Techo-Junk: An Electronic Slate

I bought a little LCD slate from Lidl: A5 size and only EUR 8. You can buy similar things for a slightly lower price direct from China (I've seen EUR 6, but with EUR 7 delivery!), but with such a low starting price it is hard to get much lower before the supplier would have to pay you to accept it. Very simple, like an Etch-a-Sketch (good heavens! Those are still being made.), or really more like one of the things with waxy paper and a clear front. You write on it with a stylus and it is powered by a button cell.

I was intrigued by how it worked, so I did a few experiments which I thought I would share with you. The stylus is not special, any similar object will do, like a ball-point pen or even a finger nail. The writing process does not require power. You can still write with the battery removed. However, writing seems to involve some "point effect": touching with the point of a ball-point pen even while not writing will sometimes produce a mark, but pressing with a fingertip or thumb will not, even if I press quite firmly. Erasure, absolutely does require power. You press a button which erases the whole screen and there is a switch which inhibits the erase function. Naturally the erase function does not work  with the battery removed. I've made an executive decision to leave erase enabled: the screen is not over-sensitive and a slider switch is likely to be the first moving component to fail.

My conclusions: the screen is not "point addressable" (there would be no point) and the writing effect is achieved either by pressure or by capacitance. I think it is capacitance. I'm afraid I can see no way of subverting it to some other use (either as an input or an output device. 

Within its limitations it's effective but not really much better than a tiny whiteboard or blackboard. It is designed so that the stylus can be used to provide a stand (but I already have a wire stand I use instead). The slate does come with integral magnets, so you can use it as a large fridge magnet. I find it handy as a supplement to my other To-Do aids and memory joggers.   

The Banishing of Huginn

I'm blessed by having many wild birds around my house. There are all sorts of birds, and as I live here longer, I am getting better at identifying the different species. There are wrens, wagtails, great tits and brave little robins; pigeons, blackbirds and magpies in various numbers from ominous one, through joy to silver, gold and dark secrets. And then there are the corvids: hooded crows, like capuchin monks and rooks, loads and loads of rooks. I lump them together as "crows". The rooks roost in the oaks and return home for sunset, squabbling as they settle for the night. 

My wife was in the habit of feeding the birds in the early evening. She would scatter seed and shattered fat-balls on the back lawn. You can't feed the smaller birds without feeding the crows, who are fiercely intelligent. A sentinel or two would be stationed on the ridge of the garage roof and within seconds of food being scattered on the ground, the sky would darken and the ground covered with raucous family groups: this year's spoiled fledglings demanding to be fed by over-tolerant parents scarcely larger than themselves.

One afternoon in early autumn, I was standing at the back door observing the crows. Many were picking away at the lawn, looking for seeds or scraps they had missed earlier. A few were strutting about, proudly grasping an acorn in their beak. When they found what seemed to them a suitable spot, they would put the nut down carefully, peck a hole, place the acorn in the hole and cover it up. They would then turn away, apparently satisfied with their work. I can't see the point myself, but I understand how oaks are planted.

I had some minor tasks to do, so I went outside and before I started I paused for a moment and surveyed the crows. They have grown used to me and after a brief fluttering of wings they settled back to their business of gleaning.

Suddenly, a single rook separated from the group and flew straight towards me. I stood my ground. I don't claim bravery, rather the slow responses of advancing years. The bird turned upwards, its wings spread and its feet extended towards me. It alighted on my right shoulder. I felt its weight shift as it adjusted its position and I turned towards it. I found myself face to face (or maybe nose to beak) with the bird. It seemed to be a juvenile, with a black beak, rather than the boney grey of an adult. As it turned its head from side to side I was looking into its eyes. I was entranced, frozen as if in the presence of great power. The bird was not hostile, instead it projected calm, but uncaring interest, a remote intelligence observing and noting my actions. Unbidden, I extended my right arm, until it was horizontal, my hand clenched in a loose fist. The bird walked calmly along my arm until it was perched on my hand. Its feet were scaly and cool. I put my left hand, palm upwards, in front of it and it reached across and gently gripped my fingers and the skin of my palm. This was not an aggressive act, not a peck, just a gentle caress and I could feel the serrations of his beak.

