Camera Obscura

Edinburgh June 2012

It felt like some kind of magic. The very sight delighted us.

It was 2012 and we had taken the sleeper train to the Scottish Highlands, waking to rhythmic rumblings and views of mountain-edged lochs scuffed with low-hanging clouds. Now we were stopping in Edinburgh on the way home for a couple of nights.

Between wandering the city’s lanes and soaking up history, we had slipped into the Camera Obscura next to the castle for the afternoon. At the top, the tower overlooked the city’s turrets and rooftops but it was what happened inside the ‘camera’ room itself that remains captured in my memory.

We huddled around the central circle of projected light that pours through the ceiling onto a round table-like screen where the real-time comings and goings of Edinburgh were being reproduced.

As the guide demonstrated how the camera worked, I was wide-eyed, transfixed; we all were. We gazed at the perfect representation of the city’s streets below, a world in miniature, like an old-fashioned movie strip. It reminded me of the 1970s cine films my dad used to make, how it always felt like such an enormous treat when he got out the projector to show us.

As we watched the ant-sized people, their tiny legs propelling them forward, the guide suddenly held a blank sheet of paper along the moving image. Those minuscule filmstrip people seemed to have no choice but to hop up onto it, still walking, as though scooped up while normal life carried on around them. After a few moments, he dropped them down onto their pavement again, a little way further on, back into the real world but somewhere slightly different. We laughed, enchanted at the illusion of it all. But now I think, yes.

That.

That’s how it feels.

Like we have been scooped up out of our world, with no choice. Picked up the scruffs of our neck and plopped down in an alternate universe. A universe where my son gets ill and cannot fully live the life he was living, cannot live a normal 16-year-old's life, for a while at least.

For this time.  

Yet somehow, within this, still walking on, still finding ways to live fully.

I told some friends about this memory recently, this story of seeing those tiny people picked up and dropped into another place. Another reality. How it felt like our experience. And in the retelling, I realised something else. When those ant-sized people were scooped up from their normality, they were also carried. And so are we. Somehow, we are safely held on that fragile leaf of paper, carried above the toughest part of the journey.

Carried, until we can be gently set down again, back into the ‘real’ world.

Or maybe somewhere slightly different.