by Ed Simon
What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is.
If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know. —Augustine, Confessions (397)
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once. —Richard Cummings, The Girl in the Golden Atom (1922)
Twenty-six years ago, on a late-afternoon, late-summer sojourn down Liverpool’s Bold Street, a High Street of dark pubs and record stores, Donner kebab counters and chip shops, Frank accidentally walked into 1965. On his idyl perambulations to meet up with his wife at Waterstone’s, where she was grabbing a copy of Trainspotting, and Frank noticed a different slant of light, an alteration in the atmosphere, a variation in the sounds from the street, a drop in temperature. The summer odor of warm beer and fetid air replaced with the crispness of Christmas time. Approaching the bookstore, the Cranberries blaring on the music system, and mid-tune it’s replaced with a tinny radio playing a Herman’s Hermits number. Bold Street’s pedestrians were no longer wearing Oasis and Blur t-shirts, now they were men in boating jackets and mop tops, women in Halston dresses and pixie cuts. The road no longer paved, but cobblestoned. Frank noted that the Waterstone’s façade was now of a shop named “Cripps,” a woman’s clothing store that had been on this spot but closed decades before. Just as he crossed the threshold, and Cripps was abruptly transformed back into a bookstore. Misapprehension, misconception, misinterpretation? Hallucination or hoax? Vortex or ghosts? As paranormal writer Rodney Davies helpfully opines in Time Slips: Journeys into the Past and Future, “One theory state that past, present, and future are all one… But our limited consciousness can only experience time by being in what we know as ‘the present.’” Mayhap.
If you are the sort who absent-mindedly scrolls through accounts of the occult with dubious provenance, or as has spent innumerable hours listening to Art Bell’s Coast to Coast A.M., if you’ve ever heard of “John Titor” and wanted to believe, then you may already be familiar with Frank’s temporal flickering in the “Liverpool Time Slip.” Not the only such anomalies – there are accounts of tourists coming upon Marie Antoinette’s retinue while at Versailles and of guests in Cornish manor houses wandering into the seventeenth-century, backroad drivers in Arizona overtaken by futuristic vehicles and London streets destroyed by the Luftwaffe restored to pre-war completeness. Read more »