For the rest of the day, and the whole of the following day, I had a new companion. I decided "he" was a boy (though I cannot tell the difference, and it matters only to other rooks) and named him Huginn. He would come to me when I was outside, perch on my shoulder and fist and eat from my left hand. He took cat food from a small saucer I held in my hand and even half a hard-boiled egg directly from my palm.

On the third day he was gone: no more Huginn. There was no sign of him. He had disappeared without leaving a trace except in my memory, returned to the emptiness from whence he came. I missed him as one would expect to miss such a companion. I still miss him and mark his absence. Stories of talking birds and magical familiars now seem much more real and much more likely than they once did. Experience is a powerful tutor. 

The worldly explanation is that Huginn was probably a chick from the previous year. He had "imprinted" on one of the women who work at the garden centre which is associated with the COPE (Roughly the Irish equivalent of SCOPE) across the road. As he had become more confident he had begun venturing further afield and had found me. The reason he had disappeared was that unfortunately he had begun to become a nuisance at the Garden Centre, disturbing customers and the residents at the COPE home. As a consequence he had been tempted into a cage and then "re-homed" some distance away. We all hope that he is happy and will eventually find a mate.

Of course, there could be another explanation, one which if I'm honest, I rather prefer. In Norse and Germanic mythology Odin, the chief of the gods, who traded one eye for wisdom, was served by two ravens known as Huginn and Muninn (memory and thought) who brought him news of all they had seen in the world. There seems to have been uncertainty or dispute about whether Huginn and Muninn were simply messengers or whether they were extensions of Odin himself. Whichever they were, I like to imagine that I had an encounter with the numinous, the divine, and that Huginn has returned to Odin with the message that I had been set a test (which I do not fully understand) and that my response had been satisfactory. 

(I originally called this "The Murder and the Banishing of Huginn", to use the collective noun for a group of crows. When I read it, I thought it was a piece of unworthy click-bait!)

[Original Events: 13th and 14th July 2025]

[Date: 6th October 2025]                

Masquerades of Spring

 [Notes for my friend Mike on Masquerades of Spring from the Rivers of London series by Ben Aaronovitch]

Masquerades of Spring

I enjoyed it. Not Aaronovitch's best, but still fun. I liked how we learned just a little bit more about Thomas Nightingale without disclosing too much: so this is why he likes jazz.

One of the features of first person story-telling is that you have a relationship with the narrator. I recognise that I don't particularly like Gussie.

The story is written as pastiche PG Wodehouse, with Gussie as Bertie Wooster and Beauregard as Jeeves. Gussie doesn't appeal to me as a person but I don't dislike him.

It strikes me that Gussie is actually smarter than he acts (or he himself realises) but he has learned to be stupid or helpless because he's lazy and it allows him to stand back and let other people do the work - because he can.

I thought that Beauregard was underused as a character. There's more potential there if Aaronovitch choses to use it.

The story is classic McGuffin. We never encounter the magic saxophone and the magic trumpet is returned to the villain Jaeger without doing anything more than "a queer sort of harmonic buzz at the words 'let it out'" (p58). We never really learn much about the instruments, except that they 

are a distress signal from Maurelle. Nor do we learn how Maurelle is imprisoned. We know it is because of her daughter Oriande, and we learn that Jaeger is exploiting Maurelle's power. We don't know how someone as powerful as Maurelle can apparently be controlled so easily.

All this is actually quite clever. We make up our own partial explanations and we are always left wanting for more.

Talking of "wanting for more", there are some good peripheral/tangential details about Nightingale. IMO we will never learn much about Nightingale. 

He's a stock character, the man of mystery. He will remain: a superman with flaws, the last of his kind. In the main sequence he has (well managed) 

PTSD as a result of what happened at Ettersburg.

