Friday 26 August 2011

A Little Allegory and a Real Landscape.

Rare event:

Today I’ve been too busy to make a blog post. Now is post-bath time, so here I am.

The first thing that happened this morning was that I saw the office curtains twitch and the face of my Chinese ghost peer round them.

‘Boo!’ she said. ‘Your exorcist’s crap.’

I love her madly, you know, so she came for a walk with me and we talked about deep and meaningful things, like the nature of haunting and how some ghosts are for life, not just for Beltane.

As we entered Church Lane (she likes the church, for some reason) I pointed out how the clouds sometimes uncannily match the shape of the land. I used to notice it a lot when I was working as a landscape photographer. You’ll have to imagine the scene here, since I never carry cameras with me these days.

In the foreground is the lane, winding away and disappearing around a bend, and just on the bend is a large ash tree (odd that it should have been an ash; maybe it was called Randolph.)There’s a hedge running alongside it, and fields/trees/copses beyond that. In the distance, maybe three or four miles away, there’s a range of low hills called the Weavers. It’s a view I’ve often meant to photograph, but today there was an added bonus. Above the Weavers lay a mid grey cloud bank which echoed the shape of the hills almost perfectly, but the weird thing was that there was also a vertical column of white cloud that was placed in exactly the right place to echo the tree.

That was what verged on the freaky, but my ghost was unfazed. She said it was probably just a cosmic sign for something and it was for me to work out the meaning. At least, I think that’s what she said. She’s so damn wise, she sometimes leaves me behind. I asked her if she would marry me when I die, but all she returned was one of those inscrutable looks for which the Chinese are famed.

I’m not mad, you know, nor crazy if you’re American.

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