Speaker 1: Hello, I'm welcomed stories all the time. The lad you
Speaker 1: are here, Let's get into it. I've always liked being
Speaker 1: the first through the old green door in the morning.
Speaker 1: Never mind the spongy, salty smell that clings even after
Speaker 1: decades of the way the stone floor siys in the damp.
Speaker 1: The museum has a chill that seeps in no matter
Speaker 1: the weather. But the reward is that no one's there
Speaker 1: to interrupt the hush, Just the creak of wooden cases,
Speaker 1: the faint rattle from goes investigating the eaves, and the
Speaker 1: feeling that something's waiting to be noticed. I'd volunteer for
Speaker 1: the early shift because Missus Talbot was letting me help
Speaker 1: hand the you Local Fist's exhibition. Most of my job
Speaker 1: was a lot less glamorous dusting glass, flipping faded labels,
Speaker 1: showing the occasional group of school kids pass the breakable pottery.
Speaker 1: But this morning it was just me, the ladders, the
Speaker 1: town of paint Anne at my back, the crackling anticipation
Speaker 1: of a wall sin to be filled with landscapes out
Speaker 1: walks since ide Catadle, I paused in front of my
Speaker 1: favorite Wingingate hill eighteen ninety four it's scene I've tried
Speaker 1: to recreate a hundred times with my camera, late afternoon,
Speaker 1: the heather on the hillside, just grazed by sun, the
Speaker 1: slate shadows gathering beneath the rim of the headland. I
Speaker 1: know that line of the hill's shoulder as well as
Speaker 1: the arch of my own foot. It's a view that's
Speaker 1: always meant home to me. Though the painting makes the
Speaker 1: grass more golden in the sky, somehow empty than it
Speaker 1: ever really gets. This time something was different. At first,
Speaker 1: it was just a flicker, maybe a trick of the
Speaker 1: museums old overheads, or the way the framed glass needed
Speaker 1: a wipe. But then my eye snagged on a shape
Speaker 1: crowning the crest, A stark white cylinder, just left of center,
Speaker 1: it's top shining in the painted sun. A lighthouse, tall, precise,
Speaker 1: the door and windows picked out as carefully as any
Speaker 1: cottage below. I stir for a long, slow minute, unsure weather,
Speaker 1: to laugh for frown. There is no lighthouse on Windate Hill,
Speaker 1: not even the stub of a foundation. Nothing on the
Speaker 1: hill but low grass, brambles, and the ghost of a
Speaker 1: sheep pen. I'd taken photos there as recently as last week,
Speaker 1: standing right where a pain to hat lining up the
Speaker 1: outcrop on the ash tree below. If there'd been a lighthouse,
Speaker 1: even a ruined one, I'd have seen it, won't I
Speaker 1: admiring Old Simmonds. Are you? Garry's voice sliding from behind
Speaker 1: as he balanced a case of pamphlets under his arm.
Speaker 1: That's always been my favorite view, though I've never settled
Speaker 1: whether the clouds or that Lanton tower are the best. Bit.
Speaker 1: I turned biting, dwn doubts the lighthouse. This isn't that's new.
Speaker 1: He set the box down, dusting his hands. Oh, been
Speaker 1: there since I was a boy. That's Bristpoint light, built
Speaker 1: by old Captain Fenwick, you know, during the fogy years.
Speaker 1: I blinked. I don't think we've ever had a lighthouse
Speaker 1: on Wingate. You're thinking of the one on stone Isle,
Speaker 1: He ringed, shaking his head. No, no Wingate, hild There
Speaker 1: are stories. Missus Carter used to tell us she watched
Speaker 1: it sweep the bay on her wedding night, blew out
Speaker 1: in a storm, if you believe the old tales. The
Speaker 1: models in the cabinet, isn't it? I swallowed. I wanted
Speaker 1: to insist it wasn't, but the certainty was foggy suddenly,
Speaker 1: as if my own memory were a wet pane of glass.
Speaker 1: I don't remember seeing it. He shrugged. Ah, well, it's
Speaker 1: one of those things that vanished till you look for them.
Speaker 1: He winked, as if ledting me in on a local joke.
Speaker 1: After Gary returned to holding pamphlets, I stared at the painting,
Speaker 1: searching the brushwick for ast of new paint, anything out
Speaker 1: of place. It was seamless. The museum's old catalog records,
Speaker 1: stuck in a folder upstairs, described the painting with lines
Speaker 1: about windplated grass, headland afternoon suner, but no mention of
Speaker 1: a lighthouse. None of the descriptions, at least as far
Speaker 1: as I remembered. Prudentials can be strangely fragile in a
Speaker 1: small town. I pulled out my phone and scrolled through
Speaker 1: my photos, finding the grainny digital record at snap for
Speaker 1: the museum's website last spring. The painting was in the shot,
Speaker 1: but a resolution wasn't clear enough to make out the
Speaker 1: cress lost behind a glare. Every image I could find
Speaker 1: in my past attempts, a few press clippings seemed to
Speaker 1: obscure or crop that precise bit of hill I felt
Speaker 1: a lurch of embarrassment, and then second guessed it. Maybe
Speaker 1: I'd simply never look closely enough. Maybe being away at university,
Speaker 1: even for those three years, had scrambled more of my
Speaker 1: own museum than I'd realized. That should have been the end,
Speaker 1: a trick of memory, slip of attention, some local story
Speaker 1: I'd missed instead. As the morning sun crept across the
Speaker 1: foreboards and Missus Talbot's keys clicked in the lock behind me,
Speaker 1: the duck cab fluttering, delicate as dust. If something so
Speaker 1: central could shift without warning, what else was waiting for
Speaker 1: me to find it? The museum sits low and browed
Speaker 1: against the caise, It's roof listing gently toward the sea,
Speaker 1: like it's always watching for the tide to creep in.
