I couldn’t sleep one night, and amid the imagined arguments with people I’ll never meet, and random thoughts like ‘why did we stop putting gargoyles on buildings’, another thought popped into my head: ‘Why does time feel like it has a geography to me?’.
It means that, at any given month of the year I can physically picture that space of time coming up on the floating track – a bit like when a train approaches a bend and you can see the front carriages ahead on the tracks from your window.
I’m aware that will sound like complete nonsense to most people, but I have something called spatial sequence synesthesia – a condition that means my brain processes units of time and numerical values as having an inherent colour and form.
It’s like asking: ‘When did you know you could see colour?’ or ‘When did you know you could dream?’ If you always have, you always have and this is genuinely just how my brain has always worked.
The year 2002 for example was an unpleasant baby blue and when I was designated a hotel room number of 547 one time, I shuddered at its clashy blues, greens and oranges.
