Living In The Liminal Zone

Listen. You know I have this thing about liminal zones? Well, I'm going to tell you what they are and how I began to notice them.

For me a liminal zone is a place that exists where time and space don't mean the same things as time and space normally mean, like when you catch the train to work or go out for tea with a friend. Liminal  zones can be independent of time and space, or they can be alternative paradigms. They are mostly lost pockets of time and space , black holes in the loose knit fabric of life. Airport lounges, motorway underpasses, 24 hour supermarket at 3am in the morning, transitional places where the dweller really is on the threshold. An event can also be a liminal zone and liminal zones can exist in your mind. You know what and where your liminal zones are, you know the way to enter and the way out but you just don't want to go there most of the time.

So, I was thirteen and sitting in the car in a car park of a country market. We are on holiday in Dorset. I am waiting for my dad to come back and have been told to stay in the car because I always mither for one of those Aron sweaters they sell at country markets. My dad is buying some bulbs for the boarders of the front garden. I'm really bored and quite hot in the car. It's a really hot day. This man walks up to the car and is really staring at me through the window. I don't like him, he looks quite old and is wearing a flat cap and has a stick. I'm wishing he would go away and I manage to stare back. I'm a defiant child. Then he turns around and walks quickly off in the direction of the market stalls, swinging that stick. Git. He looks like old man Steptoe.

When my dad got back from getting the bulbs I told him about the man who looked like old man Steptoe and peered in at me through the car window. I thought about this incident for years and years and I used to tell people about it and everyone thought that it was really funny and that I was pulling their leg.

When I was 28 we found some old super 8 movies from when we were kids.Seriously funny too. There is this one of me round at the Lowe's house with their kids. The Warburton's are there too and Ian Foster. Us kids are all about 3 or 4 and we are splashing about in the paddling pool on the back garden. I'm wearing a red swimming costume with three white buttons on the front and a tiny white pleated skirt attached to it. I have my hair in bunches and I am very tanned. In the background you can just see Bill Lowe faffing with his red jag - it's half in and half out of the garage and he is showing someone the interior of one of the doors. All the kids are running wild and I go up onto the slide and sit at the top. The cmera looks towards the bottom of the slide, sees what I would have seen. At the bottom of the slide, looking up at me, staring, is the old man I was to see in Dorset years later. He is staring in the same way.

I don't remember seeing the old man when I was 3, I only remember seeing him in that car park at the country market in Dorset. I have never forgotten what he looked like, I still remember what he looked like very clearly too.

This was my first experience of a liminal zone 'event'. The second was in an airport lounge.

You get the drift, no? You can identify your liminal experiences - things that just don't seem quite right, out of time, space and place, but you have never really given them much thought until now. If you find them will you tell me?