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Wandering with Alice

Wandering with Alice

Author: Jo Rushby
Date: 2021-11-25

Invariably, it is the same question I pose when somebody wanders into Ike's Bookshop and the answer is more often than not the same as Alice's. Of course, good sense and wanting to make a sale prevent me from saying:

"You may look in front of you, and on both sides, if you like," said the Sheep: "but you can't look all round you - unless you've got eyes at the back of your head."

In Covid times, when travel was outlawed, emotions masked, and intimacy sanitised, Alice allowed so many of us to wander in wonder while staying in one place. In strange times, perhaps we always crave the even stranger adventures of Alice. Remember that wonderful interchange between Alice and the Cheshire Cat, when she asks: "Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?" the cat replies, "That depends a good deal on where you want to get to." You see, the Cheshire Cat is telling us our imaginations can travel in all directions and allow us to assume different identities.

In this world where none of us are what we appear, Alice shows us how more complex is the question "Who are you?" posed by The Caterpillar. In a few months' time, I will see my mother after three years. She taught me to read at the age of three. She still lives in the house where I fell down the rabbit hole. The years have changed me, and after a few days, I am sure my mother will silently ask 'who is this woman who has come into my house and made it her home'?

As Alice says to the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle: "It's no use going back to yesterday because I was a different person then."

It will be 'curiouser and curiouser' the longer I spend there in the back-garden in Nottingham, wondering about journeys that have taken me to Moscow, Mali, Mumbai with a long stop in a fairyland of books in Durban:

'I almost wish I hadn't gone down the rabbit - hole - and yet - and yet - it's rather curious, you know, this sort of life! I do wonder what can have happened to me! When I used to read fairy tales I fancied that kind of thing never happened, and now here I am in the middle of one!'

Now I must go. The Mad Hatter is here and it is time for tea.