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MIND THE GAP-a touching story

 

A common phrase heard in the London underground. A universally accepted command that any one who has travelled by the subway has been exposed to. It refers to the gap in between the platform and the train that arrives. Historically this announcement was recorded by Oswald Lawrence, an actor and vocalist back in the 1950s. It is played like clock work for each train on particular tube lines that bear these warnings.

 

So for well over 50 years this voice continued till even the passing of Oswald in 2007. That is where this story takes a turn. Oswald’s wife Dr Margaret McCollum was so heart broken that she would come to the tube station each day for years just to listen to her dead husband’s voice. Then tragedy struck, as in 2012 the transportation department decided to digitize the “mind the gap” and replaced Oswald’s voice with a new recording. Heart broken, she asked the ministry for a recording as this was the only way she had been coping for the last 5 years.

 

Miraculously the staff set out to find the original recording and were able to give her a restored Oswald’s voice on tape so that she may listen to it each day when she was in the comfort of her own home. This touching story of the kindness of the staff to ease her grief was beautiful. On my recent trip I recalled how as a teenager I would hear the original voice announcement and it was different now 31 years later as it had been replaced by a soul less digital warning, except at the Embankment station on the Northern Line ( presumably near to where Oswald and Margaret lived) where travelers can hear the original recording.

 

This is a heart felt story of an undying love of a couple which got me contemplating. How often do we attach ourselves to a material possession, or an item of a deceased or distant relative or friend that helps us to recollect a memory. Our senses come “ alive” as we step back into time as we touch that object, read that letter, observe an old photograph and recall a forgotten time. No one is ever truly gone, for each of us lives in the history of another human’s mind, like an archived computer file on a hard drive.

 

The quantum computer of universal consciousness keeps an imprint of each of us in some form making us immortal in the hearts and minds of our loved ones. It is wise to remember that we are neither lost to time nor forgotten. We are not misplaced across the continuum of infinity but in fact perfectly in harmony within the bandwidth of cosmic movie reels.

 

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I love you