Slipping in Time

I think my sense of linear time is a little off.

Well, okay, it's always been dodgy. Left to my own devices, I can't really tell the difference between an hour and five minutes. Remembering what I did this morning has always been a challenge - along with what I was about to do, or what I ate for dinner two nights ago. I occasionally get yesterday confused with three days ago...

But for the last couple of years I've found I sometimes forget exactly when I am.

This is particularly so when I half wake up in the middle of the night after I've heard a noise or something. It usually takes me a minute to remember which house I'm in so I can work out what's likely to be causing the noises. As I've been living in that house for almost four years now, you'd think it wouldn't be such a challenge.

Strangely, when I'm on holidays and sleeping in a different bed every night, I always seem to know exactly where and when I am. It's only when I'm sleeping in the same place for several nights in a row (or months, as is the case with my house) that I get misplaced.

There's also slippage in my 'half thoughts'. Just today I thought about something I wanted to do towards the end of the month - visit a book fair - and I half thought I might drop by my grandmother's house and show her the books I found. It took me a second to remember that I live in that house, she hasn't lived there for over a year, and she died last week.

Heck, the version of my grandmother I was thinking of visiting hasn't been around for years.

For some reason my internal clock just slipped back about six years, and it all seemed like a perfectly reasonable way to spend a weekend.

It would have been, too.