Fifty Years with Virginia Plain

Somewhere in Pembrokeshire, south-west Wales, family holiday - hot summer's day, August 1972. I'm 14, and back from three weeks on Polish scout camp. We're in my father's company car (a metallic brown Ford Cortina 1.6 GL) my parents, my brother and me. The radio's on. Radio One. Suddenly - this: piano, wailing synth... sounds familiar - and yet unlike anything I've ever heard...

and my world is changed. Suddenly - a magical world has been created (or maybe recreated?) - the Past and the Future - merged. Fifty years ago today, Roxy Music's first single, Virginia Plain entered the UK charts. Hearing it for the first time, I recognised straight away, the sublime aesthetic. This was not one of those songs that grows on you. The effect was startling. I had to hear that record again! Fortunately, it was on high rotation and would be played over and over again, it would stay in the charts for 12 weeks, peaking at number four.

In a low-fi world of AM radio, the lyrics were never clear - half of them I wouldn't grasp until the advent of the CD - but the soundscape was spot on - the future as imagined in the past - the past as remembered in the future. Glamour, excitement, sophistication - intelligence - art. Stepping way outside the spirit of the age, as only David Bowie could back then. A song as unformulaic as can be - no verse/chorus verse/chorus middle eight verse/chorus  repeat-chorus-to-fade structure here - a song which ends with its title. "Far beyond the pale horizon/Some place near the desert strand, Where my Studebaker takes me/That's where I'll make my stand..." Instantly familiar - and yet... why? The imagery is Hollywood Americana, 1930s to 1950s (referencing Flying Down to Rio, made in 1933, and Last Picture Show, set in 1951). "What's real and make-believe" - indeed. What is real? What is make-believe?

On my return to London, back from the school holidays, a new term, starting the fourth year. I discover that Roxy Music has an album out, called simply, Roxy Music. The single Virginia Plain is not on the LP. A friend has it and tapes it for me - in mono. And that would really open the door to a new perception. Pop and rock had been an important and ever-present part of life since childhood, a shared soundtrack to growing up, but this was something I felt was uniquely personal.

But then looking at that week's charts, I can see that soul music made up one quarter of all the UK hits. And what classic slabs they were too - Al Green's I'm Still In Love With You; Roberta Flack's The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face; the Stylistics' Betcha By Golly Wow; Bill Withers' Lean on Me; Love Unlimited's Walking In The Rain With The One I Love; songs from Michael Jackson, the Supremes, the Four Tops, Bobby Hebb, Donny Hathaway and Roberta Flack, Chairmen of the Board; re-releases from Jackie Wilson and Mary Wells. Music that has stayed with me over the decades.

Which reminds me to remind my readers to tune in, as I do every week, to Yours Sinsoully on West Wilts Radio, live on Fridays (9-11pm UK time, 22:00-00:00 on the Continent), hosted by my classmate from Gunnersbury, MJDJ - two hours of classic soul/funk/R&B, with past shows available to listen to again.

This time last year:
The Curve (and one's place on it)

This time three years ago:
Fifty years on, my last kolonia

This time nine years ago:
Grodzisk Mazowiecki's pretty station

This time 10 years ago:
Exorcism outside the President's Palace

This time 11 years ago:
The raging footsoldier - a story about anger

This time 12 years ago:
Graffiti and street art 

Familiarity, revisited

Me: "There's no direct equivalent in Polish for the word 'familiarity'."

Stock response: "Yes there is - it's znajomość".

Nowhere near, I'd argue. Look at the etymology. 'Familiar' shares the same root as the word 'family'. From the Latin familia, or 'household'; Znajomość, like the word znajomy - acquaintance - has its root in the verb znać, 'to know'. Znajomość is defined as 'relacja osób, opierająca się na utrzymywaniu ogólnych, niezbyt bliskich stosunków' ('relationship of people, based on maintaining general, not very close relationships'). 

"Are you familiar with the works of James Joyce?" "No, but I am acquainted with them." 

There's a big difference.

Familiarity is defined as 'close or habitual acquaintance with someone or something; understanding or recognition acquired from experience'.

