Time, the simplest thing.

The other morning, asleep, I travelled in time.

Which Is weird - because the time machine that I’ve been trying to build for the last 36 years still isn’t finished.

Ok, some people would say that it hasn’t even started, that all I have is a collection of random bits and pieces discarded and disorganised in my cellar and in my imagination - but they just don’t realise how often they have been assembled and taken apart.

On the morning in question, I returned to a street that I knew only vaguely from the past, near Winchester.

I was in a car travelling from distorted memory to forgotten moments and I arrived at a row of terraced houses fronting a country lane in woods between two villages.

Thirty-seven years previously I had come to this place with a friend, Bob who had moved to Winchester from near London.
We were best friends, more than that.

In one of the houses lived Alan and his girlfriend, new friends of Bob and thus friends of mine that I would have been prepared to die for.

I crossed over to the house, it was evening and already dark and only one house showed any light.

I imagined saying - ‘good evening, 37 years ago there was someone called Alan who lived in this row, do you know what happened to him?’

I haven’t seen Alan since the one time Bob and I visited and I eventually lost touch with Bob a few years later in Mexico -the last time I saw him we were fishing together on a beach in the Baja California, two girlfriends waiting for us and our uncertain futures.

I knocked on the door, rang the bell and heard movement. I imagined that someone called out asking who was there.

I started to speak, “hi, I’m looking for….” when the door opened .

It was Alan as he could be today and his wife.

No one spoke, there was no need, and we hugged there in the doorway.

I can feel the intensity of it still.