Square and Compass, Worth Matravers – Night

Surreal Girl nudges the car along unlit roads. The world seems empty. We are the traffic.

Free from the taint of sodium orange, this is moon country. Silver gilds the landscape, makes water mirrors, alchemises glass into precious metal. Lets us flow along shining lanes.

Corfe Castle grabs the horizon with dramatic stabs of rock. Black teeth against the spilt bruise purple of the sky. Its starving spectres and assassinated dead using the dark to make their escape.

Even the best of places often have a different feel at night. Vital energy, caught between polarities of stone and sea, breaks away when the sun is not around to watch the drama of a view. Enchantment exits when the light gets switched off. Everything changes when the night watch clocks on.

The village falls away. A hamlet splutters out. With it goes the last artificial glow for a couple of miles. From now on, we twist and climb through the dark towards our destination.

The Square and Compass in Worth Matravers is one of England’s most magical pubs. Coming from someone working on The Grimoire of London Taverns, that is not a glib statement. It is not housing the genius loci, it has become it.

From the languid creek of the pub sign to the comforting spill of light coming from the windows, the place is so archetypal it almost becomes unreal. As we walk towards it, I cannot shake a vague feeling of walking onto a film set. Have to banish the thought of several films. Raise hope that we are not going to opening the door to a Slaughtered Lamb welcome. We have drifted across a liminal border and into England’s own dream of itself. Its vision of what a rural pub should be.

Inside there is a chalk board listing the ales, home-pressed ciders and perries. Imagine the shipping forecast areas replaced by names of potential pints. Firebox. War Horse. Dark Star. Priory Mild. It reads like poetry. An irregular ode to an alternative fluid Albion.

My beer is the Chilli Plum Porter. Strong, rich and dark. Autumn poured into a glass.  From the first sup, my mouth falls in love with it.

With traces of Masonic graffiti and fossil ghosts trapped in stone, The Square and Compass needs no faux trappings to generate a sense of history. Its museum of local finds is eccentric character, not a manufactured stab at heritage.

Pint in hand, I can psychometrise Roman rings corroding out of time. Touch giant ammonites. My fingers bridge a gap of 150 million years, flow across the shape of a creature extinct, but not vanished.

The temporal echoes of decades of laughter and talk bounce off of the wood, bounce off the Purbeck stone. You can feel the collected tales of the past swirling around. The Square and Compass has become part of the narrative of the landscape. Part of the English Dreaming.

One pint becomes two. I am drinking in more than the heady kick of the Chilli Plum Porter. My head is a crowded house of spirits. More than a century’s worth of landlords, assorted members of the Newman clan and drinkers pour their stories into me.

A third pint has to happen. One for those who have gone before. One for those here. One for those yet to come. Tonight you cannot help but feel that you can read the future in beer froth, divine a line of fate from your beer dregs.

Surreal Girl and I go outside. Above us is an explosion of stars. A map of past moments of light. The sky as both space and time. Unfolding, traveling into the now.

We look up. Our hands curl together. We walk back in the glow of the highest magic.

The Square and Compass, Worth Matravers – Day

Summer has staged an unexpected comeback. Determined to go out with a suicidal explosion of heat, it gives us a gin bottle blue sky untroubled by cloud. This is the final passionate kiss. A goodbye to remind you what you will be missing as your love leaves the hemisphere.

Crippled, all I can do is let my ripped flesh warm in the sun. Sit on stone so soaked with memory it holds a thousand stories. I try to numb the pain with mind-blurring strength perry. A taste echoing back to wilding times.

The Square and Compass is built on a special spot. The perfection of English feng shui. Sea to the front of me. Hills to my back. Wind warped trees to my sides. Vital energy riding the wind. The place recharges me.

We have arrived in the middle of a pumpkin festival. Giant, bloated orange balls of concentrated sunshine have colonised every available space outside the pub. Mutant squashes tumble down the side of the Fossil Museum.  

Chickens tumble around me. There is a constant dance of sparrows from the trees to the ground to scrabble for pasty crumbs. A local with a Catweazle beard wheezes down the lane on a bike which is clearly more corrosion than dependable metal.

