Sometimes A Time Machine Comes For Me When I Don’t Expect It

Proust had his madeleine. I don’t seem to need one. Photo: Lionel Allorge

The first time it happened was at a school in Ely, Cambridgeshire, around 2006. I didn’t work at the school, nor was it one I’d attended — I was taking advantage of the holiday-empty campus as a slightly improper shortcut, in fact — but its laundry must have used the same commercial detergent as my own school did in the mid-’70s, because without warning I was there again.