Loving the Macabre.

The sky was clear tonight, and the half moon bright enough to cast deep shadows on the lane. A light mist infused the fields and trees with the merest hint of a cold glow, and the walls of the farmhouse and cottages in Mill Lane were rendered a harsher range of half tones than usual. The combined effect was to make their angles seem slightly more angular, their prospect slightly more twisted. In a word, they looked gothic.

I’ve always taken pleasure in such an atmosphere. I remember walking home some nights as a teenager. The route was a track that ran close to the road along the bottom of a small range of hills, and I used to imagine that every large junction box standing out from the power poles was a dead man hanging from a gibbet. I didn’t know then what the difference between a gibbet and a gallows was, but it hardly mattered. My sense of the macabre was duly satisfied. And it wouldn’t have worked had I not been alone. It seems that some aspects of our natures don’t really change very much.

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Venus was a little higher above the horizon tonight, and Jupiter a little further away from her. And that’s something else that doesn’t seem to change very much.