Speaker 1: Most days, the town drifts passed at the waywater slides
Speaker 1: by stone in the river. Kids on the skateboards whirring
Speaker 1: into the square, a postman hurrying up lanes so twisting
Speaker 1: you can't see both ends at once. Old men and
Speaker 1: wilhats debating under the awning of the fishmongers. I've grown
Speaker 1: up here, then left for Union, the strength of a
Speaker 1: patch truck up portfolio and the insistence that seeing the
Speaker 1: world meant leaving the coast behind. But after three in
Speaker 1: different years, and a need for quieter mornings, I'd come back,
Speaker 1: piecing my days together with early shifts at the Drift,
Speaker 1: with cafe and volunteer slots at the museum. It was
Speaker 1: meant to be temporary, a foot in the door for
Speaker 1: some one who knows their f stops but not how
Speaker 1: to land a gallery gig. Maybe it still was, Yet
Speaker 1: the museum's quiet rhythm suited me far better than I expected.
Speaker 1: Most people, including quite a few locals, walk straight past.
Speaker 1: It's a muddle of rooms, ships, wheels and pilots, notebooks,
Speaker 1: children's shoes, cake with so much does the labels of
Speaker 1: mystery faded, all paintings, and a collection of objects so
Speaker 1: peculiar the glass cabinets themselves seem to sigh in confusion.
Speaker 1: The museum was a customs house before anyone remembers that
Speaker 1: a strange then a private home whose family portraits glower
Speaker 1: in the side gallery, and finally, since the sixties, the
Speaker 1: Tan's official Chamber of Heritage weekdays. The only other volunteers
Speaker 1: are Gary, who seems to have taught every subject at
Speaker 1: the primary school. And relishes correcting label typos. Rosi, a
Speaker 1: sixth former who had always cataloging buttreats the real things
Speaker 1: like Exchelshfeer's cracking and Missess Talbot half magician, half martial
Speaker 1: and all brisk competence. Then there's June, who's lived long
Speaker 1: enough in this town to have become part of its myth,
Speaker 1: and who appears every morning ten minutes after opening, like
Speaker 1: the name painted on the pillar outside promises her a seat.
Speaker 1: The museum's enters was more companionable than lonesome. Mornings were
Speaker 1: frustraightening displays and tangling the endless snarl of audio guides,
Speaker 1: and quietly killing time before the first wave of school
Speaker 1: children of the Odd Coach Party. Missess Talbot let me
Speaker 1: run the local Vista's curation because truth be told, she
Speaker 1: didn't mind turning a profit from the types of people
Speaker 1: likely to donate their grandparent samplers or lead soldiers. Garry
Speaker 1: was to fixture the point of continuity. Rosy lived most
Speaker 1: of the year in the back room, cataloging objects with
Speaker 1: the reverence for category that made even old shoe buckles
Speaker 1: seem sacred. Afternoons, I took my battered bicycle a round
Speaker 1: townd camus lung over my shoulder, hoping to catch the
Speaker 1: light along the upper lanes, or chase the fog as
Speaker 1: if rolled down over the mortum, vanish between the buildings.
Speaker 1: It's a town of phaphazard beauty, thick with stories you
Speaker 1: hear repeated, each time slightly different. The coastlines always changing shape.
Speaker 1: Every storm gnaws away at the shingle, new sandpos appear
Speaker 1: Alice Twista's old cottages fold inward, a lean away from
Speaker 1: the wind Museum. Pride is a peculiar thing in a
Speaker 1: place so restless. This an insistence shared between Gary Rosy
Speaker 1: and Missess Talbot that here, at least the past remains
Speaker 1: pin an named, even if the streets outside seemed to
Speaker 1: slip about beneath your feet. They speak of in authenticity,
Speaker 1: the steamer tickets so genuine, the glass floats found in
Speaker 1: the marshes, the paintings all checked by wandering experts who
Speaker 1: leave light notes about provenance. Here especially likes to remind
Speaker 1: visitors that no other institution records the look of this
Speaker 1: place quite so well as we do. That's why the
Speaker 1: lighthouse un settled me, not out of fear or even SUSPICI,
Speaker 1: but because it didn't fit, not with my sense of
Speaker 1: the town, not with the certainty my colleagues were so easily.
Speaker 1: The confidence of their memories squared up against a squishness
Speaker 1: of mine, left a little gap for questions to slip through.
Speaker 1: I tried for a day or two to forget it.
Speaker 1: It's surprisingly easy to dismiss a single oddity when you're
Speaker 1: surrounded by them. The crackbell from the Rek schooner, the
Speaker 1: Shamasake plaq iscribed to Your Anonymous Child eighteen eighty two,
Speaker 1: the indistinctly drawing rumor to be by a famous painter
Speaker 1: who died before ever reaching these shores. But trouble of
Speaker 1: the most interesting candrarely sits still for long. I was
Speaker 1: restocking pamphlets for a tour group when it happened again.
Speaker 1: The display in question was just outside the between the
Speaker 1: wall's corner, where Rose, who sometimes perched on the bat
Speaker 1: of radiator copying accession numbers into her ledger. On the
Speaker 1: top shelf a black and white photograph, large and slightly
Speaker 1: warped under the glass, labeled a dockyard Southern Vieutzy nineteen
Speaker 1: twenty four. I glanced at it a hundred times. The
Speaker 1: dockyard is the backbone of old town stories, though most
Speaker 1: of its bones, rusted paddings, we choked lips have long
Speaker 1: since been washed away by time and tide. In the photograph,
Speaker 1: the yard bunch beneath the slope, the same angle preserved
Speaker 1: in postcards and family albums, but there, stretching alongside the
Speaker 1: gravel spit and new shape, a broad, dark boat house
Speaker 1: as imposing as a barren, with shillings chandle repainted bold
Speaker 1: acrossus eaves. The building takes her path the background, as
Speaker 1: if dry ugen sister doesn't belong. My mind immediately lit
Speaker 1: up with that crowding sense of contradiction I'd often wandered
Speaker 1: that part of the key of my chemist guffy grass,
Speaker 1: broken concrete teeth were all piling stuck up, not an
Speaker 1: inch of room for boathouse that alone a landmark, And
Speaker 1: none of the stories I had heard from the older
Speaker 1: fishermen ever mentioned shillings. That gravel spit ire remembered was
Speaker 1: only ever a place for skipping stones or dodging angry swans.