It's that second part I want to focus on - 'understanding or recognition acquired from experience'. Familiarity - with a landscape, with music, with taste - with all manner of subjective experience - is a matter of consciousness. Something you intuitively feel - or not. A period of history, a place in space and time - do you feel it - or not? It either clicks, or suits, or falls into place in your consciousness - or it doesn't. The familiar is congruent. It fits. 

Familiarity is important, just as comfort is important. If something is unfamiliar, it can be uncomfortable. But something strange or even eerie can be comfortably familiar. 'Strangely familiar' is itself a familiar term, suggesting a common experience.

My childhood included numerous conscious moments of anomalous familiarity - "where do I know that feeling from?" A snatch of melody, a particular cloud formation, an old motorbike, a scent - intimate experiences, unique to me, outside of ego or imagination, yet instantly familiar to me and only me.

These flashbacks of anomalous familiarity occur to me a couple of times a week, more often when the seasons change. I had one on this evening's walk - I turned west towards a sun setting towards a flat horizon in a cloudless sky, under the wide brim of my bush-hat. Strongly familiar yet not West Ealing or Warwickshire.

They are pleasant and bring me comfort and indeed joy. And with them comes a sense that life is less transient than our physical selves - biological containers for our egos - think it is.

[Update Jan 2023: One suggestion I was offered was bliskość - (literally 'nearness') - good one! And the adjective, for familiar, would be bliski/bliska/bliskie. Thank you, A!]

This time four years ago:
Karczunkowska viaduct - further delays

This time ten years ago:
Russia's going home

This time 15 years ago:
Sun and zenith rising

Dreams of birth?

I write about dreams from time to time; not from any 'interpretation' point of view, but rather seeking more scientific answers. Dreaming is an essential part of our human condition - indeed, many pet owners are sure their cats or dogs dream too. The scientific study of dreams is oneirology, and while relating individual dreams can be boring to everyone other then the dreamer, grouping dreams by type is useful.

I dreamt this morning of Hanwell station, though not Hanwell station - it was bigger and grander and located further west than in reality, a brictorian edifice modernised in the 1960s with BR Rail Alphabet signage, a BR-era cafeteria and lighting. Yet what makes this dream significant is the passages. To get to the platform from the Uxbridge Road, I had to crawl - on hands and knees - through a narrow tunnel under the tracks, lined with ceramic tiles. The tunnel was so narrow in places that I could feel my back scraping on its ceiling. I had to crawl quickly to catch my train... here and there, I had to avoid horse dung. How on earth could horses pass through here?, I pondered. Still, I pressed on, reaching the stairs at the end, at the top of which was yet another narrow passage sloping down to the platform.

In the photo below (courtesy of Google Maps Street View - an excellent resource for tracking down the topographic settings of one's dreams), we have the Uxbridge Road. In my dream, instead of the 'Advertise here' billboard there ran a tunnel cut into the railway embankment to emerge by the station buildings on the other side of the tracks. The station in my dream was located 1km the west of Hanwell station, and far bigger, with a smoke-filled cafeteria and wood-panelled booking hall.

The narrow-passage theme recurs in many of my dreams over my lifetime (as indeed do British railway stations). The narrow passage occurs in different contexts - squeezing onto a crowded Warsaw tram with extremely narrow, disfunctionally-folding doors up three or four very steep steps is one I've dreamt of several times.

Like Alice's rabbit-hole, the narrow passage is a metaphor - but for what? I have heard it posited maybe 30 years ago now, that such dreams are memories of birth, of the struggle out of the birth canal. Since then, the theory of dreaming-as-memory-consolidation has taken hold, but this is clearly more than the filing of quotidian experiences from which to form experience-based intelligence. [Although I must say that Friday's railway trip from W-wa Stadion to W-wa Zachodnia and reading a Wikipedia article about the Elizabeth Line that will pass through Hanwell must have set off the railway setting for the dream.] The narrow passage theme, however, is something atavistic - the universal state of being born - although the growing numbers of birth by Caesarian section (around 4%) may suggest that children born this way might not dream narrow-passage dreams. People born by Caesarian delivery who experience this type of dream often enough for it to become a familiar part of their dream repertoire would be interesting to talk to!