The new details I like are that Gussie secretly fancies Nightingale ("I might have thought the situation has romantic possibilities" (p47)). 

Gussie is also jealous of Nightingale, especially that Nightingale fancy Lucy ("I am not by nature a violent man..." (p41)). Nightingale is, of course, sexless - that is the nature of the stock character.

Another detail hinted at is the nature of Nightingale's relationship with Molly. We aren't told what it is, except that it is strong enough to make Nightingale drop what he is doing, risk censure from The Folly and cross the Atlantic.

Gussie is sufficiently stupid that he hasn't twigged that he has been set up with Beauregard. It takes him a while to appreciate that Cocoa/Amelia is more than just a pretty girl - he clearly doesn't appreciate how powerful she probably is.

There are some nice hooks into "The Virginia Company" and whatever magic there is in New Orleans. It would seem that The Queen of Joy, Beauregard, Cocoa and the midwives are all part of something.

Artistically, Aaronovitch may be using the novellas to give himself space away from the flow of the main series. The novella's introduce and explore new characters. He's also experimenting with different writing voices for the new narrators. If Masquerades of Spring was PG Wodehouse, then I think (not sure) that Winter's Gift's was Stephen King.

Out of universe, commercially the novella's provide an increased flow of product and Aaronovitch may be using them to fish for something from Hollywood.

And... Masquerade is being played for laughs more than usual, with Gussie cast as clown: note the spells "Crocker" (felt up and stripped of clothes (p149)) and "Treaclefoot" (p53).

Some good throwaway bits:

"Are you a fairy? My mama is a fairy" (p137) and Nightingale in drag (of course he looks good).

Not the best, but good fun.   

  

The River at the bottom of my garden: 3 inter-dimensional portals and a goddess

Rivers of Ireland? Story 1: The River at the bottom of my garden: 3 inter-dimensional portals and a goddess

Ok. Try this for size. I suppose you could say that the whole basis of Aaronovitch's world in that there is magic just out of sight for most of us and that you can sense it if you just take the time to experience the vestigial. The submerged rivers of London are both characters in their own right and a metaphor for the magic.

In that vein, I'm going to describe some stuff. I'm not going to say I believe in the magic (I don't) but I'm going to hint at the vestigia and sometimes give the prosaic explanations too. I'm not going to attempt to imitate Aaronovitch's writing. The experiences and places and people are real, even if I've made small adjustments. I could take you to the places, show you the sights and you would experience some of the experiences. Whether or not you experienced the vestigia would be inside your own head.

Story 1 - The River at the bottom of my garden: 3 inter-dimensional portals and a goddess

I remember when you were over, oh so long ago, I took you to look into the field at the back of my house. I don't remember if I took you down to the river. Getting into the field used to be inconvenient. I had to walk down the road a hundred yards or so to reach the gate and then walk back to reach the back of the hedge of my own property. Well, now there is a better way.

This is one of a few good things to come out of COVID. Every year I trim the hedges around the boundary of my plot. It takes me a while because there is such a long boundary and so much hedge. And of course, Leylandii is what Kevin McCloud describes as "a horticultural thug". At the back of the house, I trim the back of the hedge on the field side too, because if I don't, the bits I can't reach from my side become a straggly ugly mess. I used to do this last because it involved walking down the road to the gate etc carrying the petrol hedge-trimmer.

Mid Covid, I set about trimming the hedge. This was one of the things I was allowed to do. Nobody, ever said I couldn't wander around inside my own boundary. The hedge was a job which needed doing, so I did it. In the back of my mind I must have been thinking about the back of the hedge. 

You know how it is when you notice something which has been there all the time in plain sight? Well that's what happened to me. I was cutting the hedge in the far corner of my garden, next to the boundary with my neighbour on that side, when I noticed that the hedge was less dense that I expected. There seemed to be a hedge plant missing and I could see a concrete fence post, complete with diagonal to take the strain, which created a sort-of gateway with the corner post between me and my neighbours. I pointed all this out to Nnnn and said "you know, I think I could go through there and it would make access to the back of the hedge much easier".

