When the familiar becomes unfamiliar
AS a child sometimes I used to stare into a mirror at my own face, unblinking, for minutes at a time. It got scary. Because at a certain point my own familiar face stopped being recognisable and I saw a weird creature. I couldn’t look at it for long, but nor did I have to, since the merest movement of my eyes brought back the familiar me. But I thought about what happened and I realised that the benign interpretation of my face that I had become accustomed to wasn’t necessarily the only way it could…