Speaker 1: I caught Missssed Talbot. She was adjusting the velvet rope
Speaker 1: around a cabinet of shell spoons. Excuse me, sorry, this
Speaker 1: photograph of the dock yard the boat house. Was that
Speaker 1: always there? She paused, giving me her look reserved for
Speaker 1: truly basic questions. Of course, it's one of our best pieces,
Speaker 1: a central part of our maritime heritage. She tugged her cardigan,
Speaker 1: tied her tipped her glasses, and pointed at the label.
Speaker 1: Shillings Chandelry was a famous supply star. I remember seeing
Speaker 1: advertisements for it in the old tam pamphlet Let me
Speaker 1: show you. She guided me over to a far drawer
Speaker 1: and produced a handful of weathered leaflets Driftport Gateway to
Speaker 1: the Sea from the nineteen seventies and another dockyard traditions,
Speaker 1: possibly older. Sure enough, one pamphlet described Shilling's boat house
Speaker 1: the bustling heart of the port in its heyday. Another,
Speaker 1: just as confidently it made no mention at all, it
Speaker 1: called that side of the dock of the open spit
Speaker 1: favored for picnic's and annual bird watching. Missess Talbot looked
Speaker 1: at me with vague amusement. You spend enough time here,
Speaker 1: you see how things are. The town's history is laid.
Speaker 1: But this photo has been here since long before my time,
Speaker 1: I thank turned drifted back to the display, the contradiction
Speaker 1: swelling in my mind like a rising tide. Maybe I'd
Speaker 1: overlook this boat house just as I'd missed the lighthouse.
Speaker 1: Or was something else arranging these details, adjusting them with
Speaker 1: each retelling. I lingered near the visitor sign and desk,
Speaker 1: watching as a few out of towners wandered through. An
Speaker 1: older couple squinted at the photo. The man nodded, oh, yes,
Speaker 1: my uncle worked there during the war, while his partner
Speaker 1: shrubed in, said funny, I thought that end was always
Speaker 1: just gravel, their indifference to the disagreement, each memory existing
Speaker 1: unchallenged beside the other, rankled and intrigued in equal measure.
Speaker 1: It should have been a clear record. I told myself,
Speaker 1: I've been away too long, that I was chasing trivia.
Speaker 1: Yet the more I looked, the more the puzzle seemed
Speaker 1: to thicken, like fog drawn in around the edges. I
Speaker 1: carried this sensation like an inch. No panic, no specter
Speaker 1: at my back, just the sturdy and insistent need to
Speaker 1: understand which version of the town had been set in
Speaker 1: glass and which was being gently re arranged before my eyes.
Speaker 1: After the door's closed for the day. I brought my
Speaker 1: notebook beside the painting of Wingate Hill and again writing
Speaker 1: down anything that seemed even faintly to shift. I didn't
Speaker 1: call it that, not yet, but I found my attention
Speaker 1: dot into every landscape, every batch of old photos, half
Speaker 1: expecting to spot another stray building, a fence line, gun astray,
Speaker 1: or a lap like glinting were before there was dark.
Speaker 1: Over the next mornings, the notebook began filling up. There
Speaker 1: was the famous sketch of the shoreline by Emily Pucks
Speaker 1: from eighteen seventy two. I remembered it as a simple
Speaker 1: sweet cliss two boats drawn up side by side, but
Speaker 1: now the paper showed a third day eddy stone built
Speaker 1: curving further out to sea. The boats were moored to rings.
Speaker 1: I was sure hadn't been there before. When I checked
Speaker 1: the expision booklet, the description had changed boats and Jetty
Speaker 1: Sea eighteen seventy two. I went to the corner where
Speaker 1: the centenary town e ramasatin miniature of houses and shops,
Speaker 1: tiny match to figures leading miniature horses bunting strewn between
Speaker 1: cardboard facades. The center of the town square was always
Speaker 1: just empty paving. I'd cleaned the display dozens of times
Speaker 1: with pale cobbles, flt withland and stray sequins from Rosy's
Speaker 1: occasional restoration experiments. Now a fountain stood there, broadstone, ringed
Speaker 1: with a flock of concealed miniature frogs, water frozen in
Speaker 1: its sleep. I pressed closer, muttering that's not possible. The
Speaker 1: base was covered in dust and faded pain as old
Speaker 1: as the rest. But I knew the squareso while my
Speaker 1: mother passed through there every day after skull pick up
Speaker 1: all those years ago. No fountain, not even a gap
Speaker 1: where pipes or drains might have been. Rosy was taking
Speaker 1: off inventory by the window. Do you think the sculper
Speaker 1: for the centenary fountain was local? I asked, Boy's casual
Speaker 1: but thin. She turned, fingers fidgeting with her pen. Boh, yes,
Speaker 1: arfur house. My grant said his sister posed for the
Speaker 1: chair up on top before they lost the malt in
Speaker 1: the flood. I always liked that, felt like the only
Speaker 1: bit of art in the middle of the square. Too
Speaker 1: bad they took it away when they rebuilt the market.
Speaker 1: I stared at her, not sure whether to play along
Speaker 1: or push funny. I don't remember a fountain at all.
Speaker 1: There's nothing but paving now. Rosy shrugged, small and oddly
Speaker 1: self assured. Well they used to be. The photos are
Speaker 1: around somewhere. She didn't seem remotely troubled by the discrepancy.
Speaker 1: I checked the museum's tattered guidebooks and the battered drawer
Speaker 1: behind the front desk, where we kept stacks of tourists
Speaker 1: leaflets and a few bundles of found old snap truts.
Speaker 1: Some of the pamphs described the square as distinctive fountain,
Speaker 1: and even off at facts on it to restoration date.
Speaker 1: For others, had homes been maps showing only empty paving
Speaker 1: at the center. The ambiguity stitched everything together with unerving neatness.
Speaker 1: I took my camera out on to the square that afternoon,
Speaker 1: dodging rain and tourists, I bent squinting for any trace
Speaker 1: of circle of discolored stone marks were plumbing might have
Speaker 1: fared a vanished feature. But there was nothing. The paving
Speaker 1: was a patchwork, some stones clearly old, some modern inserts
Speaker 1: gray and bland, but no outline of a fountain. I
Speaker 1: found two women perched nearby on a bench, knitting, the
Speaker 1: sort of town regulars who'd know every pebble out of place.