So we agreed, and I cut away the hedge and removed a piece of chain-link fencing (there is a chain-link fence, fronted by the hedge), and Bob's your uncle, there was a gateway. This was a job which, amazingly, went much easier than anyone expected. The (prosaic) explanation is that when my house was being built, the builders put up the boundary chain-link fence but left a gateway (complete with concrete sill!) in the corner for ease of access (they didn't want the problem I had encountered with walking along the road to the gate). When they were almost finished they had sealed the gate with a separate piece of fencing and planted the hedge. They'd been a bit economical with hedging plants in that corner but eventually the branches from two plants reached out towards each other and the closed the gap. It became invisible. All I had done was expose something which had been there all along. Surprisingly, there was a short pathway through a piece of natural hedgerow (not Leylandii) outside my boundary, where my neighbours had been taking their dogs out to walk in the field. By that time we'd been in the house for about twenty years and this was the first time we had noticed! The hedge is that thick!

After I had removed the piece of chain-link fence and done a very little bit of trimming I was left with an empty gateway between two concrete posts about 3 feet apart leading through a thick Leylandii hedge which is about 6 feet high. At the foot of the gateway is a short length of concrete kerb which the builders had installed as a door sill. They had really gone to that much trouble to make a proper gateway before eventually sealing it up. I filled the gateway with a simple low wicket gate constructed from pallet wood, liberally doused in creosote and closed with a bolt. Simples! The gate opens onto a short pathway (barely 6 feet long) through a natural hedgerow, leading from my neighbours land, outside my boundary, into the field. 

With the gate finished, I cut the back of the hedge at the bottom of the garden. What a difference the gate made! No more lugging the petrol hedge clipper all that way, throwing a cable over the hedge and using electric tools practical and forgetting a pair of loppers and having to go back for them was no longer a disaster. The job got done very quickly indeed. Only, a man's work is never done. Nnnnn didn't like being able to see the neighbours going to and fro to walk the dogs, and actually neither did I. There was something obtrusive about it. I like them, they get on with me, but I didn't want to see them and I didn't want them looking into the back garden. After a little thought, I constructed a high but very lightweight hurdle to put in front of our side of the little wicket gate. I fronted the hurdle with a piece of trellis with artificial greenery. The effect was miraculous! The gate was now invisible. The plastic leaves blended in with the evergreen hedge.

Time passes. I now go through the hedge and walk down to the river at least once a week, often several times. The gateway starts by being "invisible". Even for me, it doesn't stand out from the hedge. From the field side it is almost invisible too, and the eye is drawn from it by the route into my neighbours garden. The neighbours don't mind, the farmer doesn't know and the agricultural contractors who cut the grass for silage don't care. The cattle, when they are there, don't even notice. There is something magical about the process of going through the hedge. I start in front of the plastic greenery, remove that, go through the wicket gate, unfasten and refasten behind me a flap of square wire fencing and then duck under a single, almost invisible, length of galvanised wire at waist height and I'm in the field. Four, barriers in quick succession, two of them almost invisible. It's like parting curtains, one after another.

Each walk down to the river is an experience because the field and the river are changing constantly with the weather and with the seasons. I'm a good boy, so I usually walk round by the field boundary. Even going that long way round it's a short slow walk, 5 minutes at most, down a gentle slope to the bottom corner where the ground gets soft. The margin between the river and the field is marked by native trees: rowan and alder. In the summer and autumn my view of the river is obscured by a screen of bracken. Now in the winter I can see across the river. The water flows clear (but not too clear, the summer day when the water flowed "gin clear" is a different, bad and sad, story). In May the air is filled with May flies and in high summer damsels dance and flirt. There are several places where, if I am fortunate, I may glimpse the goddess. There she lies, lithe and elegant, facing upstream, sinuous limbs and muscular back, emerald green hair streaming down her back. Her skin is golden, mottled dark like a toad or lizard. In the summer she wears white flowers in her hair. I have never yet seen her face. I long for and fear what I might see.

