Timepiece

Eight minutes until it is tomorrow - this is necessarily a very brief blip. I remain on the nostalgia-go-round. Meals, alcohol and blinkered, self-serving speeches at my old college, which I clapped politely. For two years, I ate in this room (this is roughly half of it) thrice daily for six nights out of seven, twenty-four weeks a year. The day is about recreating the experience, but with people who are now - for good or ill - aware of what their lives became, rather than anxious about what might be

The tables and benches are the same, but different - no longer scarred, pitted and stained. The ceiling is no longer blackened by a century of candle-soot. The food is highly engineered, unrecognisable and a work of visual art. In our memories; then, it was... appalling. The acoustics did not matter so much all those decades ago. It is much easier to recognise most people by their voices and mannerisms than their physical appearance. The fundamentals of character do not shift very far, whatever we believe about ourselves

The friends I had before are closer friends still. The memory of those lost to death is stronger. Tomorrow (no, today) is a return to the present