Speaker 1: Excuse me that of an odd question? I said, was
Speaker 1: there ever a fountaineer? One nodded, eyes flickering with memory.
Speaker 1: Not when I was a girl, but my sister's work
Speaker 1: used to be the meeting place. Our friend chimed in, Oh,
Speaker 1: I think we all were made to walk round it
Speaker 1: at the school parade, or maybe that was somewhere else.
Speaker 1: This mild at me explanation complete on concern with its logic.
Speaker 1: That night, I tapped the notebook back in my desk drawer,
Speaker 1: alongside my print outs and the pile of and sorted
Speaker 1: local newsletters. It felt like I was living in parallel tracks.
Speaker 1: Every object in account devsion just enough to keep me
Speaker 1: off bounce, but never so far as to feel impossible.
Speaker 1: I mapped out each finding the lighthouse, the dock out
Speaker 1: boat house, the stretching jetty of the fountain. An uneasy
Speaker 1: pattern started to show. Some displays had clearly shifted, others,
Speaker 1: no matter how closely I examined them, remained exactly as
Speaker 1: I remembered. The painting of the stone Isle light down
Speaker 1: in the maritime room was still in change. The marquettes
Speaker 1: from the nineteen thirty festival matched even the earliest color
Speaker 1: photos in the file drawers. The question flowered, why did
Speaker 1: only some things change? And how could everyone around me
Speaker 1: so easily accept both? I didn't want to bring it
Speaker 1: up at dinner with my parents. My mother would laugh
Speaker 1: it off as over tiredness, and my father would mutter
Speaker 1: something about too much staring at dusty things. Instead, I
Speaker 1: turned my curiosity on the evidence itself. One afternoon, a
Speaker 1: rare lull and visitors, I decided to make my own record,
Speaker 1: a way to fix things in place. I took my
Speaker 1: camera through the galleries, photographing every painting, every model, muggy glassanol.
Speaker 1: The digital files felt like anchors, prove I could pull out.
Speaker 1: Later that night, at home, I imported the images to
Speaker 1: my laptop and consumed an on Wingate Hill eighteen ninety four.
Speaker 1: The lighthouse was there, crispas of her, as though it
Speaker 1: had always stood atop the hill. Yet one strange shot,
Speaker 1: a slightly off angle snap taken in poor light, looked
Speaker 1: just as I remembered, the hiltop gleaming empty against the
Speaker 1: painted sky. My fingers trembled as I flicked through the
Speaker 1: boat house in the dock yard, absent in a photo
Speaker 1: taken from behind a passing group of visitors, then prisoned
Speaker 1: and prominent a minute later in the file immediately after.
Speaker 1: It wasn't consistent even within my own records. My friends
Speaker 1: sound dropped by the cave later that week and out
Speaker 1: of town of these days after moving to Bristol. What's
Speaker 1: going on? You look like you found a ghost. I
Speaker 1: slid my laptop over, showing him a sequence painting photo
Speaker 1: foto again. What do you see on the hill? He peered,
Speaker 1: lighthouse bright white? Why I showed the other angle? How
Speaker 1: about here? He looked, squinting, then shook his head. Still
Speaker 1: a lighthouse? Is this a trick photoshop thing? He scrolled
Speaker 1: for more, grinning. You're winding me up. I was not.
Speaker 1: But every test I tried yielded the same result. Photographs
Speaker 1: taking seconds apart, seemed to change between Nold, Anne and you.
Speaker 1: But only I could see the difference. Any One else,
Speaker 1: even my own parents, accepted whatever was visible at the moment.
Speaker 1: Their surprise never provoked, their memories, always slipping into place.
Speaker 1: My mind spiral for explanations, misremembering local jokes, some confusion
Speaker 1: of cataloging, a town wide case of groupthink. None felt
Speaker 1: close enough. The uncertainty stopped being stressful and shifted gently
Speaker 1: into something more productive. If the museum's record was slippery,
Speaker 1: could be at the museum itself, for somehow, showing not
Speaker 1: only the town as it had been, but all the
Speaker 1: versions it might ever have been. The evidence stacked up.
Speaker 1: I began writing my findings more formally, now building a
Speaker 1: shift's locked in an old sketch book. I tracked the
Speaker 1: towns I noticed a change, documented the models and paintings,
Speaker 1: and annotated every contradictory account I could tease out of
Speaker 1: colleagues and visitors. The contradiction was always gentle, almost playful,
Speaker 1: the sense that something quietly corrected itself as soon as
Speaker 1: he stopped paying attention. If the collection was a mistake,
Speaker 1: the tiles arranged themselves as he watched, but the patterns
Speaker 1: kept changing when you blinked. At this point I started
Speaker 1: keeping an eye out for June. If anyone knew the
Speaker 1: town's oddities, it would be the only person who spent
Speaker 1: more hours here than I did, usually leafing through battle
Speaker 1: paperbacks and the alcohvore offering murmured corrections to children on
Speaker 1: school trips. One foggy morning, I found her in the
Speaker 1: gallery corner perched beside a bay window, streaming pale light
Speaker 1: cross of row ship's models. She looked up, expectant. You
Speaker 1: are looking for something, she said, Before i'd spoken, I hesitated.
Speaker 1: Then do you ever notice the paintings change, or the models,
Speaker 1: little things that weren't there before? She smiled more with
Speaker 1: her eyes than her mouth. Oh, the meseums always remember
Speaker 1: better than the rest of us. The rest of town forgets.
Speaker 1: But these old boats and glass they know more than
Speaker 1: they tell. I sat my notebokopuin on my knee, the
Speaker 1: pen already between my fingers. I think something's different about
Speaker 1: Wingate Hill, the lighthouse. It wasn't there before, but now
Speaker 1: everyone says it's always belonged. She drew a narrow journal
Speaker 1: from her bag, flicking through its pages, dense with looping handwriting,
Speaker 1: call ow snippets of clippings, almost childlike sketches. I write
Speaker 1: it down too, I started when I was little. My
Speaker 1: mum said it was only a child's game. But sometimes
Speaker 1: things here don't stay the same. She showed me a
Speaker 1: pencil drawing of the bay, the outline of two peers.