I shall be writing extensively during Lent about memory, consciousness and quantum physics, in a layman's attempt to bridge the gap between the material and spiritual. Dreams are, I believe, an integral part of the puzzle, the hard problem of consciousness. They exist, we experience them, yet they are ephemeral. Like the qualia we experience in waking life, dreams can be stored in our memories as fuel for further dreams. This enables the phenomenon of lucid dreaming, whereby you are conscious (in your dream) of dreaming, of being in a dream state, of experiencing familiarity in your surroundings and the type of dream.

The other significant type of dream I've had throughout my life is the 'disappointment' dream; in my childhood it was disappointment that a toy turned out, once in my hands, to be of poor quality, not the thing I had wished for, quite different to how I had initially imagined it. In my adult life, the toys have become cameras, with disappointingly poor viewfinders verging on the opaque, malfunctioning shutters, bits coming off. And the air crash dream - watching a plane crashing or falling from the sky.

More common to all of us though are dreams of being lost, dreams of falling from a great height, dreams of social awkwardness (being naked in a crowd, for example), dreams of being late. One regularly reported dream that I've very rarely (certainly not in recent decades) had is the dream of being chased by malevolent beings.

Neuroscience considers the study of dreams to be rather fringe and too subjective for serious research other than in the combating of psychological disorders; I believe that the still rather edgy area of consciousness studies will move us more and more into taking dream research seriously; after all this is something that we all experience and yet no one fully understands. It is one of those great areas that straddles the gap between empirical, reductionist materialism - we all dream, that cannot be denied - and spirituality - the quest to find our consciousness's place amid the eternal and infinite.

This time last year:
Foggy, icy, slippery day in Jeziorki

This time five years ago:
Hannah Arendt and the banality of evil

This time six year ago:
Snow scene into the sun

This time seven years ago:
More winter gorgeousness

This time eight years ago:
New winter wear - my M65 Parka

This time nine years ago:
Winter and broken-down trains

This time ten years ago:
General Mud claims ul. Poloneza

This time 11 years ago:
Just when I thought winter was over...

Familiarity, music and memory

Following up on my recent post about familiarity, tradition and identity, I'd like to focus on music.

Let me start with a quote from the Polish classic cult comedy film, Rejs.

Inżynier Mamoń: "Proszę pana, ja jestem umysł ścisły, mnie się podobają melodie, które już raz słyszałem... po prostu. No, to poprzez, no, reminiscencje. No jakże mi się możne podobać piosenka, którą pierwszy raz słyszę?"

[Rough translation... Engineer Mamoń: "I have a scientific mind, Sir; I simply like melodies that I've once already heard, Well, it's through - reminiscences. Well, how could I like a song that I'm hearing for the first time?"]

How indeed. Out of interest, I looked up the UK singles charts for this week 50 years ago. Of the Top 30, I knew pretty well every single song. Familiar songs, familiar singers, bands - from Marmalade's Oh-Bla-Di Oh-Bla-Da (a Paul McCartney composition), number 1 in mid-January 1969, through the theme music to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Canned Heat's Up the Country, Stevie Wonder's For Once In My Life or Blackberry Way by the Move. My final year at primary school, the beginning of my last (full) year living in Hanwell, this for me was the soundtrack of Class 4I at Oaklands Road Primary School.

From 40 years ago this week similar blast of familiarity - Ian Dury, Funkadelic, Chic, the Clash, Third World, Rod Stewart. Songs that remind me of where I was and how I felt (I associate many of these songs, still in the charts from the Christmas break when I was working at a Tesco warehouse in Coventry).

Over this Christmas break I asked my son Eddie, 23, to name one song that was in the charts at any time in 2018. He could not. (Neither could I, but that's not surprising). Pop today is pap, driven by algorithms that take the diversity and risk out of the music business. A tiny number of artists churn out similar sounding songs with hooks created to stick in the memory - the 'earworm' phenomenon. Gone is the rich aural texture of the 1970s. I am talking about the mainstream, about what would be on in the background, played on radios everywhere.

