Time
[slideshare id=115391&doc=timea-reflection4055&w=425]
why this slideshare? Read on……
I drove like mad from Glasgow to Greenock with my two boys to make sure I saw, one last time perhaps, the QE2 sail out of Greenock and down the Firth of Clyde. More precisely, I wanted to hear the QE2, for it is the deep bass of the horn, sounding three times, that always makes the hairs on my neck stand up. That sound summons up old moments from the past, when I half remember boats and ships’ sirens and hooters welcoming in the New Year in Greenock. And so it was again that the QE2 blasted out her farewell, valedictory, but awakening, I am sure, a host of nostalgic yearnings in many of the crowd at the Esplanade.
I turned to head back to my car, which I had abandoned miles away, frustrated by the static car jam at the top of Greenock. As I walked back I retraced the steps I used to take each summer as I walked from home to the filling station in Regent Street where I worked as a student in the late 70s and early 80s. Much of Greenock is still the same-pockets of old tenements, run down factories, derelict land, abandoned multistoreys and scrap yards and one-man car repair works. Even the smells are the same. But elsewhere the old houses and street patterns have been overwritten by new layouts of maisonettes, neat gardens and play areas, clean new convenience stores, with only the street names fossiliing the original plan. I walked past the Garage , showing my son where we’d sit in the sun while waiting fill up the next car, walked by St Lawrence’s RC Chuch and Regents Court, past my best friend’s house in Bawhirley Road, out in the East End. I remembered playing with Timpo soldiers in the front garden way back in 1969. i remembered having spaghetti hoops for tea. Climbing up Kilmacolm Road I looked back over the Clyde, as the sun filtered pitifully through the greys and blacks of the next imminent shower.
All this prompted me to reflect on time. How many people, I wondered, as they watched the QE2 were instantly transported back 40 years to the day she was launched? How near the past seemed as I walked through the old haunts of Greenock. How close the link between time and place. And I was struck by how the notion of time changes as we grow up. I used to imagine time as a kind of x axis, a linear concept with a begining, a middle and an end. it;s like the stratigraphy of a rock face or the sequence in an archaeological dig. But then, sometimes straigraphies are reversed; tectonic forces folld old layers back on top of young layers. Cataclismic events jumble near horizons of settlement occupation and old sherds work their way to the surface. And so , time is, to me, like a CD, where you can jump back or forward to any track as the mood takes you. With binary code we can access the deepest memories and jump straight back 20, 30, 40 years in a second, prompted by smells, images or, as today, sounds. The sound of a ship’s horn on the Clyde.
Until the time that time stands still………Until our wounds are healed….
Originally uploaded by *Rosemea