Speaker 1: See that to Piers Wright, this was how I saw
Speaker 1: it last year. Her finger traced the lines, but for
Speaker 1: decades it was always one. I mentioned at once to
Speaker 1: missus Talbot, and she told me the other had washed
Speaker 1: away in some storm. But the week before her answer
Speaker 1: was different. That's always been a shape of the harbor.
Speaker 1: I started keeping notes, because every so often some little
Speaker 1: piece returns. She flipped the page once. The warehouses appeared again,
Speaker 1: rose and rows, stretching up toward the hill. Though I
Speaker 1: remember the space as nothing but wasteland since the sixties.
Speaker 1: Though there's this look. She held up a press far
Speaker 1: blue to the margin, next to a blurry photograph snip
Speaker 1: from a newsletter. The curve path through Glen Alley. I
Speaker 1: remember it sharp a summer, though now there's a fence
Speaker 1: blocking halfway. A year ago there was no pathway at all.
Speaker 1: That came back, then vanished again. Her voice was gentle,
Speaker 1: speculative and entirely without fear. There isn't just us, you know.
Speaker 1: Back then some others noticed to one moved away. Another
Speaker 1: said it was playing with the past. Whatever that means.
Speaker 1: Most just stop mentioning it, maybe because it's easier to
Speaker 1: live with one version. But if you look, if you
Speaker 1: really watch, things rearrange themselves all the time, I showed
Speaker 1: him musketches side by side with has two ways of scene,
Speaker 1: the same scenes, each slightly different, each corroborated by both
Speaker 1: evidence and live memory, but never quite the same on
Speaker 1: any given day. We fell to comparing details, laughing over
Speaker 1: some inconsistencies, sighing at others that came close to coinciding,
Speaker 1: only to slip out of sink the longer we examined.
Speaker 1: June looked out the window, the wind batting branches against
Speaker 1: the glass. Maybe the museum's just a place where all
Speaker 1: the other towns get to peek in, even if we
Speaker 1: don't invite them. So maybe it's the only way for
Speaker 1: a place to remember everything at once, all the things
Speaker 1: it might have been. Sitting there, knowing that she Tiu
Speaker 1: had seen it and kept careful notes, I felt the
Speaker 1: change for the first time, not as an acting error,
Speaker 1: but as a doorway opening on to possibility. The museum
Speaker 1: was no longer just shifting its artifacts behind our backs.
Speaker 1: It was gently unfilling all the routes the town might
Speaker 1: have taken, all the might best alongside the head beans.
Speaker 1: I left the alcove with a sense of friendly or
Speaker 1: prickling along my arms. My collection of sketches and notebooks,
Speaker 1: June's old journals, the paintings and direhmas, quietly shifting under
Speaker 1: our nose as they were part of something larger, All
Speaker 1: the lives and landscapes the town had almost lived, pulling
Speaker 1: quietly in the museum until someone decided to look closely
Speaker 1: for the first time. The question wasn't which is true?
Speaker 1: But how can all these almost towns fit together? Beneath
Speaker 1: the single roof. I closed my notebook, certain that the
Speaker 1: next page would mark a new, tricky beginning. I merged
Speaker 1: from the alcove that afternoon, with June's journal heavy in
Speaker 1: my backpack and prickling sense that my duties at the
Speaker 1: museum had shifted in no longer just catalogging what was,
Speaker 1: but documenting as best I could, what might be happening
Speaker 1: right now. I cycled home in the wind. I was
Speaker 1: darting between the familiar and the suspiciously unfamiliar, half expecting
Speaker 1: a new angle in a lane, a corner's shop I
Speaker 1: didn't recall, but outside the thick old walls of the museum,
Speaker 1: the town held this line battled lampus chit blue paint
Speaker 1: on the bakery's door. Kids hul in a bowl against
Speaker 1: the war memorial under the gray sky. That evening I
Speaker 1: made a vow sorts, not a grand mystical one, nothing
Speaker 1: fit for a compendium of local legends, just a promise
Speaker 1: scratch in my own lopsided handwriting. Photograph everything every day,
Speaker 1: if possible, from every angle I could manage cad A
Speaker 1: logged the differences as they appeared or failed, to leave
Speaker 1: less room for the fog to thicken. Yet I couldn't
Speaker 1: be certain which details belonged. At least I'd be honest
Speaker 1: about the boundaries of my confusion. So the documentation project
Speaker 1: properly began. Each morning, arriving before Garry or Rosy, I'd
Speaker 1: walk from room to room, camera in hand, snapping images
Speaker 1: of every painting, every model, and cabinet I considered suspect.
Speaker 1: I logged the final and two notebooks, one to record
Speaker 1: what I saw with my eyes, another for what appeared
Speaker 1: in the camera. I had even experimented with time stamps,
Speaker 1: five minute intervals between shots, sometimes returning to a single
Speaker 1: artifact hourly, just to see if anything slaid out of place.
Speaker 1: The first week produced more tedium than revelation. I filled
Speaker 1: my phone storage with nearer identical images glass reflectioned, old paint,
Speaker 1: warm thin, the slow crawl of sunshine across the model
Speaker 1: harbor master's face. I compared them back at my kitchen table.
Speaker 1: I aching from squinting at screens. Most details remained steadfast.
Speaker 1: A few, though, most notably the Wingate hill painting and
Speaker 1: the Centenary di rama, produced occasional flickering discrepancies. One proto
Speaker 1: would show the lighthouse clear as chalk. The next dicken
Speaker 1: from a different angle or indifferent light presented only the
Speaker 1: hilt up grass to grubbium bare. Some days the fountain
Speaker 1: in the dirama was prominent, other days shadowy or altogether missing,
Speaker 1: lost beneath the hint of lichen and dust. If these
Speaker 1: changes had in settled me before, now they drew me in.
