Sentence The Threehundredandsixtyfifth

And in another time and place, what happened? nothing that anyone noticed – the sun rose and set at the allotted time, buses and trains ran more or less to schedule, there were no aeroplane crashes as a result of the sudden disappearance of a pilot from his seat, no acrobatic girl on a flying trapeze fell to her death because her partner, the man on his flying trapeze, vanished in mid swing, no ecdysiast dropped her knickers on the tiny stage with it's chromium pole in that spit-and-sawdust pub in Easter

 

Road and in the wink of an eye was gone before she could pick them up, no darrein scratching on the Act of Union was inexplicably erased, no brass plate bearing the name of Martin Elginbrod WS was missing from the door of a set of Edinburgh Chambers, certainly a Deputy Chief Constable of Police Scotland was not sitting in the corner office high above the open spaces of Fettes Avenue, just to the north-west of the City Centre – but he had already been missing for some days, after his car had been found abandoned in mysterious circumstances, and a rather ossified Sir Pantagruel MacFarlane,

direct descendant of Sir Parlane - was still sipping at his glass of Highland Park in the bar of The Royal Burgess Golfing Society of Edinburgh, instituted 1735, and the glass didn't drop from a height of three feet to spill it's contents on the richly-hued and deep-piled Persian carpet; so apart from the apology for Google being unable to access Quadrivial Quandary, no-one noticed anything different, for, truly, nothing had changed for them: now, whether that would be the same for a time traveller who had left our present a few days ago and returned today – would she notice any subtle or dramatic change from the world as it had been before? well, that would depend (don't you just get all riled when a teacher or parent, or psycho-analyst says that? it feels so patronising, as much as to say “you only see the universe through your own eyes and can't imagine how it looks to anyone else, or how it feels, smells, tastes or sounds,” and the key is in that reference to our senses, which are the means by which we absorb and evaluate all the information we need, in order to be able to understand things; they are like the 5-person recce patrol sent out to survey the area beyond our circle of wagons, for they venture into that unknown territory, before we sally forth to hobnob with the outside world, which might with poetic justice be called 'No Man's Land') wouldn't it?