Dark Days and Dark Corners.

Another cold, wet, and gloomy twilight this evening. And I’ve got that old August feeling hanging over me – the one which comes from noting all the signs that summer is nearly over for another year. The lowering sun, the lengthening shadows, the occasional chill in the air, the drying leaves, the depleting colour in verge and hedgerow, and the harvested fields now naked and littered with scattered straw bales awaiting collection. 

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Last night I was woken in the early hours feeling cold, not on the outside but in my body core. There was nothing obvious to explain it because the panel heater was running on its thermostat so the room was warm enough, but uncomfortably cold I was nonetheless.

I opened my eyes and looked around the bedroom. The night sky was beginning to show the first tepid hints of brightness, and the wall opposite the window was sufficiently lit for its reflected light to show detail in the room. But when I looked at the end of the room opposite my bed I was surprised at how dark it was, so dark that I could hardly discern the white painted door in the corner. It looked as though a cloud of black mist was obscuring that part of the room, and I thought I saw occasional white, filmy streaks appear and disappear.

I expect it was all an optical aberration of some kind, but I’m congenitally inclined to wonder whether reality is quite as simple as we think it is. In fact, the older I get and the more I listen to modern scientific thinking, the more tempted I am to consider it likely that there’s a lot more to reality than we generally perceive. I lay in bed wide awake and wondering whether to get up and make a hot drink, and then I fell asleep again.

So what’s the verdict on last night’s event? I don’t have one. Unusually for me, I prefer not to think about it too much. Black mists in the corners of rooms are a tiny bit spooky, and I’d prefer to sleep uninterrupted until the sun comes up.