Samuel and I.

While walking along Mill Lane tonight, I heard a dull thump behind me. It sounded like somebody kicking something with a heavy boot, so I turned around and shone the torch. There was nothing there, of course, but it reminded me again of those lines from The Ancient Mariner:

Like one that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread
And having once turned round, walks on
And turns no more his head
Because he knows some frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread

And they, not unsurprisingly, brought on the old feeling that I get every so often – that there is something walking close behind me which might tear me apart with its claws any moment, but probably won’t.

And then there are the indeterminate things that I see occasionally in my peripheral vision, up in the trees or coming past my shoulder on the lane.

I wonder whether Coleridge, too, went for night walks around the lanes, and whether the locals thought him weird.