Coming home

Back home and back down. Post-break blues eh? Killer.
Especially when you come back and find you and the rest of the world is much the same as you left it.

Some good memories though, wandering around the lonely heaths, valleys and woods of the New Forest. Ironic name, I'm told it's a relic of the post-glacial landscape our ancestors found when they crossed the land bridge to here. Magical. No, really.

Step away from the gated Barret homes and the Mercedes filled car parks around the forest and you are 10,000 years away, when spirits haunted the dark or drove the boar onto your spear. The Sidhe still inhabit the place, no more or less than when feared or placated by the tribes of the heath. Whether it's because I know the history, legends and tales, whether it's because being a werewolf makes me sensitive to such places, it reeks of Elsewhere. The tumuli that loom from the mists and woods have the same impact on me as Eliot's "places where prayer has been valid", the thinning of reality is palpable*.

For whatever reason the liminal** spaces, the sea, empty woods, open horizons, moors, heaths, airfields and even car parks, give me a sense that something has, or is about to happen. I put it down to a clearing of sensory inputs (just sky, land, rock or plane surfaces), allowing the antenna to tune, to attenuate the myriad choices that have been or will be made. My sense and delight of our deep, deep past is matched by my sense of the infinitely deep future, the choices and histories yet to be made. When faced with those sorts of infinities, you have to accept you are always halfway between the Beginning and the End, and wonder.

Or alternatively, accept that you should lay off the Martinis before writing blogs...

*note to self: more meat, less dictionaries in diet
** note to self: i won't tell you again...