Day 74: Picking Up Things

An early job takes me to Regent Street.   The Christmas crowds are gone, and without the need to fight through them, there's the space to imagine the pavements peopled by the past.   It's a street where it comes easy.  Hats and canes and stiff collars.   Particularly around the old Cafe Royal, where Oscar Wilde's downfall started.   (And where I torched my fringe with a Zippo.   Less monumental, but still significant to me.   I looked very surprised for a month.)  I daydream my way down the broad pavement, and look at shops catering for tourists with cash.  Sherlock hats and Mozart balls.   

Tomorrow I have stupidly agreed to do a job at Longleat (raarrgh!).  I say stupidly, because I had Longleat and Woburn mixed up in my head.   Woburn - half an hour up the road; Longleat - two and a half hours.   The silver lining is that Longleat is close to one of my oldest and dearest friends, so an ideal opportunity for a flying visit.

Down the A303, past Stonehenge, which is barely visible in the darkness.  From the road it always looks far smaller than it should.   Like Spinal Tap for real.   And then off on country lanes carving into the deepest Dorset countryside.   It's hard to see in the darkness - dazzled by on-coming SUV headlights, and confounded by twists and turns, steep hills and valleys.   There's a BMW right on my tail and I feel pressurised to go faster than I'd like.   Finally it turns off and I'm on another tiny road, behind a little van.   Conscious of the way I'd felt, I make sure to keep a bit of distance, but it's so much easier to allow someone else to pick out the way forward with their headlights.  Just to fall in behind, and follow the cheery red beacons of their tail lights.   I suspect that's exactly what BMW driver was doing too.   So much more comfortable to let someone else take responsibility for the path.   I'm not going to get metaphorical, but, well...   Ho hum.

Emma has acquired a dog (actually, a bitch, but that sounds wrong).   After eating, laughing, talking, we take her for a walk in the pitch black.  No street lights here.   But the most extraordinary starry sky.  All the constellations I can recognise (the Plough - obviously - and Orion's Belt - which looks far closer than normal) and loads I've never seen before.   The Seven Sisters (I think).   Sagittarius (I think).   The sky is crammed full of stars, bright and big, like we're in the desert.   So busy gawping that when Tess decides to take a shit, we don't notice exactly where.   And we haven't brought a torch.   So Emma has to use her bagged hand as a heat sensor, hovering over the likely areas on the verge until she feels some telltale radiating warmth.   A completely silent village except for two people weeping with laughter in the middle of a dark lane.   Success, and with weighted bag swinging Carnaby Street-style, we blunder back through black to the lights of the house.

I sleep in a room up under the eaves, still and peaceful except for the scuttling of small things in the thatch above.   Such deep quietness that you can pick up on the tiny things you might otherwise miss.

I can't get a mobile signal here.   Good.