Finding a moment to reflect

TIME is a funny thing, isn’t it? It bends and twists like old knicker elastic and feels about as reliable. It was tricky at the best of times, when life was normal and none of us had heard of social distancing.

“Where did THIS week go?” we would enquire of each other on a Friday, eyeing the calendar and wondering aloud how it got to be May already.

As a kid in the 1970s, Sunday afternoons seemed to go on until Tuesday and school summer holidays lasted forever, yet as an adult, time speeds by from one year to the next, measured in birthdays and holidays and increasing grey hairs.

Time particularly enjoys playing with us over Christmas when days cease to have relevance – don’t even get me started on Bank Holidays – and while good times fly past, waiting times drag.

In these lockdown days, of course, time is having more wicked fun than ever, what with Mondays feeling like Thursdays, and while the days are long, weeks seem short.

It’s all frankly discombobulating. This week though, time did me a favour, albeit a bitter sweet one.

Clearing out what we laughingly refer to as the office, I came across an old video camera. And inside, just like in all the best Hollywood films, was some old footage.

It was Christmas. The kids were two and four and were ripping open gifts of dollies and bikes, oblivious to my husband’s instructions to look into the camera.

My daughter sported the tiniest of pigtails and a dummy, my son a smart shirt from Next and excited eyes.

There was our old living room – remember that couch? – and our old kitchen with the flowery wallpaper and me with longer hair and the look of a parent who had been awake since 4am.

How long ago it all seemed.

And then, as the camera panned round, there were my mum and dad – and it was like no time at all.

My mum, showing her granddaughter how to feed the new ‘baby’ with a bottle and laughing with delight – the same cackle my daughter has now. My dad, in his usual sports jacket and slacks, proudly watching his grandson ride up and down the hall on a bike.

Their voices, their mannerisms, lost to me now for more than 15 years but brought fleetingly back to life again courtesy of an old camera.

It was both painful and wonderful and I watched it again and again, enjoying my parents’ company from a decade and a half ago.

They say time is a thief but sometimes – just sometimes – it gives back to you something more precious than words.