Inżynier Mamoń's immortal words came back to me after our Christmas drive from London to see my brother and his family. Moni had brought along her smartphone which she linked to our rented Mini's stereo system via wi-fi; we then played music streamed from the internet via Spotify. [A short aside - in my lifetime, we have progressed from in-car entertainment as being none, then AM radio the FM radio, then music cassettes, then CDs, then MP3s and now internet streaming.] Anyway, there were a few songs in Moni's playlist which I knew from the original and Moni from the cover. After hearing the cover, I suggested we listen to the original; unsurprisingly, I preferred the original, and Moni the cover - which she'd come across first, before hearing the original.

We prefer that which we hear first, that with which we are more familiar. "Some people won't dance if they don't know who's singing," sang Shirley Bassey in the Propellerheads' History Repeating. Quite. If the DJ's playing something unfamiliar to me, I won't tap a foot.

Music and memory are inextricably linked and again linked to identity. From national anthems to dance-floor anthems, we are bound together in communities by tunes and beats. But is it just a matter of familiarity? Is there something that makes one piece of music intrinsically better than another? Or is it just a matter of taste? De gustibus non est disputandum - in matters of taste, there can be no disputes. Or can there? From any objective measure, a Chopin nocturne is far more sublime than a piece of Disco Polo, played using two keys on a pocket calculator. But how to settle arguments as to whether Pink Floyd were better before or after Dark Side of the Moon? I'd say before. Much better. in fact. The Wall is crap compared to Atom Heart Mother. But why?

Science is nearer to understanding how different aspects of music - timbre, tempo, musical internal, tone, beat - in particular, their complexity - is received by the human brain. Instinct will help you find the beat and move your feet. But how a piece of music is received by your consciousness, the nuance of mood, the pictures in your mind - is a different matter. Bach's music is mathematical and precise, I find it sterile; it does not create a klimat in my consciousness other than a generic early-18th century feel. Chopin, on the other hand, is far more evocative - moonlit nights in Mazowsze.

How do you react to the unfamiliar? Do you seek connections to something that you can relate to, something you've heard before? Something you cannot recall, something you have no memory of, something that Inżynier Mamoń could not possibly like, having not heard it before?

Try this. My brother sent me a link to this - Ethiopian jazz from the late 1960s/early 1970s. Give it a try - familiar?



My brother likens this to "walking into a cloud of ground Lebanese cardamom coffee". What do you think? I'd welcome your comments!

Final thought... Looking at that Top Thirty from 50 years ago, I came across a Herman's Hermits song, which has been giving me earworm. As I reach the hook in the chorus, I get the distinct memory of the smell of plastic cement (Airfix glue). I wonder what plastic model I was sticking together on a winter's day in January 1969 as I listened to Something's Happening?

This time two years ago:
On taxation and (national) defamation

This time six years ago:
Where's Britain going to be in Europe?

This time eight years ago:
Jeziorki under water

This time nine years ago:
In a nutshell - the best science book I've ever read

This time ten years ago:
Flashback to communist times

This time 11 years ago:
Pre-dawn Ursynów

Familiarity, tradition and identity

Kraków, near the Barbakan. Christmas illuminations still on, many tourists still wandering around. I came across this fellow (below) who was surrounded by an American couple, several Spanish students and some middle-aged Brits, all taking photos with their phones. I waited until everyone got their selfies then took some snaps myself.

Here he is, familiar, isn't he - the Lajkonik or tatarzyna on his hobby horse, with long pointy beard, a marshal's baton (buława) in his hand, a pointy hat with crescent moon on it. He's familiar to anyone growing up Polish - part of the national myth, along with the Hejnał Mariacki that dates back to the Mongol invasion of Poland. It is something we learned about in Polish Saturday-school lessons in our British childhood, a simplified part of a simplified, mythologised story of our people.

But for the foreign tourists the figure is strange, unfamiliar - exotic; what does it prompt them to think about Kraków, about Poland, even subliminally?

