It's August 1974. I'm on what will be my last summer family vacation together with my parents and my brother. I am 16.
We are on the last leg of a motoring holiday to Scotland having stayed at bed & breakfasts in different locations along the way. Heading north, we passed through Glasgow, drove up to the Isle of Skye, across the Great Glen alongside Loch Ness to Inverness, up into the Highlands, and then we turned south for the long journey back down to London.
My father decides that to save on a night's B&B, he'll drive down from Scotland in one go, stopping for a nap at a motorway service station somewhere along the way. Our car at the time, a metallic brown 1973 Mk III Ford Cortina 1.6 XL*.
We have just stopped at one service station as night falls; I have bought a tin of sarsaparilla-flavoured soft drink. I've never seen it before, and I would never see it again. I cannot recall the brand; it was not well-known, like Barr's or Corona. The design of the can intrigued me; the brand name was written in a typeface styled to look like neon lighting; it is very American. I had never tasted sarsaparilla before, but it was immediately familiar. Quite unlike Coke or Pepsi. Later on, I'd get to try root beer in McDonalds (1975), and sarsaparilla in the America (1978), but this was a first for me. The nearest taste I could associate with this was dandelion and burdock, but it was clearly different.
I drifted off to sleep. My brother sitting next to me and my mother in the front passenger seat had also dozed off, my father was driving. The motorway traffic was relatively light 50 years ago; I slept listlessly, woken frequently by the lights at junctions flashing by. Somewhere around Sheffield, or maybe further south, that hypnotic strobing woke me up and PAFF! I found myself experiencing one of those strong exomnesia moments. I looked outside. Slip-roads and bridges, over and under; a well-lit. motorway junction. The lights of a big city not far away.
I have experienced this before – but not in this lifetime. It felt like America. A brand-new highway interchange at night, mid-1950s. A powerful and profound moment, after which I fall asleep again.
This particular moment comes back to me from time to time; that telescoping of a flashback through a flashback, to one of which I can clearly attribute a time and a place. Through it, and in it, I experience an anomalous qualia moment that I cannot attribute to this lifetime – and yet it felt so utterly real. This compound déjà vu experience is fundamental to my spiritual quest.
Our bodies are but single-use containers for our souls, that evolve along with our unfolding universe, journeying from Zero to One, continually evolving, learning, growing. Intimations from past biological existences seep through into our waking consciousness, forming an ephemeral link between the material and the spiritual,
[*This is also the car that I associate with the Three-Day Week in the UK (Feb-Mar 1974), when due to power cuts resulting from the miners' strikes, we had to drive out to whichever suburbs still had electricity, so that we could eat takeaway fish and chips in the car. We'd have the radio on, listening to David Bowie and T-Rex.]
Two years ago:
Interstices (junction of S7 and S2 expressways just ahead of its opening to traffic)
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Jeziorki in May
This time eight years ago:
The eyes... the eyes...
This time nine years ago:
New old terminal open at Okęcie airport
This time 11 years ago:
Arrogance vs. humility
This time 12 years ago:
Warsaw looking good ahead of the football-fan influx
This time 13 years ago:
Heron over Jeziorki
This time 17 years ago:
Present rising, future loading
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