Speaker 1: With the casual and predictability. Each discovery wasn't a threat,
Speaker 1: but an invitation, as if the town and its material
Speaker 1: memory were extending a hand asking me to dance along
Speaker 1: a line dividing possibility from record. I taught my obligations
Speaker 1: over with June. Whenever she appeared, she was more amused
Speaker 1: than baffled. Now, her tone lighter. Perhaps now you see
Speaker 1: why I never threw out my old journals. Every version's
Speaker 1: worth something, even if no one else brought us to
Speaker 1: remember which was which. On her rainy Thursday, halfway through
Speaker 1: my second week of this ritual, June and I came
Speaker 1: across a new painting in the Maritime Gallery, a late
Speaker 1: edition laid out in the marble disk of the Harbour Room,
Speaker 1: pat by Missus talbot Or, one of the amateur historians
Speaker 1: he donated every so often. I stopped in my tracks,
Speaker 1: not because of anything avertally odd, but because the scene
Speaker 1: itself was unfamiliar. It showed the harbor stretch much farther
Speaker 1: north than in any other painting, the water reaching out
Speaker 1: to brush, a temple of brick warehouses and slate roofed
Speaker 1: offices that, as far as I knew, never existed. Rain Street.
Speaker 1: The painted glass of the frame reel droplets, distorting the brushwork.
Speaker 1: So I blinked twice, focusing on the painted dockouts, where
Speaker 1: the north dock was neatly letted in the corner. My
Speaker 1: heart pand though not would dread more like the thrill
Speaker 1: of seeing a new possibility to peel back a corner
Speaker 1: of reality. June caught my reaction. She put her umbrella
Speaker 1: aside and stepped close. Well, I'll bee that the face
Speaker 1: I haven't seen since I was maybe nine, North Dock.
Speaker 1: My father used to mention it at Christmas, when family
Speaker 1: stories run long, said it was lost at the big storm,
Speaker 1: way back before even he could walk. I always thought
Speaker 1: he was making up a tragedy, a the way parents
Speaker 1: due when they want you to eat your Peas we
Speaker 1: stood in silence together, taking in the rippled lines of
Speaker 1: the harbor and the distant cranes, the painted workman moving
Speaker 1: crates along the key, I remembered studying the town's land
Speaker 1: registry at the library years before, no mention of a
Speaker 1: North Dock persisting in any of the official records for
Speaker 1: the last century. And yet here it was spoiling its
Speaker 1: presents through brush and pigment and June's own seepy memories.
Speaker 1: Energized by this new contradiction, I went home that night
Speaker 1: and poured over digital scans of old survey maps had
Speaker 1: long ignored in the Archives Online database. In a few
Speaker 1: dated between nineteen o six and nineteen twenty nine, I
Speaker 1: spotted intermittent references to a North Stock key penciled and
Speaker 1: then erased in later versions. It wasn't just the museum's
Speaker 1: collection that was malleable, but perhaps the very documentation of
Speaker 1: the town itself. The next day, I brought doctor Lynn
Speaker 1: into the picture of visiting geographer from the university, rumored
Speaker 1: to be writing a book on the region's caprecious coast line,
Speaker 1: cataloging the sand buzzlus slipped in and out of existence
Speaker 1: with every major storm. I caught her hunched over a
Speaker 1: tied chart in the local cafe. You studied the town's lion, right,
Speaker 1: the history, not just now, but what used to be.
Speaker 1: She smiled, amused by my breathlessness, ordering us coffees, before
Speaker 1: launching into a rapid description of the coast geometries. Nothing
Speaker 1: about this place is steady. You're standing on salt and memory.
Speaker 1: Most days. Ask five people to draw the shoreline and
Speaker 1: you'll get five different laps. Half the trouble for surveyors
Speaker 1: here is the ground not staying put long enough to
Speaker 1: draw a line. I unspoiled the tale curious paintings, shifting
Speaker 1: di Ramus the north dock and handed her my stack
Speaker 1: of print outs. June's journal opened to the relevant sketches.
Speaker 1: She flpped through with visible delight. Of course, she mused,
Speaker 1: tracing a finger across a nineteen twenty edition showing the
Speaker 1: disputed dock, where the line moves, the stories move. Every
Speaker 1: town's got ghosts, but here you've got mappible ghost possibility,
Speaker 1: layer to top, possibility, sedimented into the crown, the stories,
Speaker 1: the artifacts. No wonder, you can't pin it down. The
Speaker 1: thought crackled through me. Maybe it wasn't about a supernatural
Speaker 1: force rearranging museum objects, but the landscape itself, always in flux,
Speaker 1: always feeding multiple equally plausible narratives. Our museum wasn't an error,
Speaker 1: but a living testament to how community reconstructs its own
Speaker 1: truth when faced with an unruly and steady world. That evening,
Speaker 1: I invited Rosy and a couple of the high schoolers
Speaker 1: who volunteered part time to join me in June for
Speaker 1: her memory night in the staff lounge. June brought her
Speaker 1: journals in the tin of cinnamon biscuits. Brosi arrived with
Speaker 1: the shoe books of her grandmother's photos, and the teens
Speaker 1: produced the most recent yearbook, annotated with local trivia. There
Speaker 1: were also a handful of written recollections, sketched maps, handriton
Speaker 1: this is what I remember It lists the conversation ed
Speaker 1: and flowed more lava than night expected, as people compared
Speaker 1: and corrected each other about which corner store soul Penny sweets,
Speaker 1: which square had once featured a statue he remembered about
Speaker 1: how being much taller, or lacquered or painted a different color.
Speaker 1: One of the students, Jay, pointed out that even the
Speaker 1: school's backstairs, so familiar to the current court, didn't appear
Speaker 1: in his father's graduation photo, though both swore they had
Speaker 1: always been there June and had brought out our own
Speaker 1: logs of anomalies. The table soon resold with evidence, each
Speaker 1: artifact or recollection both confirming and denying someone else's certainty.
Speaker 1: J pencils flying began to assemble a memory map on
Speaker 1: a roll of brown paper, Plodding dots and lines for
Speaker 1: every version of a dark plaza or visible landmark anyone
Speaker 1: could recall, lay upon layer a nervous system of overlapping truths.
Speaker 1: The air vibrated with polite disagreement and moments of shared recognition.
