets of old crumbling buildings remain for sale, seemingly forever unsold, awaiting their collapse before new blocks can go up in their place. Round red plaques warn passers by that these buildings are dangerous after earthquakes. The night of Brexit, Bucharest experiences its biggest earthquake in a year, and in the apartment in Colentina we gild picture frames with gold leaf.

I have been trying to reactivate my memory, so I walk and walk. The smell of fresh concrete and placinta cu mere at Piata Victoriei metro station awakens new memories, but the changes in once familiar streets are enough to unsettle any confidence in those memories. I have a new moment in time to capture and remember. So this is what this blog will do over the next few months, as I prepare to become a student of history, memory, the past – and who knows what else.