Mutable Time

Time seems to be such an elastic thing. I've been reading about it for years now, fiction and non-fiction, and trying to understand the various theories surrounding it. It seems as though it may, on a quantum level, be mutable enough that some travel within it may be possible. Of course, the quantum level and our level are very different, but sometimes, I've felt I might have managed it, might have had a glimpse of the past.

Like my ghosts, my glimpses have tended to be audio. I stood under an archway of the London Wall, at Tower Hill, and I heard the tramp tramp tramp of feet above me, and the clatter of something metal on stone. Only for a moment, but it was very clear.

I stood on a flat square patch of tarmac on part of Clapham Common, without any idea of why I suddenly heard planes overhead. Some three weeks later an elderly lady I met on my walk from the Tube told me that the tarmac covered the old air raid shelters, which had been filled in some years previously. She remembered being rushed out of her house by her father, and carried down into them. She remembered the noise of the planes.

When I was a child, we stopped once on a trip from Johannesburg to Durban at the wall where Piet Retief's daughter wrote his name on an overhanging rock while she and his party of trekkers waited for him to return from the meeting with Dingaan. He never did return. As I stood there I clearly heard the snorting and blowing of horses, and the rattle of their bridles. But when I climbed over the rocks looking for them, there were none there.

So perhaps the quantum bleeds into the reality we live in every now and then. At an old racetrack in Surrey, near Woking, I was struck with this thought; what if those people from the Roaring Twenties, racing round their track on glorious Spring days and Summer mornings, glanced up and saw, not the Surrey countryside gleaming before them, but the Services, stretching over acres of space, full of cars and people and tarmac and trucks. Would they have driven off the track, thrown completely by the brief vision of that space occupied by its future time?

Perhaps, though, they would only have heard it. Like me.

Cathedral Peak, Drakensberg

Pure magic!

Philosophy

There seems to have been some gloom around the last few weeks. I keep reading beautifully written blog posts all over the bloggersphere dealing with sadness. Someone suggested it was Mercury retrograde... could be.

It certainly seems to be universal. I've been hanging on wanting to come back here with a jolly, funny post about something jolly and funny, and two weeks have passed. Mind you, in my defence, I've been ill. Viral laryngitis followed by a week of cluster migraine which got so severe Jon had to come back from work and take me to the doctor to be made a pincushion of. Gah. I loathe, hate and detest migraines, and now that they're ba-ack I'm back to only just glancing at computer screens, not looking at faces for too long, not using mirrors, wearing sunglasses inside, keeping curtains drawn... anything to avoid triggering another aura.

I'm doing some other stuff too. I'm trying to relax, trying to lose some weight and get a bit more exercise, and I am NEVER EVER EVER again eating hard cheeses of any description. I know it triggers the migraines, but I got complacent, and ate cheddar. Boy, did I regret that.

So I have been a bit of a pale shade of blue lately. Just a delicate one. I used up my letting-off-steam coffee morning with Kerryn in bitching about politics, about which I am aware I know far too little to really be commenting on. I'm also guiltily aware that the other woman there has met me in a social setting precisely twice, and both times I've gone off pop about the same thing. I feel like I owe her an apology, and cherish a small, probably vain hope that she won't be saying to other moms she meets "Well, she's nice enough, but she NEVER stops moaning..." I don't usually worry too much about what other people think about me, unless I think I behaved badly, and, well, I do a bit.

Sometimes I envy these smug types*, with their certainty that the universe has a personal interest in them, wants the best for them, and can be pushed, prodded and prayed into a favourable position. My universe is far more independent, far less personal. I'm part of it, and a valued part, but I'm not the most important thing in it. When I was younger, this was enough. To be a part of a greater whole, individual yet joined together. I didn't need more than that. I had so so much less to lose.

I have a memory, of being 17 and of being in a combi being driven from somewhere to somewhere, and the driver going faster and faster. There were two of us standing on the seats with our heads out the sunroof, and we were whooping and laughing and loving every second. The feel of my hair (blonde then, much longer) whipping against my cheeks is very vivid. I miss that sense of power so immensely much sometimes, but it's gone. Absolutely gone. I am far more respectful, bordering on suspicious at times, of the universe now.

I know there is more in heaven and earth, Horatio, and I've had glimpses, but what, exactly, is it? And how do I stop being so afraid?