Tuesday 27 October 2015

Back to the Future

There is a beach in Argyll which is the first I ever knew. I knew it as a toddler, babbling with incoherent thoughts, and I revisited it every year until I bade it a conscious farewell when was eighteen. Each of those years was, if not a flash, then a smudge of light in space and time. Revisiting it again now is as close as I may come to time travel.

Of course the beach is spinning at five hundred miles per hour relative to the Earth's core, orbiting the sun at sixty-seven thousand, orbiting the centre of the galaxy at four hundred and ninety thousand and hurtling outwards towards the Great Attractor at over two million miles per hour, so it cannot be said to be static. But to all appearances the same smooth, familiar boulders emerge from the same sands, washed by the same sea and surrounded by bladderwrack and thrift from the same DNA. They have not aged as I have aged, and relatively they have remained motionless as I have travelled in time and space, and then returned.

It is an odd feeling standing there, as those distant cones of light from the past still spread everlastingly outwards, carrying images of a growing child playing in the sand, decaying fragments of home movies, while I stand simultaneously in the present and the past like Marty McFly, haunted by the echoes of voices and laughter and the Zeitgeist of those onion-layered other times.

3 comments:

  1. Replies
    1. Thank you! (I didn't even know you had a blog; looks wonderful, and I aim to immerse myself in it).

      Delete
    2. It was experimental and is out of date. Won't take long...

      Delete