Speaker 1: Rosa fingering an old snapshot, it gave a laugh. Mike
Speaker 1: Grand called this the clock mark she know with the
Speaker 1: weird arch and the clock made from ship's wheels. But
Speaker 1: my mum wouldn't hear of it. She swears it was
Speaker 1: only a play market hall with a bell, not a clock,
Speaker 1: and never any arches. Maybe both are true, said June,
Speaker 1: with a soft shrouke. Or neither only on special days.
Speaker 1: Perhaps there was a generosity, and how no one seemed
Speaker 1: thrittened by the slippage. People went upset by the contradictions
Speaker 1: so much as delighted and used to discover how their
Speaker 1: own memories were others act. The artifacts became props in
Speaker 1: a communal performance, less relics of certainty than touchdoms for
Speaker 1: mutual recognition. As the night wore on, a kind of
Speaker 1: consensus emerged, not about what asters Causaster is true, but
Speaker 1: about their apparent willingness of the museum and the town
Speaker 1: to metabolize as many stories as any one had patience
Speaker 1: or imagination to offer. I watched as Jay Penn, smudging
Speaker 1: his knuckles, connected lines between diverging recollections, mapping a network
Speaker 1: of possible towns suspended in time. June caught my eye
Speaker 1: eyebrows dancing. Maybe the museum's just the place that listens
Speaker 1: the most. It keeps every story alive, at least for
Speaker 1: a little while. From then on, my approach changed. I
Speaker 1: no longer felt the urgency to pin each sudden feature
Speaker 1: as evidence of a personal failure or a riddle to
Speaker 1: be solved. Instead, I wanted to understand how the town's
Speaker 1: many laidselves and the museum's part in shipperding them, could
Speaker 1: inform the very nature of local truth. This led me
Speaker 1: deep into the story of the building itself. The museum
Speaker 1: sits on what the earliest MAT's labeled scarrows low the
Speaker 1: Crescent of Marsh or claimed in bits and pieces from
Speaker 1: the sea. Townark having was always a haphazard business, ancient
Speaker 1: customs records, then notaries, ledgers, then to the museums own
Speaker 1: gain a rummage sale approach to acquiring everything from anchor
Speaker 1: chains to grandmother clocks. Each administrative han drew it unboundary,
Speaker 1: sometimes shifting the coastlines softly, sometimes excluded, dading an entire
Speaker 1: ally from official to history due to nothing more than
Speaker 1: a property dispute. I unnursed a series of town council
Speaker 1: minutes stored in the local library's microfiche cabinets. In eighteen
Speaker 1: sixty seven, a petition refers to a six distinct Matt's
Speaker 1: current among shopkeepers, each with the differing shoreline, all named
Speaker 1: correct Later during the expansion, after the first railway committee
Speaker 1: attended to unify the records, discarding dubius map editions. Many
Speaker 1: of the anomalies that now surfaced in the museum alternate
Speaker 1: dark layouts, vanished landmarks, oddments of the square had lived
Speaker 1: in matt margins, or briefly annotated in collector's hands before
Speaker 1: feeding out. Doctor Lynn Now, a willing co conspirator, showed
Speaker 1: me erosion tables and historical charts, whole spits of land
Speaker 1: flickering between existent and erasure. A cosign like this, she remarked,
Speaker 1: breeds stories the same way an estuary breeds fock. She
Speaker 1: invited me to view a three D model she dissembled
Speaker 1: from Lidaan's satellite passes. Each historical period could be dialed
Speaker 1: in and out, revealing how the land walked, crew shrank
Speaker 1: and tilde. Seeing the museum in this context, I was
Speaker 1: struck not by the peculiarity, but by the inevitability of
Speaker 1: the shifting stories. After all, a landscape that never settled
Speaker 1: could hardly offer a single permanent narrative. The museum's collections
Speaker 1: wore mistakes of all the versions the land and people
Speaker 1: had conjured consciously or not from the available materials Boyd.
Speaker 1: By this insight, I set out to reconstruct a chronology
Speaker 1: of the shift's June and I had cataloged along with us,
Speaker 1: from the amateur historians, local guides, and Jay's memory map.
Speaker 1: It became clear that each time the museum adjusted as
Speaker 1: exhibits added, a new acquisition, reorganized, a gallery hosted a
Speaker 1: major skill project, the scope of remembered had scene to broaden.
Speaker 1: It was not the artifacts occasionally winked in and out
Speaker 1: of existence at random, but rather the ASTERISKI ch act
Speaker 1: of curation made space for new pasts asterisk. One Saturday morning,
Speaker 1: we gathered in a museum small conference room, June Rosi,
Speaker 1: doctor Lynn, Gary and Cessed Talbot, a handful of older Townswrook,
Speaker 1: and Jay's memory map referraled on the table between us.
Speaker 1: I presented what I had learned, nervous in a way
Speaker 1: I hadn't felt since my first exhibition critique at university.
Speaker 1: So much of what we hold her isn't just record
Speaker 1: but possibility. The artifacts, paintings, diramas, even the photos don't
Speaker 1: merely document one version of the town, but seemed to
Speaker 1: invite every variation anyone has ever sincerely remembered. Every new
Speaker 1: edition or re arrangement doesn't clarify the past, but expands
Speaker 1: its scope. Wolsey, skeptical but intrigued, asked, but art museums
Speaker 1: supposed to protect the one real history, Doctor Olyn interjected,
Speaker 1: maybe in places with less flux here the land rights
Speaker 1: in erasable link to be stranger if you only ever
Speaker 1: had one story, missesteal WoT arms folded was less easily swayed.
Speaker 1: You can get sentimental about memory, but if someone's making
Speaker 1: changes to the catalog, that needs correcting. Otherwise, how do
Speaker 1: we know what's real? It was Gary usually a sticker
Speaker 1: for a proper history, who surprised me by chuckling. Or
Speaker 1: maybe this collection's just honest about how slippery truth can
Speaker 1: be in a town like this. My students used to
Speaker 1: argue about which bell the market rang, whichever one he
Speaker 1: believed in that was real enough for the day. June's
Speaker 1: act content nodding at her younger self across years. Perhaps
Speaker 1: every object here is an experiment not in what was
Speaker 1: or was, and but in how far a place can
Speaker 1: be stretched by the stories people needed to tell were participants,
Speaker 1: not just witnesses. A hush fell. The realization was dizzing,
Speaker 1: not frightening, Morriston honishing than any anomaly so far. We
Speaker 1: weren't discovering a haunted or mischievous force, but an organic process,
Speaker 1: objects metabolizing all the remembered, rumored, yearned for alternatives of
Speaker 1: a constantly shifting town. We weren't meant to pin it down,
Speaker 1: but to act as witness as to the full scope
Speaker 1: of what might have been. Doctor Lynn put it best.
