MARY Speyer is blonde and smiley, patting a big yellow labrador in the garden of her house on Lowell Street in a leafy, well-to-do corner of north-west Washington DC that reminds me a bit of the set of Desperate Housewives.

It’s a bright March morning...and everything seems spookily, extremely spookily, familiar.

The reason is simple: for four years in the early 1980s, when I was aged 10-14, this was where I lived.

I explain to Mary (no desparate housewife, just a very friendly person) that I’ve come to DC for on a “nostalgia tourism” trip. “How funny!” she exclaims, immediately inviting me in for a coffee.

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Soon memories are flooding back: of finishing homework in the dining room, mastering Atari computer games and listening to Michael Jackson’s Thriller in the basement, and “shooting hoops” (playing basketball) in the backyard. This small room was my Dad’s study; where he had his Telex machine, a ticker-tape contraption that spewed out news reports. This is where we used to put the Christmas tree. This is where my brother Ed, sister Kate and I ate breakfast.

Mary tells me that Karl Rove, the chief strategist in George W. Bush’s election victories, now lives round the corner. “There’s undercover security everywhere. This must be one of the safest streets in the city,” she says cheerily, totally at ease with having a stranger in her house after a couple of minutes’ chat, and making me think: would someone be quite so open back in the UK?

I’m here for a long, nostalgic weekend, aiming to see some US sport (I was a teenage sports freak), whizz round the main sights I used to know so well, and catch a hip-hop gig: I was a big fan of “old skool” groups such as The Sugarhill Gang, Run-DMC and Grandmaster Flash, back in the days when hip-hop was just starting out.

I’m staying at a hotel in Georgetown, a smart university neighbourhood by the Potomac river. Preppies in designer shirts, many driving smart cars, are everywhere. I walk down side streets lined with smart brown stone houses that must cost millions. Most are immaculately maintained. Most have expensive cars parked outside. I can’t remember it being so plush when I was younger.

On the subway to watch a basketball game downtown, I try to get a better feel for the “real DC”. The majority of DC’s population is black and in the carriage to see the Washington Wizards take on the Toronto Raptors I’m one of the few white people. Not a preppie about.

The stadium is buzzing. Hot-dogs, chili dogs and pretzels are being munched. Budweisers and Miller Lites are being drained. Cheerleaders leap about. T-shirts with slogans that say “honoring our heroes” (in the Iraq war) drop from the ceiling on tiny parachutes at half-time.

It’s a truly American experience. As is watching the Baltimore Orioles play the Washington Nationals at baseball at RFK Stadium the next day. The Orioles won the World Series in 1983, when I was here, and the Washington Redskins, the local American football team, won the Superbowl the same year. It was a great time to be a DC sports fan.

I see signs idolising the old Redskins heroes — John Riggins and Joe Theisman — feeling a sharp stab of nostalgia; which I guess is what “nostalgia tourism” is all about.

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