Somewhere between Mordor and Fairyland

The light is failing as I begin the trudge to Essex. The tipping point in a grey afternoon when cars lose the definitions of marque and colour, become nothing but white headlight glare. I move too slowly through the Piccadilly, the neon dream of now obscuring its secret Masonic history. It is near dark as I traverse the ghost zone of Bell Yard.

Stuttering through the streets, I feel a surge of crossroad power at Ludgate Circus. The next mile becomes an imaginary ley as I brush by the sacred sites of Saint Bride’s, Saint Paul’s and the London Stone. I mainline on occulted history till I hit the skulls of Saint Olave Hart Street.

For the next 45 minutes I have to sit cross-legged on the floor of a train. I see nothing but a crowded thicket of legs. Having made the journey so many times in a previous life, I do not need to watch the landscape fall away outside the window to know where I am when. I let the subtle sensation of moving backwards pull my mind towards ideaspace. In reverie, the severed heads once spiked on London Bridge speak old secrets. Tales spat from rotting tongues only silenced by arrival at Leigh-on-Sea.

I climb the hill; look out across the dark blanks in the landscape that memory fills in as fields. Night graces even the blight which is Canvey Island a certain magic. The constant flare of the refinery and the sodium orange glow of the thousands of streetlights give it an aspect somewhere between Mordor and fairyland. Essex is no longer my home, but at least tonight it contains not ghosts, but the prospect of friends and laughter.