Portal

In the place where I work, there is a noise. Richard recognised it today: it sounds like we are in an aircraft at 30,000 feet, cruising speed. We sit in a part of the building where the space is about the width of a plane with the same flat white light.

No wonder all we really want to do is watch a film and drink those small bottles of booze. Thankfully, we have more legroom. There is no meal service.

Then I started to think about how maybe whenever we come into this space, we do 'go' somewhere... and when we leave it's like we have landed in a new place. You step outside and what was day is now night and the air is strange. Perhaps every time we step out into a new reality. Perhaps, in the place we left the first time, time has passed with no Donald Trump or Brexit, no Boris Johnson or coronavirus. In another dimension, we live lives in a place where global warming has been slowed and the future, though less flamboyantly technological, is brighter and more assured.

The company moved into this building maybe in 2013 I think. I can't remember what the world was like then. If it felt safer. My life had horses still... but a crisis was coming. And one was already past.

Seven years. I think that seven years is a traditional curse. Once when I didn't want to give money to gypsies, they said that if I did not the 'Old Man' would curse me for seven years. Same as a broken mirror. My age is not divisible by seven. I am starting a new era, one year nearly in. Is it better than the last? I do not know.

But my maths is bad. We are eight years into the new building. In the second era, then, of this new world - in which we know that it is a portal. That we left our real fates behind some sunny August day...