MY FAVOURITE FORM OF TIME TRAVEL

I got in the car today to go and get sandwiches. Something strange happened. As I closed the door, I caught the scent of something - a sort of car smell, nothing specific, just hot plastic, or seatbelt or something; a very familiar, but also a very lovely old smell.

I started the engine, but I was already in deep. What is this? Nostalgia? I suppose it could have been that - but there was no melancholy, just a happy reminder that maybe the world is much bigger than I've allowed myself to remember. I drove, clumping the car off the kerb and feeling intrigued.

I think it might have been a sort of repressed form of hope. I'm not certain I understand why hope would hit me at lunchtime on a very ordinary Friday, but I suppose whatever it was, it was so different, and so joyful, that it just reminded me of a world out there I have forgotten about - and it felt like nostalgia, because there was a time when I once knew it.

The world is very difficult isn't it? We can always look back with rose-tinted spectacles of course, but it does seem much bleaker than it ever did. I miss church - not the version we have now, but perhaps the carefree version we used to have. I miss my old house with all its rooms and stairs, and I miss feeling young.

And then one showery day in late August, it seems I got swept up in it all again. Perhaps it is just that: nostalgia. Sometimes I get the feeling that people dismiss nostalgia as a waste of time, a trivial thing that you can't do anything about so you might as well snap out of it. I don't know. To me it feels like my favourite form of time travel. But is it forwards or backwards?

If it's hope, I mean real hope, then perhaps out there in the car I caught a waft of the future. Perhaps there are excellent times ahead I'm not going to want to miss. Perhaps there's an end coming to the mindless ocean I so often feel silenced by, and this pandemic has exacerbated. Honestly, if it weren't for the friends I have, I think I'd be lost in the waves.

I got sandwiches. The world is weird. Masks and distancing, fear and control; social media wars and sniping from the valleys. Nobody knows who to believe, and everyone's merely surviving on their best intention. You know what. I don't think it's good enough for me. I need hope. I needed that little ripple of joy from another time, from another moment.

I have to believe there's more than this.