Speaker 1: Museums everywhere hoped to share the truth with the capital t.
Speaker 1: But here youre a possibility engine. Every art fact is
Speaker 1: a window not just to the past, but to every
Speaker 1: world the town could have imagined for itself. That's not
Speaker 1: a flaw. It's the heart of the collection. The energy
Speaker 1: in the room change tightening into something electric. Even Missess Talbot,
Speaker 1: after a moment, seemed to relax, managing a rice mile.
Speaker 1: If we're going to have a gallery that re arranges itself,
Speaker 1: might as well take proper notes on how it happens.
Speaker 1: We didn't need any more proof, no additional vanishing buildings
Speaker 1: or time lost artifacts. This central contradiction had revealed its
Speaker 1: deeper logic Our museum was a living archive of possibility,
Speaker 1: generally compiling every remember version, every alternate route history might
Speaker 1: have taken for as long as the community care to
Speaker 1: keep Lane down stories from that day, my sense of
Speaker 1: my role changed once more, not just witness with cataloger,
Speaker 1: but collaborator. Each week I devised new documentation method stereo
Speaker 1: repairs of photos to catch our shadows, sketches from multiple perspectives,
Speaker 1: audio interviews with townsfolk drawn out about vanish or returning features.
Speaker 1: We hosted workshops with local students, urging them to bring
Speaker 1: their own artifacts, sketch their own impossible memories, note every
Speaker 1: oddity in their family album. Jay's memory mapp sprawled ever
Speaker 1: for further, dotted with multi colored flags and penciled in
Speaker 1: a movie dess. What struck me was the way that
Speaker 1: hand began to take part, relieved, seemed to treat its
Speaker 1: contradictions as celebration rather than embarrassment. I saw teenagers prowling
Speaker 1: the Allies notebooks out, taking notes on a gate or
Speaker 1: window that had been their last term. Rosy's catalog and
Speaker 1: gained a playful edge. Her notepds began to fill with
Speaker 1: columns labeled consistently remembered occasional audity, and only I notice.
Speaker 1: June's journals found their place in an open bindoor beside
Speaker 1: the reception desk, where visitors could contribute their own recollections
Speaker 1: or sketches. The reading room became a gentle coffee of possibility.
Speaker 1: The project's energy spilled over. My photography changed too, no
Speaker 1: longer just seeking to approve which reality was correct, but
Speaker 1: documenting with delight every new permutation as it played out
Speaker 1: a miniature or paint, the flecker in a window, at
Speaker 1: the shadow of a long vanished dock, the brief gleam
Speaker 1: of a fountain that might one day be built again.
Speaker 1: It no longer felt important to resolve which frosion was real.
Speaker 1: Each change became a kind of gift to peque at
Speaker 1: how history, a community, memory, shifting landscape, and the act
Speaker 1: of attention melded into a single living experiment. Instead of
Speaker 1: feeling at odds with the uncertainty, I settled into it
Speaker 1: the way one leans into this way of a boat,
Speaker 1: trusting the rhythm or reveal something new around each turn.
Speaker 1: Some afternoons, I'd walk the length of a promenade, chemist
Speaker 1: drawn around my neck and spot a bundle of curious
Speaker 1: kids pointing out details. I've missed a second lint above
Speaker 1: a shop, or braided chain around the dock's edge. Did
Speaker 1: that used to be here? But one of them would ask,
Speaker 1: and I grin. Maybe for someone, Maybe it's only just arrived.
Speaker 1: Often an elderly passer by his way in offering yet
Speaker 1: another conflicting past. No one was wrong, so long as
Speaker 1: the museum kept its doors open and made room for
Speaker 1: one more variation. I came to understand that protecting the
Speaker 1: uniqueness of our gallery did not mean freezing it in amber,
Speaker 1: but sustaining its openness to wonder to every new participant,
Speaker 1: every contradictory recollection, every layered possibility the town could conjure
Speaker 1: from the interplay of memory and place. June summed it
Speaker 1: up one misty afternoon, as we sat together in the
Speaker 1: alcove again, her journal sprayed between us. All these years,
Speaker 1: I thought I was chasing a trick or some secret
Speaker 1: nobody else could see. But perhaps the only secret is this.
Speaker 1: Every place is a gallery of what could have been.
Speaker 1: We just chose to see it. Standing in the front
Speaker 1: hall one bright morning, golden slats of sun shifting across
Speaker 1: the WINDGate Hill painting I watched the light saddle uncertainly
Speaker 1: on the crest, sometimes catching on the ghost of the lighthouse,
Speaker 1: sometimes show nothing but grass and sky. I found myself
Speaker 1: smiling at ease with the possibility. A visitor walked in
Speaker 1: behind me, pausing at the threshold. Which version's true? Then
Speaker 1: the lighthouse were the empty hill? I considered, depends who
Speaker 1: you ask, oh when she nodded, curiosity flaring behind a
Speaker 1: patient smile, as of content to stand among so many
Speaker 1: towns that might have been. I lingered in the doorway,
Speaker 1: sensing for the first time that every new day could
Speaker 1: bring a saddle shift, a new artifact, or returning rumor
Speaker 1: of some quiet, rearranged piece of history amid the world
Speaker 1: both inside and beyond these stone walls feel vast again,
Speaker 1: not because it was fixed, but because it was endlessly
Speaker 1: capable of difference. I don't know if other towns keep
Speaker 1: their own galleries of alternate selves quietly shifting the wazars.
Speaker 1: Does I hope they do. I intend to keep looking,
Speaker 1: just in case, because now I know every answer is
Speaker 1: really the start of a better question, and that is
Speaker 1: the end. Thank you for listening, and I will see
Speaker 1: you in the next one.