Let's do the timewarp again

Time has been looping the loop and tying me in knots over the long Easter weekend. I spent it in Lincolnshire with my parents, and I'm guessing it must be the required adjustment to an elderly routine which has made yesterday morning feel like last week and all the days run into a blur.

And then one afternoon I was catapulted back almost 30 years, an experience that left me feeling oddly shaken. My first boyfriend's mum has kept in intermittent touch with my parents over the years and we've often spoken of going to see his parents during one of my visits, but for one reason or another it never happened. And then last autumn his dad died unexpectedly of a heart attack, one of those events that shocks you out of the comfortable assumption that there will always be time, one day.

Quite clearly there won't, so I arranged to visit M on Easter Monday. She lives a few miles away from my parents and you'd hardly think it possible that in nearly 30 years I wouldn't have gone down that road a few times. If I have, I don't recall it, so there was that weird process of overlaying the remembered landscape with the contemporary one, knowing that I shall probably revert to my memory regardless.

M herself looks just the same, maybe a few more lines on her face. The house was just as I remembered it too, except the kitchen has been extended and faces in another direction, which was disorientating. As we chatted, all those years just seemed to peel away, like re-entering the past but with all my accumulated knowledge and experience. A real Life on Mars moment.

It was only later that evening that I realised that during the time I was a regular visitor, M, a no-nonsense mother of three, was actually younger than I am now. (Not that I ever called her by her Christian name, I'm sure, it was always Mrs T).

And the boyfriend? No, I didn't see him, except in some family photos, and judging by those, he looks much the same too. But then M said I hadn't changed a bit, apart from the grey hair, and hadn't put on any weight either. Nice that she thinks that, even nicer if it were true.