Memory is synaesthetic. Sights, sounds, smells, sensations ? all can prompt the sudden and unexpected recall of an old memory, musty, frayed around the edges and long since consigned to the dustbin of your mind, or so you thought.
Prising myself away from my desk a few weeks ago, I walked the 15 minutes to our nearest corner shop. The sky was a crisp blue, clouds sculled across it like fluffy white boats on a mill-pond sea. It was definitely a spring day, one that might in a few weeks metamorphose into summer, but for the moment it remained a pupa of a day, fat with possibilities but not yet ready to take wing.
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From the category archives:
four corners
From Christopher Robbins on Four Corners:
It's December. It's cold. You're using a sleeping bag. You have to wear a sweater when you bike to work in the mornings. This is Africa, what is going on?
Harmattan is going on, when the cool winds from the Desert blow in the cool, dry air, bringing a soft mist of fine red sand. You walk around with a a permatan from that red dust all over your skin, and if you were silly enough to bring any electronics here in the first place, consider them donated to the desert gods.
It's everywhere - in the air that fills your lungs, in the ground beneath your feet, in the water you drink. In your teeth. It permeates everything, often unseen, unnoticed, unfelt.
But pause a while, sharpen your senses, plant your heels firmly and connect to the rest of the world. Feel it seep up into your body, feel it circulate in your blood, feel it ebb and flow through you, binding you to the rest of time, to your forebears, to your descendants.
You cannot move in Britain for history. Modern, medieval, prehistory. History is here in abundance. Not just the buildings, in the dark oaken beams of a 13th century coaching inn, the fine sweep of majestic Georgian terraces or the peaceful solitude of a Saxon church built on ground that was sacred long before Christianity was brought to the British Isles.
Read more on Four Corners
Like a fish-eye lense that takes in more than you can view with the naked eye alone, Four Corners brings together contributors from the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa and Oceania in a brand new group blog. Four Corners seeks to straddle boundaries, meld cultures and create a global shared storytelling experience for both writers and readers.
I was delighted when Robert Daeley asked me to contribute to Four Corners. There is with Four Corners an opportunity for me to write essays that might seem out of place here on my own blog. It?s an opportunity I relish - it gives me a chance to get my teeth into subjects that perhaps I otherwise wouldn?t write about.
In the interests of cross-pollination, I shall post here the opening paragraphs of my essays on Four Corners and I invite you to pop across and see what else this new and undoubtedly fascinating blog has to offer.
Please do let me know what you think.
