Make of This What You Will Too

In the original Make of This What You Will, posted here shortly after my wife’s passing in 2020, I related the tale of strange goings-on in my house that appeared to relate to her. Well I’ve always been  susceptible to unusual phenomena, and I might well tell the story of my Guardian Angel one day. But that’s for another day: this particular post concerns an event that occured mid 2022. Today I took my Yamaha along part of the road upon which the event happened. My body cam captured the locations most pertinent to the tale, which is brief but inexplicable.  But first let me set the scene. A scene that takes us back to the mid-seventies, and my best pal, Steve…

Steve spent a lot of time in the house I shared with my parents. Like most youngsters we watched very little TV, but if something interesting happened along, he would often stay late to watch it with me. On this particular night he had an early start for work the following morning, so he departed my house half-way through the hour-long documentary we were watching. Riding his motorcycle home, which normally took him ten to fifteen minutes, he found his father watching the same documentary. So he sat himself down to watch the last fifteen minutes of it. To his consternation he recognised the portion of the broadcast. It was the same segment he had watched with me a half-hour earlier. Somewhat amazed he checked the wall clock: it displayed a time that preceded his departure from my house.  He had arrived home before he’d left my house! The only explanation he could conceive was that he had traveled through time. When he told me, I concurred. I have related this tale several times through the years. People suggest that perhaps his father had recorded the show on a VCR, and was watching it a half-hour later. Good idea – if the average Briton had owned a VCR back then. But they didn’t: they were as rare as hens teeth or rocking horse shit. In fact the only video recorder that any of us had seen up until that time, was the example that William Shatner’s character showed Peter Falk in the Columbo episode Fade to Murder. In any case, how could he have recorded the second half before it had aired? Now (to use a VCR term) Fast Forward to 2022. I’ve departed my late wife’s step mother’s house in my Skoda Octavia.,.

I’m on my way home via the country route,  which takes me to this tiny roundabout at the foot of a long , gentle ascent…

Turning left I start up the climb…

Around the corner I pass a side road named Crouch Lane, which separates the urban sprawl of Horndean from the hamlet of Catherington…

A kilometre (approx) later a white Ford Transit pulls out of a side road – forcing me to test the ABS by braking heavily whilst swerving…

Regaining my momentum and reconfiguring my sphincter, I move on – pleased to have survived the encounter. Moment’s later I pass by a flint wall that runs too close to the road for comfort. No room for error – especially when a large lorry passes by in the opposite direction…

What should have happened next is that I continue around the bend, with private dwellings to my left and a public house to my right, followed by a school and a church…

But this doesn’t happen. Instead I get a’ What The Fuck?’ moment. Everything has changed. I’m not approaching the top of the hill anymore: I’m at the bottom again! I’m just around the bend from Crouch Lane all over again!

For the next thirty seconds and an approximate kilometre of road, I’m trying to make sense of the situation.  Then I remember the white van pulling out in front of me. So I slow in preparation. Guess what – it pulled out in front of me, as anticipated: but this time I was ready for it and had no need for sudden braking. But as I continued past the flint wall for the second time, I sincerely hoped that I wasn’t trapped in some form of causality loop: that I would gain the uppermost section of the hill…

Well the fact that I’m writing this and have this photographic proof of my existence in the here and now, my prayers appear to have been answered. But what really happened? Did I travel back in time by half a minute? Or did I dimension-jump from an almost identical reality into this one? Or something else entirely? Hmmm- spooky. And true too!

P.S Is it any wonder that I became a writer of science-fiction and fantasy! I think they call it ‘living the dream’. Or should that be ‘nightmare’?

P.P.S If I did swap dimensions, did the ‘other’ me take my place? Did he have a weird thirty-second moment too?

Advertisement