White walls. Painfully blue skies. The last gasp of tree green. A hundred shades of orange from Princeton to safety to burnt marmalade. This is an English autumn coloured with a Disney palette.

I cannot help but feel as is I have stumbled out of the mundane into an archetypal England. Some higher mystical form of the land usually only ever seen reflected in art. English dreaming manifest.

My body may be broken, but my soul is healing.

Chapman’s Pool

When I fall, I hear not only crack and crunch above the breaking waves, but tearing. I cannot get up. Any attempt at movement produces a surge of nausea. My hands flail, hit black rock and clench sea-soaked sand.

It is bad. I know it. There is no mobile phone coverage. More than a mile of hard climb back and I cannot walk. To top this layer cake of woe, it also feels as if an invisible hand has phased through me and is now clutching my heart.

Not since my days knocking around with Andy Collins have I placed myself in such a perilous situation through a mixture of clumsiness and blithe assumption I can suspend any chance of something going wrong. There is stupid and king stupid. Fossil hunting at Chapman’s Pool with my current health issues is king stupid.

My scarf becomes part of a splint. Surreal Girl supports me. We begin the scrabble up. Pain splinters my vision. I can no longer tell whether I am hearing the waves crashing or my own blood breaking inside.

There is a tinnitus explosion of sound in ears then only the Petro off-beat drumming of my heart. My body does not know whether to give in to the dizziness or nausea first. Whilst it tries to decide, I push on.

Surreal Girl remains calm. I follow her example. There is nothing to fear, but fear itself becomes my mantra. Focus on the words instead of the agony. Each step recalling those who said it. Trying to silence the internal scream with thoughts of FDR, Sir Francis Bacon. Trying to push out pain with the Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear.

I climb. Recalling Rosicrucian conspiracy theories about Sir Francis. Recalling the plots of old space operas. Looking at my wife’s weak smile. Anything to block out what is happening to my body. History, fiction and Surreal Girl get me through. They always do.

The Secret Languages of London

London is ghost-haunted. Almost every street is home to at least one temporal shade. It is a city so dense in historical information that the compression of its layers makes it bleed past memory into the present.

Walking London is a dance with its spirits. Open yourself to the memories grafted to stone or brick and the buildings whisper to you. Engage with the history staked below the flow of certain crossroads and you can listen to stories that were old to the Legio XIV Gemina.

A journey in London, no matter how banal its purpose, cuts into history. Traipsing down almost any street, you can kick up anecdotes like a child scuffing through a carpet of autumn leaves. Here, the past is a glorious confusion litter you must crunch through. Memories of 730,000 yesterdays have carved themselves into the fabric of the place. There is no avoiding the echoes of all the feet that pounded before you.

You can learn all the secret languages of London by moving through it. The code embedded in decorative ironwork. Transmissions hidden in the harsh static of rush hour traffic. Fossil omens flashed in slabs of York stone. All of the hidden tongues of the town accessible to those who walk.

The Lullaby of Little Venice

Tonight the canal is a black mirror. Rippled obsidian. Its jagged peaks fracturing the light that spills from the street lamps of Blomfield Road. Sodium white paving across the dark water. Willo-the-wisp trails to tempt towpath drunks into oblivion.

Bluster transforms the landscape of canal. Ridges flattened, valleys carved. New shards of light rise and fall in an instant.

I listen to the lullaby of Little Venice. Water clapping the side of the cut. Boat wood creaking. Wind dumping street sounds into blackness. Instants are snatched from the constant Westway drone and dub. They skim across the surface before sinking with a hot stone hiss.

At times the canal seems to twist as if in fitful sleep. Dreaming of forgotten water gypsy ballads or the muffled, processional chug of dark lantern boats. Maybe it dreams of Lovecraftian amphibians that wake at night to pull leggers from their boats and into the cold ink of the Islington Tunnel. Shallow Ones who swim up the Regent to rock the boats of the Three Bridge Kingdom.

