Ah, now I see. Although there’s a perceptible murkiness fogging up the scene, and elements are disjointed, people are standing and leaning in the places they did before, even if the setting seems a degree or so out of position, an alternate image of a known memory.

I stop, then glide through the clouds, a spook. If a scene even partially close to the desired one is on the verge, then I’ll settle into it, and try with the solid fibre of my being, my inflamed soul, to nudge the final outcome in a different direction. To replay a vanquished history and do the right thing, to settle an unrest that’s played out since those eras.

The tavern is exactly the design of a dream. Maybe there’s even a chance I glanced at it during those spectacular years, when the rousing hubbub and the coming together of beer glasses proved an excitement too hearty to resist. It’s where accumulated desires reach their fruition.

The revellers from this inn overflow onto the narrow street; once inside it’s a hazy, chatter-smogged tangerine glow. It takes some minutes for my eyes to adjust to the orangey silhouettes inside the perspiring room. And excited dialogue is the main symptom of this newly buccaneering metropolis.

Spring-into-summer dapple breaks through, smashing the April drizzle, that downpour in my mind, layering on that sublime hue that I know wasn’t simply a dream or expectation. Wafts of the wanted season. And the awakening aroma as the thick sunlight disturbs the musty dirt and the floating grains are illuminated in the beam.

Loads of dust blown and consumed by freshness. And, just the same as that former day, but a bit skewed, I spot the girl, the woman, the centrepiece of a lost dream. The soul-grab. At first, she’s amid the mass. But something higher, louder, dash of blonde against the ordinary, against a murky grey palette. There among everything. It’s a febrile jolt and time is smothered, it goes flaky, as it did in real time.

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