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.

My Innate, Old School Grasp of Romance

A burst of sodium orange signals the return to England. My iPod celebrates with a version of Cradle’s Second Nature sung in French – its usual irony clearly intact. Within seconds it is hard to distinguish between the blackness of the Chunnel and the darkened Kent countryside.

I did not achieve frites or a decent croissant while in Brussels. However, as the Eurostar rolls across South East England with the speed of a getaway driver hyped to the gills on dexedrine, the amount of chocolate I was importing made my trip feel like a partial success. The fact it was even bought at the shop previously specified reassured me that Surreal Girl would be pleased to see me when I arrived at St. Pancras.

Of course, as I had promised to buy her a glass of fizz at the station’s champagne bar she already had a good reason to be happy to see me safely return from the continent. Surreal Girl might be my best friend, but if the finest Belgian chocolates and a drink at the world’s longest champagne bar does not demonstrate my innate, old school grasp of romance, I am not sure what does. Not that it takes something similar to woo me. I am wowed by a crème brûlée gelatai or a poke of chips to be shared on the beach at Leigh-on-Sea.