In the lost hours of slumber, the lost hours of stretch and turn, the cut owns itself. No longer just a route through the city or space to live on, it possesses purpose divorced from its users. Pushing east to kiss the Thames, pushing west in Grand Union. The liquid ley of the land.

Nicholas Courtney – the Best Possible Replacement TV Dad you Could Imagine

This year, two heroic pillars of Doctor Who and my childhood died. I have already written about the sad loss of Elizabeth Sladen, so it is only right that I also reflect on the passing of Nicholas Courtney. This entry may be belated, but often words that start from the heart take some time to journey to fingers.

It is not often that a man has a moustache instantly recognisable to a whole generation of boys. It is even rarer for an actor to turn a character he plays into an iconic part of a beloved cultural institution reflecting the best of a nation’s values. Nicholas Courtney, through his portrayal of Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart – the Brig – in Doctor Who, managed to achieve both with some style.

Almost everyone in Doctor Who fandom it seems has a Nicholas Courtney bar story. A precious memory of enjoying a pint with him. A wonderful recollection of the tales he shared over a glass. Always rich in humour, but always told a gentleman’s lack of malice.

Others will better parade the old trooper’s battalion of anecdotes than I. Whoever tells them, they will still hold a little of his warmth and a smile. Though my time enjoying doubles of Jura Superstition with Nicholas Courtney was filled with laughter and more witty one-lines about Brian Blessed than the human epiglottis is designed to endure, I took my than memories of mirth away.

In the clockless, alcohol-fuelled hours of post midnight hotel drinking, I told him how I grew up fatherless in the 1970s. How I was the only single-parent child in the school. How I looked to the television for potential replacement fathers. Looked for my male role models even in the strange universe of Doctor Who.

The Doctor was of course alien and showed no interest in marriage; he was also centuries too old for my mum. Yet the Brigadier as played by Nicholas Courtney … here was the best possible replacement TV dad you could imagine. Yes he could be stern and you knew you would not want him to catch you being naughty as we often splendidly cross, but he was everything you could want a father to be – brave, loyal, reliable. Someone you knew who would not only be a hero in your eyes, but to everyone else’s as well.

After hearing all this, Nicholas put down his tumbler, looked directly at me and said: “I have always felt proud of play the Brig. He was more than a just another character, Emblematic and iconic. He stood for things, for values. Important values you could and should be proud of. Having heard that, I am even prouder to have played him. Cheers.”

Life gives you very few moments when your childhood champions are transformed into even bigger heroes in your adult eyes. When it does, you seize and cherish them. Bank the memory and its recollection will sustain you for a long time to come.

A couple of years later, I met Nicholas Courtney again after a Mass the Actor’s Church in Covent Garden. We shook hands, but I had no expectation of him remembering me. He suddenly gestured up and around the Inigo Jones gloriousness of the church and said: “We all have a Father.”

If England has produced a sweeter, more affable and charming gentleman, I doubt if I will be lucky enough to ever meet them.

English Rain

The sky grinds low. Rain pummels the canal. A thousand instant craters spluttering in and out of existence. English rain. Cold and hard. A relentless imitation of a monsoon. A thousand new miniature streams pouring into the canal.

It is a summer afternoon, yet the sky is bruised black with premature darkness. Pipes along the canal steam. Release primordial phantoms that curl and dance away along the cut.

Being English requires you to understand and embrace the country’s bi-polar weather. You learn to wake to sunshine and see all your plans for the day torn apart as the afternoon brings the November three months early. Welcome its unpredictability or it will drive you crazy.

Strangely, the harshness of sudden English rain has its compensations. Your view never dulls to the eye, because when it pours like this, everything is transformed. There is always an excuse for keeping a battered trench coat in your wardrobe. You can prove your devotion by venturing out to buy milk.

This is what I do this afternoon. Turn my collar up. Venture out into a noir film director’s wet dream. Walk the canal out of the Three Bridge Kingdom towards the sharp light of the shops. Skin tightening to armour as water needles fall on it. Bless the English rain for giving me the chance to make even grocery shopping a little note of love to Surreal Girl.