Seasoning

Turn Up Towers above fog, which forms a miasmic pool at the feet of the groaning keep. The greater elevation provided by the situation on a hilltop helps the effect of course. Procrastination being my watchword, I noted that shortly we would move beyond the ripe and into the rot, and that this season I had completely skipped the raw. Inadvertence is a strange bedfellow! Her cousin, Miss Adventure, had even avoided collusion with the raw. I gaze out upon the specially-bred spindle-shanks dahlias, 12 feet tall this year, and admire their orange and red bomb-burst forms above the shifting shroud that hides the ground. They look like a black and white photograph, with one or two brilliantly-coloured highlights, like Ed Mustafic’s famous orange in an otherwise black and white bowl of fruit.

A mysterious call from Orville Quantock, long silent. The urgency in his rasping voice persuaded me to roll out the car and recklessly agree to collect him from a disused railway halt, long abandoned to weeds and the ghosts of weeds.

Mist almost amounting to fog the last two mornings, a deep, swirling, allegorical fog. The tide of the year is changing. Strange beasts become active at the edges of perception, in defiance of reason itself. The engine seems to stutter as I clatter in the old charabanc across the bridge that leads away from familiarity. The radio falls silent. I catch sudden sight of a phalanx of five leeches moving across the moistened surface of the passenger side window. Is it just my imagination that seizes upon the indescribable horror of their constantly moving mouths? What is it they say?