Above Essex Nowhere

I hate cliché. Hate writing it, hate living it. This morning I walk out at 8am through London drab. A tired grey sky makes it seasonless. No rumour of summer. Cool drizzle beads on my face. By the time I turn off of Oxford Street 40 minutes later I am damp and rheumatic.

I work for three hours. Basement publishing. More cliché. Wrestling with an index; trying to impose order surrounded by dunes of dust, forgotten books and dozens of broken Apple Macs. A dripping track soundtrack only broken by the feet clacking over the skylight.

At 12, two lines into ‘T’, I down my pencil, straighten my manuscript and make my way back to Oxford Street. The 23 I catch crawls towards its destination. Iain Sinclair to cushion the passage along painful places of The Strand, the Law Courts and Bell Yard.

Even when London is left, the grey continues. It bleeds into the aborted futurism of Stansted airport. A back of the lorry fake Antonio Sant’Elia design, blighted by Essex weather, has become a temple of dull paranoia. The two hour security lines and machine gun police create concentrated fear. The same instructions to comply are broadcast over and over in assorted languages including German. Close your eyes and you are in a parallel universe where the Nazis won the war.

It is raining by the time I walk across the tarmac to climb the steps to the plane. The wind, buoyant from the easy journey across Essex flatlands, whoops in my face like ugly football supporter from a rival team high on victory. The grey sky keeps everything in low definition. Cold, wet and oppressive, I am living the line by Luke Haines that helped name this blog.

Sitting between strangers, my aircraft terror begins to coalesce. The black hole in my brain – the injury from my last flight with Anne-Marie – exerts an awful gravity. Fears are sucked from the chasms of memory, ghosts ripped from slumber. The old language of dread reasserts itself. The smoothed down acronym TIA regrows its teeth, glorying in power regained as transient ischaemic attack. Ryanair roulette. Every time I fly, I know it could happen again.

Noise builds. The thumping, expectant power you feel building as you taxi becomes a purposeful, concentrated roar. A sudden skip in the stomach and then flight. Above Essex nowhere. A flattened quilt of fields in dark greens, browns and colours so tired they have given up and become exhausted shades of yellow are stitched by hedgerows, trimmed with ribbons of black tarmac.

For a few seconds it all goes white. When detail returns, we are cruising above a landscape straight out of the adventures of Rupert the Bear as drawn by Roger Dean. Mountain ranges of atmospheric water vapour come complete with secluded valleys that could house the palace of the Bird King, a mist village or floating island. When the continents of cloud eventually begin to fail and become hydrosphere archipelagos, the fields below are French.

Even from thousands of feet up, you can see the difference between England and southern France immediately. A landscape drawn from a divergent colour palette, sun-whipped soil scrapped thinly over limestone. No hedgerow enclosures. Arid peaks and dry valleys. Scattered vineyards. A flash of the Rhône. When we make the Mediterranean, the sun bends the wings of the plane, turns the water below into a blinding expanse of gold. Turning over Marseilles, I struggle to understand how a city of little more than a million and a half people could stretch itself across over such a wide area.

I land in another cliché. Blue sky. Technicolour movie blue. Total absence of cloud. A palpable hit of lavender carried on the warm air. Sunlight so strong my automatic English reaction is that it needs watering down like pastis. My phone’s loyalty morphs from T-Mobile to Orange F. For once there are no problems at the border. Smooth transition from one state to another. Everything is blue skies.

Normally I hate cliché, but this one, exchanging grey for blue, this is one that I can hack.