“The first chamber was the size of Greenland, the second the size of the moon. The final chamber was the size of Blackpool Woolworths. The astronauts soon lost themselves in the pick’n’mix aisles.”
The madeleine dipped in lime tisane, as it resides in the 21st Century soul, is constituted of a more formally-tended paradise than the edenic playgrounds of our ancestors. Its bounty of endless choice will always and forever be the realisation of awakening on a Saturday morning and experiencing what we imagine to be freedom.
The straight path leads from our front door (“put a cardie on, you’ll catch a chill!”) along a pavement that reflects the weekend sun back at itself. Whether there is a bus journey, paid for with a single shiny coin, or whether we can reach our destination on foot, the quickening of the pulse as our quarry comes into view sets off benevolent chemical signals in the brain.
Woolworths is in practice limitless in scope. When it was possible to visit a real Woolworths on a real Saturday morning in our real childhood, the shabbiness of its goods and the gaudiness of its shop fittings were immediately obvious.
Now that it is so long removed from us, as much as Saturday is removed from us, because Saturdays as they exist in later life are a shadow of their sunlit form-of-forms, the aisles expand out along notional perspective curves that hint at a full assimilation of spacetime.