What surrounds us becomes familiar. We move across geographies, more importantly we move through time. Walking the same West London streets that I walked over 50 years ago, I have seen old familiar things disappear and new things taking their place. The cars. The Austin A40s and Vauxhall Crestas were replaced by Hillman Avengers and Ford Grenadas, then Golf GTIs and Toyota Carinas, now Nissan Jukes and Audi Q5s. Road signs, street lights. High-street shops change. Dolcis, Tru-Form and Woolworth's have gone. The people that inhabit these streets change. Their clothes, even their smell. We've become more hygienic. Newcomers - at first from the former colonies, then from the Continent.

Things change, and if we are not aware of these imperceptible small changes as they happen, their loss can breed a longing for the past. And this subconscious longing, when linked to a resentment stemming from the lack of success in one's life, can make one susceptible to false myths peddled by populism.

Over the centuries the Lajkonik has come to symbolise something that never happened. The Krakovians didn't successfully repel the Mongol hordes - the Mongol hordes continued to invade, occupy, capture, destroy and harass Polish cities for the best part of 250 years, right up to the end of the 15th century. But at Corpus Christi, the myth is celebrated, the Lajkonik parades around Kraków's old town market square. He is a familiar part of Kraków's history and tradition, even though no one is quite sure how that tradition emerged.

I suspect that many national myths evolve in similar ways; King Arthur burning the cakes, King Canute bidding the tide not to come in, King Charles II hiding in an oak. Stories that through their familiarity form part of our national identity.

How we deal with the unfamiliar is problematic. Some of us are open to the new, we are curious, we do not feel threatened by change. Some of us are closed to it. And with that come dangers.

This time last year:
Black hat merry-go-round 
(I've found four so far this season)

This time two years ago:
Skarzysko-Kamienna and Starachowice, by train

This time three years ago:
The world mourns the loss of David Bowie

This time five years ago:
Where's the snow?

This time seven years off:
Two drink-free days a week, British MPs urge

This time eight years ago:
Depopulating Polish cities?

This time nine years ago:
Powiśle on a winter's morning

This time ten years ago:
Sunny, snowy Jeziorki

This time 11 years ago:
Eddie's giant soap bubble

Streets of my childhood, again

Spirit of place, flashbacks to childhood memories. When I'm at my father's and I have a bit of time, I will wonder down through West Ealing to Hanwell to connect with where I am from. I walked this way to school each morning as a small boy for seven years, observing. Crucial to spirit of place is the texture of reality, those qualia, those moments of conscious experience of being there. And I am drawn to relive those qualia... Sensory inputs and their effect on emotion, on the me-ness of being me. Knowing where one's from is essential to rooting your consciousness's place in the universe.

Below: Oaklands Road Primary School, which I attended from September 1962 to July 1969. Happy days!

Below: this was the parade of shops, just round the corner from our house on Croft Gardens. From left to right: Lawrence the Butchers (now a private house); Oaklands Hardware; DeVee Hair Fashions...

Below: ...now a 'Polski Sklep', this used to be Tanner's newsagents and confectioners; then W.J. George the grocers; and then with brown paper bags, earthy spuds and chromed scale-pans, the greengrocers.

Below: and on the corner of Oaklands Road and Grosvenor Road, the Grosvenor pub, the air outside heavy with the smell of spilt ale and stale tobacco smoke. Built in 1904, by the time I was a boy, the pub was just over half a century old; a passage of time lesser than that which has elapsed since the early 1960s. Up Grosvenor Road, I discover that legendary British-motorbike shop Reg. Allen on the corner of Hatfield Road, closed this summer after 60 years in business; the premises will be turned to flats.

Hanwell of my childhood - below, the public library on Cherington Road. I walked in expecting to be greeted by the smell of floor-polish and well-thumbed books, the sight of elderly gents browsing the day's newspapers in silence, but was disappointed - the building's interior no longer contains that smell which I can so vividly recall and can so readily bring to mind. Much as level-access is welcome, the ramp does upset the visual proportions of the front elevation.

Below: next door to the library, another building that was important in my childhood. This is Cherington House, built in the late 1830s, which during the 1960s served as an NHS paediatric clinic. I'd come here with my mother to collect bottled orange juice and cod-liver oil, and to have my baby brother weighed.

