WSD

For me, WSD usually means the gloriously archetypal Suede b-side WSD. I am aware it can also stand for word sense disambiguation (largely because I was once paid in cakes at Queen’s University to take part in experiments to develop algorithms to get round it). However, for the last couple of days WSD has translated into West Sussex Downs.

Bizarrely during my stay, the WSD seemed to act like a zone of increased potential. It became natural to be one minute herding sheep on the Truleigh Hill with an 87-year-old shepherd called Don before the next moment was taken up with talking to a Canadian girl who was riding across the downs atop a blue-eyed Shire horse. Meeting a professional magician called Raven atop the Devil’s Dyke quickly seemed as commonplace as spotting a clump of emo on Southend High Street. It felt at times as if I had slipped into a fiction edited by Boris Vian.

In these circumstances, the mind can smooth down the unusual. The flint and razor wire walls of HM Lewes Prison quickly became accepted as a natural a part of my temporary environment as the sudden chalk drops. The secret military spots, leftover microwave towers of Backbone and visible outcrops of Home Office Scientific Development Branch that may feature in Off The Map seemed no more extraordinary than the eating at a table whilst a Buff Orpington pecked around your feet. Chanctonbury Ring no stranger than certain alleys off Villiers Street.

For all the dramatic splendor, for all the constantly performing landscape, I am glad to be back in London tonight. I loved the relentless prototypical bursts of Englishness – cream teas served out the back of village post offices; hillside lanes, arched in green, twisting to reveal thatched cottages; moss-eroded statues of pan in formalized gardens – but I am WSDed out.

I could now happily go several months without seeing ducks copulating or lambs bouncing. I have exhausted any desire to navigate through fields covered with livestock excrement arranged in distribution patterns Viet Cong landmine layers would be proud of. I have also had enough of bloody rhododendrons, but that is an entirely different story.