1 – Thenamong the pepper dulse and carrageeni am wracked with sobshe takes his sockdressing the woundsmiling telling methe blood will washaway and so it doeswithin moments Iam back alive blit…

You know I love Soft Play. I’ve mentioned it before. I’ve waxed, opined, fanboy squeed…a lot. Heavy Jelly remains my most played album of the last twelve months and most of my time seems to be underlined and soundtracked by Soft Play. I seriously love them in a way my 14 year old music obsessive self would have thought was a bit much. 

I was in the process of writing - well, researching - an idea I had for a novel. It involved various incarnations of the Green Man and probably owed more to Alan Moore’s run on Swamp Thing than I care to admit. It was a very cozy eco-centric idea in which the remaining green spaces fight back against the great polluters and yadda yadda yadda…

1 – Thenamong the pepper dulse and carrageeni am wracked with sobshe takes his sockdressing the woundsmiling telling methe blood will washaway and so it doeswithin moments Iam back alive blit…

And so, after half  a century, I finally make it back to Ardnamurchan. It is both a moment of triumph and a moment of disappointment. Part of the disappointment is due to misreading the website for the lighthouse. The daily opening times are quite clear, but the dates between which those opening times apply are not. Even internet travel sites were confused declaring it open, even as we arrived to find it closed. 

Map 1 1 All Mathematics would suggestA steady straight line as the best,But left and right alternatelyIs consonant with history. In his book How We Believe, Michael Shermer argues the human brain has evolved to be a pattern recognition engine. The patterns themselves are real but often subjective. The interpretations of these patterns are sometimes based on correctly perceived information and sometimes an attempt at imposing meaning on chance manifestations.

. i The past is fragmented and falsified. Of course, this is nothing new. Archives have been doing this since the concept of archive was first mooted but if, as a result of this constant real time revisionism, all we remember is false, are we not contributing to our own psychological entropy? Academic archives, at least, tried to illustrate a flow of time and thought even if that was subject to societal and personal preference.

Part Two – The Phantom Hitch Hiker. i. Thumbs It is 1981, and my friend Mark had just bought his first car. We would go for night drives, searching for UFOs or headless horsemen or any other ‘weird shit’ that might populate the Lincolnshire Wolds. In their expected – but disappointing - absence, we would share whale tumour stories and lurid urban legends.

xiii. Rik Rack Recumbent On a bench outside the main gate of King's Cross Station, I see a familiar face. Rik Rack has poured himself into a solid wooden bench that is pooling water. He is blissfully unaware of the encroaching wetness and sleeps peacefully. Tuckered out, no doubt from a nighttime railing against the electric dogs in Anglesey. I looked at him for a moment a reached into my wallet.

i ‘The form that is most appropriate to the weird,’ says Fisher, ‘is the montage; hence the preference within surrealism for the weird combinations.’ (Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, 2016) The montage, though, has become something of a cliché. Its usage is now openly mocked and satirised. In 'Team America: World Police,' the montage sequence, complete with an original song, explains what a montage sequence is, what it does and how it works.

vi ‘Since the Saturnine temperament is slow, prone to indecisiveness, sometimes one has to cut one's way through with a knife. Sometimes one ends by turning the knife against oneself.’ (Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn: Essays, 2009) If one recalls a memory, one tends to edit and ‘clean up’ the recollection. The context of events before and after are deleted.

i ‘To attempt to write a guide to such an amorphous concept as melancholy is overwhelmingly impossible, such is the breadth and depth of the topic, the disciplinary territories, the disputes and the extensive creative outpourings. There is a tremendous sense of the infinite, like staring at stars or at a roomful of files, a daunting multitude. The approach is, therefore, to adopt the notion of constellations and to plot various points and co - ordinates, a 'join - the - dots' approach to exploration which seeks new combinations and sometimes unexpected juxtapositions.’ (Bowring) …

V My parents did not like or approve of Science Fiction. It seemed odd to shun a single genre like that, especially as I was also a horror fan, but and despite its importance to me they told me, point blank, that they would not take me to the cinema to see Star Wars. In Tunbridge Wells, the nearest cinema was a short walk; maybe thirty minutes.

I On Monday mornings at infant school, we did something called 'News and Stories.' These days it is known as 'Show and Tell' but 'News and Stories' had an additional 'learning to write' component. We would draw a picture and then take it to the teacher. She would write what you had drawn underneath. You would then copy the words and then stand in front of the class to tell everyone what you had drawn.

I’ve been asked to illustrate a point about ‘self-editing,’ in terms of agoraphobia. The answer is that I can’t. Not directly, anyway. The problem with agoraphobia, as I men…

I've been asked to illustrate a point about 'self-editing,' in terms of agoraphobia. The answer is that I can't. Not directly, anyway. The problem with agoraphobia, as I mention in part iii of this post is that one's past becomes diminished and confused. Reliability is off the cards. As a result of circumstances, I am an entirely unreliable narrator of my own life.

vii The understanding of nostalgia has changed since the dark days of incarceration or forced interment into a concept that is enjoyed and has been commoditised and monetised. Where one’s eyes may glaze over on seeing, say, a cherished childhood toy in a charity shop, nostalgia is now big business. Boym notes that: ‘Nostalgia too easily mates with banality, functioning not through stimulation, but by covering up the pain of loss to give a specific form to homesickness and make ‘homecoming’ available on request.

iii My formative years were founded in the temporary – moving towns far too frequently to establish any kind of stability or peer group - and I find myself often confusing and misremembering exactly where I was when an event took place. I travel back to find a way forward. Perhaps, I have substituted people for ‘place.’ Not having a peer group throughout my final years at school, the landscapes I inhabited took on a more profound meaning to me.