As a reference back to timepiece 1 my wife has bought me a new watch. Conveniently, we were staying in a hotel in a city that was not our own when she bought it, so the golden rules of being in love and on the lam still hold true.
But that is not what this is about.
This happens once in a while, but not so often, and not with such intensity that I have ever felt like reporting on it before, even to myself. Its just a feeling I get when passing some folk in the street. I get the feeling that someone has just passed from another time. I don’t mean that their choice of clothing is suspect. I mean that when they pass and I look at their face, I feel myself transported back to the Middle Ages, or the Dark Ages, or some other age that lives only in oil paint and difficult English.
Something in the quality of their face, or the gait, or the clothing…
A woman brushed close by me this morning. She had a high forehead, thin, thin lips, and a tracing of a blonde moustache. She gazed ahead as if in formal sitting for a portrait. I had the sudden waft of linseed oil and National Galleries, and the fact that she was framed by trucks and buses and electric light seemed all wrong. Close by – you could hear stable noises, and hear her walking on hay and cobbles. Her buttons, were, I insist, 500 years old.
The more I dwell on this and similar encounters I now find myself wondering whether I am dragging them out of the Dark Ages or if they are pulling me back.
