Gothic Eye Strain

If I disregard the comments accusing me of being in the pay of SIS or a ‘shadow-stealing dealer of Obi’, my blog only gets the occasional complaint. As much as a writer should ignore criticism, I do listen to reader feedback. From the enigmatic Mr. Lomax with his grumbling over my overuse of the word ‘sodium’ to the Ruby Empresses and her complaints of me not having written a decent piece about cooking for an age. I even listen to Kid Atari and his protests about not having slipped in any obscure Bowie references for several months.

However, there are some complaints I just refuse to take seriously – even if they come from trusted sources. According to one Mr. Dove, the design of my blog causes ‘gothic eye strain’. If someone is staggering around an office, retinas imprinted with throbbing afterimages, I am not going to accept that English Dreaming, English Rain is to blame.

Beyond the Edge of England

On the ground, the screen in front of me shows London as a huge yellow boil growing from green skin patterned with thin veins of blue. Only three roads are marked: A4, M25 – the city’s magic circle – and A13, first ley of English Hoodoo and my ancestral road. I wish my journey only involved taking one of these paths. It is 5,767 miles/12 hours and 50 minutes to Singapore.

As we taxi, the engines whine like whale song, building to a storm crash as the bulk of the 777 finally fights gravity. At 5,000 feet the sodium orange of the streetlights below mark fiery labyrinths on the map. At 14,000 they are reduced to the smudged trajectories of civilisation, isolated villages and towns revealed as blazing worlds in the blackened landscape of the night.

We reach the Essex coast and suddenly the fires stop. Beyond the edge of England there is only a black void. We carry on with only a belief that there must be sea below till we reach the scattered clusters of light which signal Holland.

BA Station 12 plays Morrissey’s Vauxhall & I on continuous loop. Mozza is about the worst oracle soundtrack I can imagine. ‘There’s going to be some trouble…’

The stewards enforce a false night. When I sneak open the shutter I glimpse wonders. The Himalayas. The Bay of Bengal. At one point I see jungle mountains surrounding old Dagon. The trees an encircling army, providing paranoia that the vengeful spirit of the green may not be something the junta can hold back with chainsaws and conscripted labour alone. A thin string of white sand marks one border of the Andaman Sea. Part of my mind wants to translate it into a fractal equation, but my eyes only want to communicate awe at its simple, devastating beauty.

Descending into Singapore the pain starts. It feels as if my teeth are being pulled, yanked from my mouth in clumps by industrial pliers. There is a knife blade scouring the white of my left cheekbone. A pencil being pushed into my brain.

I want to scream. I have had bones snap, molars shatter, but nothing as bad as this. I want oblivion. Anything as long as it stops.

Hands tear the fabric off the seat as I fight the increasing destruction in my head. As we drop below the cloud, 200 ships appear below. Anchored in a rigid grid, clothed in emaciated gauze of mist, their lack of motion suggests death. We are falling towards land over a bulk freighter graveyard.

I stumble into the neon buzz of the airport already near blind with headache. Giant plasma screens blast RSAF propaganda. The Black Knight’s F-16C Fighting Falcons perform precision rolls, acting out action snatches from every big budget sci-fi film and computer game cutscene of the last decade. Slogans proclaim: ‘Air Force - Above All' and 'Careers – Like Nothing on Earth.’

With me, they are preaching to the wrong demographic. Right now I do not need any Manga technology death fetishation to fear aircraft. Right now, I bloody hate flying.

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.