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It is cold and grey here today… the weather is being very English, with that insidious, almost invisible rain that soaks you to the skin. The tables of the chocolaterie are deserted on the pavement opposite my office window, and the temperature in here reminds me that most of this village dates back 400 years or more.
The roofs of the buildings across the street are bowed and undulating like waves. Time has broken their pride and the buildings sit with slumped shoulders huddled against the winter chill.
Yet, they survive. Time has left its scars, yet those scars have now become soft and beautiful in our eyes. The old houses hum with quiet memory. Anne Boleyn stayed here as a young and beautiful woman, before Henry cast his eyes upon her and sealed her fate. She would have seen some of the same houses and inns that I can see from here today.
The windows, like sightless eyes reflect time and it is easy to lose oneself in the contemplation of a moment long gone.
The house across the street had an incendiary bomb through the room during the war… that old lady with her loaf of bread under her arm, crossing the street today, may have seen it fall.
Permanence and change, continuity and movement, like great tides lift and carry us along in the current of life. Separated by centuries, yet part of the human flotsam in the stream of life. Part of that continuity.
I can see my own past in the little girl trotting along with her hand in grandma's hand, my own future in grandma as she smiles fondly down.
Time, standing still and moving inexorably onward, tracing the spiral.
I was, and I will be, but right now, I AM, and there is no difference between them, only the angle of perception.
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