Below: usually we'd go home along the Uxbridge Road, sometimes down Boston Road (below), a run-down area then as it is now.

Below: a brief familiarity; from September 1969 to May 1970, I'd travel dach day to my new school, Gunnersbury Grammar, by Piccadilly line train from Boston Manor station to Acton Town. Paint Your Wagon was showing at the cinemas. The smell of that early autumn, my last in Hanwell, 1969, I can recall it as though it were yesterday. And then we moved to West Ealing, and new routes to school were found. But for nine months I'd stand on the platform here every morning and await the Cockfosters train.

The platform dates back to 1883, while the station building on Boston Manor Road is a Grade II-listed Charles Holden design from the 1930s.


This time last year:
Jeziorki - swans and bonus shots

This time three years ago:
A conspiracy to celebrate

This time four years ago:
The Mythos and the Logos in Russia

This time five years ago:
Going mobile - I get a smartofon

This time six years ago:
The world was meant to end today 

This time seven years ago:
First snow - but proper snow?

The time eight years ago: 
Dense, wet, rush hour snow

This time nine years ago:
Evening photography, Powiśle

This time ten years ago:
The shortest day of the year

This time 11 years ago:
Bye bye borders - Poland joins Schengen

Preference and Familiarity

My mother never, ever wore trousers. And my father has never worn jeans. Perhaps a generation thing. He never wears a hat. But then neither does my son Eddie wear jeans nor hats. Now that's a pure preference thing. A 21 year-old who doesn't have any jeans (and has never had any jeans) in his wardrobe is rare. We all have our own set ways.

My aesthetic tastes are shaped by the past, in particular by past visions of the future from the recent past. The postwar years, the early 1950s, were years of optimism, space-age dreams of rockets and Saturn's rings. Modernism in architecture, the automotive flights of fancy as created by Detroit - that's where I'm at. To a soundtrack by Count Basie And His Orchestra.

The notion of spiritual continuity – not the physical reincarnation of me, for that suggests that from life to life I continue being I - but more the continuity of familiarity and preference across lifetimes. How does this happen? Could this phenomenon be connected with the theory that matter consists of mass, charge and consciousness?

For me, there are times and places that resound with an immediate familiarity, that 'click' or 'PAFF!' moment, this has happened to me since early childhood. I have written about this over the years on this blog; my goal being to bring greater understanding and definition to a strange phenomenon that defines me.

One immediately familiar object that resonated with me was a toy American diesel locomotive from Święty Mikołaj (aged four years and two months). Here I am, left, at the Christmas party at the Polish Saturday school in Ealing. I have just been given a present. Very soon I will open it. I remember the sensation well. It was one of these (below), moulded in orange plastic. I pulled it out of the box and – instant recognition. I was instantly transported to another time and another place. So familiar, so pleasant. [The photo below shows a motorised toy to run on a track; mine was either push-along or with flywheel friction-drive.]

And some archive photos of the real thing – the Electro-Motive diesel locomotive.

These are images which still connect with me far more than train pictures from Britain, Europe or anywhere else on earth. Immediate familiarity. A year or two later, we visited Ruislip Lido, which had a miniature railway featuring a scale replica of the Electro-Motive diesel loco. To this day, I get flashbacks to this scene from my childhood, flashbacks that 'telescope' back even further. 

Others pieces of machinery that have the same effect have included (in the air) the Douglas DC-3 Dakota, Piper Cub, North American T-6 Texan, Chance-Vought F4U Corsair, while on the road all manner of Cadillacs, Chevrolets, Chryslers, Fords.. and Hudsons, Studebakers and Nashes, Harley-Davidsons and Indians.

But more than anything, we are defined by our tastes in music. It's natural to have a lifelong affinity for music you enjoyed during your childhood, teens and young adult years. But what determines whether we grow up preferring, say, soul over heavy metal, jazz over folk, or Ralph Vaughan-Williams over Gustav Holst. Research is definitely needed into the genetic sources of musical preference. Do certain harmonic structures, musical intervals and tempos tend to create emotional responses in people with a certain genetic variation?

