My grandmother lived in a grand old Yorkshire house.

It was on a respectable middle-class street just down the road from the most exuberant set of church chimes.

It had servants bells and a pantry which smelled of marmalade cakes; and dark wooden floorboards of character.

It had a lush, well-planted garden full of old broken clay pipes, and one could be an archaeologist for an afternoon, digging in the rosebeds for old bits of Delft and Wedgwood.

I often wondered how the fragments came to be there: was there simply a particularly hot-tempered cook, Lewis Carroll-style, who smashed china after every meal? And what did all those Edwardian gentlemen do to deserve the destruction of that most urbane of pastimes, their pipes?

I will never know the answer. But there was one aspect of my grandmother’s rather beautiful old house which fascinated me more than any other.

You could only ever go halfway up the stairs.

The staircase had been a graceful example of its time. My grandfather, before he died, was a lover and collector of wood, ebony, beech, oak and so forth. He even donated a whole sample collection to the town’s university. The stair rail was deep rich wood, I would guess at ebony. Its rich lustrous polish was entrancing to someone growing up in a modern three-bed semi in a southern new town.

The stairs were expansive and wide, a theatrical welcoming gesture as one ventured down the hallway past the sonorous grandfather clock.

When my father was a small boy, the top of the stairs was his scene of crime. When crossed, he would exact revenge by standing over the stairs, leaning on the stair rail, holding a book.

No one would notice a small boy up there, holding a hefty volume. He has always been a person of some precision. He would wait until a visitor knocked at the door. Welcomed in, the newcomer would proceed unsuspecting along the hall. My father would drop the book with such split second timing that it would just miss the passer-by, landing with a resounding slam on the boards inches behind.

How very disconcerting that must have been.

Not as disconcerting, however, as what happened to those stairs.

My grandfather died young. My grandmother, ever practical, decided the house must be divided into two flats: the lower one and the garden for my grandmother; and the upper one to be rented out to university students.

A wall was placed at the top of the stairs, so one could neither ascend or descend any longer. No more books would be dropped with Machiavellian intention over the banisters. Halfway up the stairs was where I always stopped.

Aesthetically, it felt wrong. Stairs are a beautiful thing in themselves, with all those parallel lines and that marvellous demonstration of perspective. These were cut off in their prime.

But if I am honest they unsettled me more than I can say. There was something grotesque about a path to somewhere which was snubbed. It was the most bald example of nothingness, a demonstration of nowhere just for me. The rude wall has sat in the back of my memory all these years.

Of course, we are no strangers to such demonstrations of Nowhere here on the island. In the dying days of the seventeenth century, a tax was introduced which made blank nowheres of windows the length and breadth of the land.

It was called Act of Making Good the Deficiency of the Clipped Money, part of which was Window Tax. The reasoning was thus: glass was expensive, therefore those who could afford glass were moneyed. And it follows, then, that the number of windows in a house was a good measure of how much any household was able to contribute to the state coffers.

Everyone paid a flat rate tax of two shillings: that got you ten windows. After that, all bets were off. ten to twenty windows would set you back four shillings: and above twenty was a sizeable eight shillings.

No wonder, then, that people started bricking up their windows as a measure designed to achieve economies. Look up anywhere in London or provincial towns and the buildings sport disconcerting blanks which leer down at pedestrians.

This country seems filled with blanks. When I was young, I used to drive along a breakneck dual carriageway renowned for its high accident rate.

Oh, the protests when it was closed: for the new motorway which replaced it was set to lacerate an area of outstanding scientific, historical and geographic interest.

The protesters came and went, the motorway was built, and now the dual carriageway where once I diced with death in a small battered Renault is a blank. It is being returned to the wild from whence it came. And these things don’t take long. Mother Nature is a voracious creature.

Surely, though, the ultimate blank must be when a track leads into the sea.

I exaggerate, of course. But one of the most poignant nowhere I have ever seen is the railway which used to carry the Orient Express, disembarking at the channel.

The sea had its own station. In the old days, one could get one’s passport checked at Victoria Station in London, and embark for the rest of the world.

The train would hurtle through Kent, headed for the sea, laden with the expectations of myriad travellers. When Phil and I were younger we would hear it tearing through our Kentish market town in the dead of night, bound for who knew where, alias Adventure.

And when it arrived at the sea, there was a terminal to receive and process the huge numbers of passengers who alighted from their train, only to step onto a ship.

The area changed, and heartbreakingly the station closed.

I went to see it a little while ago. I walked past the No Entry signs and wandered across the overgrown platform, a machine for weighting luggage still parked next to the locked waiting room. Once, this was a doorway to the world. Now, circumstances have rendered it the most forlorn blank, a reminder as powerful as that wall long ago in my childhood.

The station’s future hangs suspended in the balance now: preserve it as a heritage steam line, or bulldoze it for a new marina?

And this choice brings the whole business of blanks into bass-relief: they are suspended between two realities, waiting for a knight on a white charger to rescue, or destroy. A time-hole: a pause button.

Our unease with blanks is there because we are so lamentably unaccustomed to time travel.