The ‘Year It All Started To Go Wrong’

UNTIL

the infamous ‘Year It All Started

To Go Wrong’, time used to jog merrily along at a steady enough pace, good-naturedly complying to its usual cycle of days, months, seasons and so on without any rebellious attitudes to confuse our poor little human minds. Then somehow, in 2020, the usually well-behaved Time gave up its linear structure, only to become a tangled mess that nobody has yet been able to smooth out. Regular life was brought to a complete standstill with little to no warning — desperately hiding from the menacing hands of Covid-19 — leaving us floundering in an eternal stage of waiting.

“It’s only for a few weeks” became “it’ll be over by next month”, which then turned into “we’ll be clear of this in a year’s time”, constantly pushing back the date for our return to freedom and normality. Sitting at home, confined to a repetitive reality made us realise just how fragile time is, and while monotonous silence replaced the familiar ticking of the time flux, we may have been reminded of how the slippery tricks of time have been handled in literature. Stopped clocks feature in both poetry and prose, reminding us that time stops for noone, no matter how hard we try to stunt its progress; Dickens’ eerie Miss Havisham stagnates in her existence, surrounded by frozen clocks marking the moment her heart was broken, whereas the silent and

immobile cuckoo clock in Dickinson’s A Clock

Stopped serves as a reminder that everything moves slowly towards death, regardless of clockmakers’ apparent power over time. Faced with this bleak prospect, it can be hard to retain hope, but Camus’ The Plague seems to offer some more comforting answers. Although this book was written in the 1940s, the uncanny familiarity of a quarantined city in the midst of a pandemic may have been a comfort to readers struggling in lockdown; we are (perhaps naively) shown that friends and family anchor us in times of crisis, and that hope lives on in patient, everyday habits and routines. Now that we’ve (mostly) escaped from the restraints that Covid demanded, time seems to have caught up with us all too fast. Nobody can quite say what happened, yet we all find ourselves three years older, but with nothing to show for it. Does society still place the same value on time as it always has? If we qualify our time based on our experiences, then the period of time which confined us to our homes is just a big blank page in our yearbooks, an empty memory, a temporal void. Can we really pretend to go back to a normal experience of time, pretending 2020 was just a momentary pause in our timestream, or will we constantly be looking over our shoulders for evidence of those forgotten years, in a Proustian struggle against reality, endlessly in search of lost time?

Jake Avery, Music Editor, writes a short prose piece on childhood and memory Stig

THERE Stig lay at the centre of his nest; I gradually uncovered the newspapers that had concealed him for the last 14 years, and gently picked him up. Placing him in my hand and observing him brought back a cascade of memories; the countless days that I’d spent crawling amongst the undergrowth, peering through the branches into the wilderness of my garden, searching for him as he hid between the moss-covered stones and damp soil. The scratches over his surfaces warped as I inspected him, the flashlight beam moving across his spines projecting a hypnotic parade of shadows onto the attic wall. Many years spent in the dense foliage of the backyard had toughened his exterior and faded his once-luscious lime-green hide; nonetheless, here he was, still the same reptilian companion that I’d grown up with.

I delicately wrapped him in cloth and began to crawl across the floor, feeling the occasional bite of fibreglass lining gnawing away at my legs. The material glistened over the floor in a fine coating; every box had formed a layer of uncorrupted dust. The air sat with a stillness, existing only as a cavity unaffected by the passage of time. Every breath I cast sent clouds of the silver silk pouring over the room.

As I reached the window and began to apply force, the panel released and swung open with a jarring creak. Pink light poured in through the porthole, flickers of the dying sun passing through in strokes.

My silhouette looked unrecognizable in comparison to the last time we’d sat together; his hadn’t changed at all. He had been frozen in the jaws of stasis, the attic a vessel unaffected by the erosion of time.

The rooftops decorated the horizon and glinted in the hazy afterglow of the day. I lay my scaly friend on top of the tiles of the roof, and we gazed together out towards the horizon. I pondered over what he might see. Those rounded black eyes like marbles soaked in the view of the distance after years of hiding inside of a box of old sports certificates, outgrown shirts and yellowing milk teeth. What thoughts were shooting through his mind? I wondered. Did he even recognise me?

Tracing my finger around the edges of his beak, I was brought back to the beach trips and forest walks that we’d shared together. He was always there; waking up from a nap on car journeys and immediately reaching for the grasp of his reassuring tail brought the most satisfying of comforts. It was instinct. Yet I couldn’t remember the day when I cast him up into the attic, condemned to an existence consisting of cardboard walls. I’d always relied on him for joy. He’d also been useless to me for most of my life.

I climbed down from the ledge and stole a final look at the sun as it departed behind the urban expanse. I also captured a final stare at Stig the Stegosaurus. I liked to imagine that he would be grinning were it not for the fact that he was made of plastic. I left him basking in the sun, and as I climbed down from the attic ladder, I reminded myself that I’d moved on so far in life since I’d last seen him; and now, so had he.