PhilHydePhotos: About Time

Time is relative.

Time and relatives. Now there’s a story…

Doctor Who famously described time as a big ball of wibbly wobbly, timey wimey, stuff. He should know.

It certainly varies hugely from place to place and person to person.

Take the other weekend as an example. In France, May is traditionally packed end-to-end with bank holidays. This year, they tried experimenting by stuffing in an extra one.

Everybody in France knew this. Everybody except us…

We set off north in our newly renovated camper van. The roads were empty, the supermarkets closed. Strange for a Thursday, maybe the financial crisis has hit harder than I thought.

We stopped, on the way, next to a lake north of Limoge, where Sky professed her love for water.

We did the usual stuff, checking out the local old buildings in Mortemar…

…even wandering into the local deity establishments.

So far so good.

This was not to last…

We were heading for the amazing French version of a theme park, Le Puy du Fou. We had our first clue that all was not as it should be when parking in the special motorhome area. Here were well over a thousand vans, replete with teeming masses. Not a good sign.

Thus followed a day of mahousive queues.

This park has some seriously amazing shows featuring seriously amazing special effects.

This would normally be good but, alas, to queue for two hours to see each show does dampen one’s spirits somewhat…

We were with Annick’s siblings.

This is a close family. Big and close.

This was a truly exhausting day, where time concertinad between laborious queues and exciting shows.

We fell into bed comatose that night, ready for our journey home.

On leaving the next morning, we stopped off on the coast near Bordeaux, the Isle d'Oléron.

We had fallen directly into a giant trap.

This island, a somewhat larger version of Barry Island in South Wales, had been attracting the masses over the holiday period like flies to a warm dead thing.

We were next to the sea, so took Sky for her first visit to an ocean.

Strangely, Sky, the well known water dog, discovered that water can fight back. She is actually scared of the sea. Wimp.

The accumulated masses of holidaymakers all left the island at the same moment. Along with us. What should have been a three hour journey home turned into a twelve hour bore-fest with the giant autoroute car park being battered at the same time by violent storms.

Nice.

Time had seemingly been stretched thinly over the canvas of that four day period. Time, however, can also be stretched in other ways in other dimensions. Time can be stretched and confounded by things other than planetary masses. It can be confounded by family.

My wife’s family is nearly ubiquitous. They seem to be everywhere all of the time. Kinda scary but also kinda comforting. My side of the family however are somewhat more scarce. Both in number and in proximity.

Take my brother for instance. Go on, take him. Here he is…

He and I see each other rarely. The last time was two years ago when we cast mum’s ashes into the void. (Lake Windermere actually.)

We have both taken very different paths in life. Very different. And yet, as if by the hand of some ever present but invisible Hand of Fate, we have both arrived, in our dotage, in very similar places. Very similar.

The reasons for our seperate paths may have been, in a way, responsible for keeping us apart, but there were other factors that neither of us were aware of before we met again, some sunny day.

That time has been lost to us, but whatever the causes, we have to put them where they belong, in the past.

And so, dear readers, to the present. An invitation to visit Mallorca and join my big Bruv and his missus for a few days of relaxation.

The world held its breath. Was this to be a long awaited burying of the hatchet? Where was it to be buried?

The omens were not favourable. We were to take off that morning in an Airbus A320 from Bordeaux to Palma. The very same morning that an A320 had disappeared over the Mediterranean!

Obviously we made it.

We started our visit in a restaurant overlooked by the stunning Palma cathedral…