In 1990 I moved house in Nottingham from Carlton to Mapperley and four years later I decided to move my television to a place in the southern corner, with a plain wall on the left and a bay window on the right, looking south west across Porchester.
One night I was watching the telly when .........
...... I suddenly realized that it was in virtually the same place in the room as in my previous house (apart from a fireplace on the left wall), with an open view across Carlton Valley on the right. Well, it didn't quite occur to me like that, but rather I felt I was in the old house. Outside of the room was not my Mapperley residence but the one-time Carlton home, with its little L-shaped hallway leading off to two bedrooms, bathroom, kitchen, and front door. The lay-out of my present house was totally different, but hard as I tried to remember what it was, I couldn't, and my mind seemed to be locked inside the old house. It was as if moving the TV into that position had triggered an old memory circuit in my brain. After several minutes the Mapperley house returned.
Many years later I moved house again, to the Isle of Skye, and after the passage of two winters, in a room looking 36 miles across to the Outer Hebrides, ......
...... I once again shifted the TV into a corner, this time with the wall to the left having a fireplace, as in the old Carlton house, but the wall to the right of the TV being just a plain wall. As I was watching, the wall to the right dissolved, for tiny flakes of time, revealing a huge landscape, like lightning flashes in the mind illuminating a long forgotten world still existing somewhere deep in a memory, hidden in a tiny cupboard of proteins and lipids.