Watch Louis Jordan, another of my "past life" favourites, getting all existentialist. I fundamentally agree with the tenets of his argument here.

Is there something deeper at work here? A spiritual, supernatural, (for want of a better term), rather than biological reason behind our aesthetic preferences, be it in the visual arts, the built environment or music?

This time last year:
A long day in wonderful Wrocław

This time three years ago:
Putin will not heal Russia's tortured soul

This time four years ago:
Opole, little-known town

This time five years ago:
Raise a glass to Powiśle  (Mrs G-W gets a thumbs down)

This time seven years ago:
Mud, rain and local elections (Mrs G-W gets another thumbs down)

This time nine years ago:
There must be a better way (commuting woes, again)

Dreams and visions of lives past?

Lent 2016: Day Ten

At that twilight time between wakefulness and sleep comes that sublime moment as we drift off. Catch yourself doing this lucidly. It's instructive. The mind is unwinding from the day's cares, and as it does so you can teach yourself to look over your train of thought and ask - "what was all that about?" Strange trains of thought, that seem familiar at first. And then you stop yourself, as you're worrying about some matter or other... What was it? Pulling yourself back towards wakefulness, you realise - this is entirely invented. There is no such matter bothering you. It doesn't exist! Your subconsciousness has made it all up.

More often than not, those twilight trains of thought are pleasant. On Wednesday evening I was travelling back from Birmingham. I'd had an early start, waking at 04:45. So I was tired after an intensive day chairing a conference. As the train rumbled south from the industrial Midlands, I found myself dropping off, waking up as we hit points, so I was in and out of this semi-dreamlike state. I was carried away to another time, but the same place - a century ago? Edwardian England flashed by outside.

Provincial station hotels clad in shiny tiles, tramlines through the wet cobbles; the towns gave way to countryside. Gas-lit halts through which rushed steam-hauled express trains headed for London, steam whistle shrieking, as dusk fell.* My reverie continued until I fell fast asleep, to be wakened as the train reached Solihull.

Full-blown dreams, achieved while fast asleep in the REM phase when slumber is deepest, have sometimes been so realistic in the historic sense as to make me wonder whether these are something more than the usual 'house-keeping' of the human brain

I have mentioned many times on this blog those sensations of anomalous familiarity, as flashbacks occur to moments that are not of this lifetime. These I have felt since childhood. [A detailed account of dreams and flashbacks here.] Perplexing, puzzling yet not at all unpleasant, they happen in an instant, are gone, yet leave a lingering after-taste, leave me hungering for more.

Could this be a split-second insight into a past existence/s? I don't know. A life-long quest to find out, to learn more, and I feel at the age of 58 that although I've come a fair way in being able to define this phenomenon of consciousness, I can neither identify what it is, nor where it comes from.

And although I have spoken of this phenomenon with many people, it scarcely resonates with any at all. So this is not something usual. But it is, I firmly believe, part of what it is to be me.

But what about you? Have such feelings of anomalous, anachronistic familiarity ever befallen you? Even rarely?

* Just had such a flashback - once again, Edwardian railways, clerestory coaches, milk churns by a wooden fence, moonlit night.

This time last year:
Monist or dualist: which are you?

This time This time last year:
Grim prospects for Ukraine

This time three years ago:
Wrocław's new airport terminal

This time four years ago:
A study in symmetry: Kabaty Metro station

This time five years ago:
To the Devil with it all - a short story

This time six years ago:
Waiting for the meltdown

This time eight years ago:
Flat tyre

Don't the moon look lonesome, shinin' through the trees?

Total familiarity. Walking home this evening along ul. Karczunkowska, I might as well have been in Ohio, Kentucky or Minnesota sometime in the 1950s. The full moon sky, the scents of late summer, the landscape, suburban houses on the edge of town... Atavistic resurgence in its fullest, made manifest in its familiarity.

At times like this, I feel I have lived before, I live now and will live again.

"Don't the moon look lonesome, shinin' through the trees" - a line from about a hundred and one blues songs. Above photo: 30 sec exposure at f3.5.