On hold.

When I come back, everything will be just where I left it. I’ll retrace my steps as if I had left the day before. Somehow I will have for all the house knows. The bathroom mat will still be in the corridor, away from the bleach I used to clean the sink with. The two books I couldn’t pack and the copy of Brotherwood I need to give back will be waiting on the coffee table. The plates and cutlery will be dead dry and my last mug still stained with tea in the kitchen. Everything will be unplugged or switched off but the fridge. It’s always the same, nothing happens while you’re away. Time holds its breath and whoever would walk in could get a frozen glimpse of my life.

Sometimes this can happen for over 25,000 years. We watched the Cave of Forgotten Dreams the other day; a documentary film by Werner Herzog about Chauvet Cave, a cave discovered in 1994 in the south of France. Not the best documentary ever, it’s not the editing and visual quality of a BBC documentary by David Attenborough but the subject itself is still fascinating. That cave used to be occupied by human beings who left plenty of drawings and marks before the entrance collapsed, sealing it tightly for 27,000 years or so. Nothing moved; nothing got shuffled around. Only limescale made its way through, slowly but surely. In places you can find not only black marks on the walls where the previous tenants rubbed their torches, but even the fallen pieces of charcoal remain on the ledge below. Very few people are allowed to enter the cave. If someone can testify of what time travel feels like, it must be one of them.