Walking along the bank the atmosphere changes. The air becomes calm. The sounds of the road, far away, always quiet are silenced altogether and replaced by the whispering of the river. If I look towards my house it is no longer visible, even thought the line of sight is clear. I have passed into another world adjoining our own but separated from it.

Continuing along the river bank I climb a gentle slope to a point where the river margin widens to become a riparian woodland. As I climb, unexpectedly, the house becomes visible again just as I reach the boundary of the wood.

The prosaic explanation of the strange and perfectly real effects of the change in atmosphere and sound and the house being invisible are due to the lie of the land. The slope of the field is sort-of "s" shaped creating an effect like a ha-ha. There is a flat area near the river which is completely obscured from the top and you are not even aware of what you cannot see. You could pitch a small tent, and a man standing would be invisible from the top. The goddess in the river is the light on the broken limestone of the river bottom, illuminated by dappled light through the trees. Her flowing hair is water-weed growing from the river bottom. 

The entrance to the woodland is another multi-layered gateway. First there is an electric fence wire to duck under, then a galvanised trip wire to recognise, avoid and step over, and finally the remains of a collapsed fence to avoid. This brings you into a vestibule or anteroom from where you can look down on the rapids which are quite loud or forward, through trees to a well-trodden pathway which forks down to the river beach or forwards along a terrace into dense woodland. And every gateway should have a guardian, and this one is guarded by Lala (yes, the Teletubby), perched in a tree, who has been watching over this path since before I have known of its existence. If I were remaking this as real fiction, I think I would replace Lala with an animal skull.

   

   

Epilogue MAG

Epilogue for Mmm and Aaa (MAG)

Points I want to cover (see Journal 1st February 2025):

• Myself
• Aaa and Jjj
• Mmm 
• Ccc
• Shocks - Jjj
• Losses and Discoveries
• Points of view and start and end points

Writing a family history is a challenge intellectually and emotionally. I could compare it to detective work or as completing a jigsaw. Both of these convey something of my experience but completing a child's dot-to-dot puzzle gets closer to my emotional journey writing about Mmm Sss and Aaa Ggg. The clues for the overall picture were very limited. The "picture on the box" was at best indistinct. At the detailed level, ideally, each "dot" would associate person, place and time with an event and I would join the dots to construct the story. This turned out to be much harder than I imagined.

This was a puzzle where many of the dots were indistinct or missing altogether and the numbers which gave the sequence were sometimes muddled. Where there are two events, the natural, maybe the only thing to do is to join them with the equivalent of a straight line. Sometimes I could recognise a lacuna and make some allowance for it but often enough the discovery of a new fact, or the re-evaluation of a detail of existing evidence brought the realisation that there were events which I had not known about. Sometimes these discoveries were moments of epiphany, and just as often they were slow, extended periods of the realisation that something was not quite right.

My relationship with Jjj and especially Aaa Ggg has developed considerably. After the initial shock of discovery, Jjj has become a pleasant part of the story. I see his life, right up to the tragedy of his death, in a rosy glow. He was loved, he loved in return and he was happy.

My feelings about Aaa are more nuanced and ambivalent. His early life remains mysterious and it is impossible to tell if this is simply absence of evidence or concealment. There is a lot to admire about Aaa. He chose an adventurous path. There is no doubt in my mind that he and Mmm Sss were passionately in love. Sadly, in their case war and disease mean that passion led to anguish.

I wish that I could share what I have found with my sister Ccc. Looking back at the indistinct nature of my own early memories, I wonder how much she ever understood about the tragic circumstances surrounding her birth. I continue to believe that Ccc's early life on Islay was good and I would have liked the opportunity to tell me, as an adult, what she remembered. I like to think that knowing a more complete version of what happened to Mmm and Aaa would have been a comfort to her.

What I have learned during my research has rather changed my feelings about my mother, Mmm. I now know for certain that she had terrible experiences and did terrible things. The two sides balance but they do not cancel out. When she was alive I do not think she was able to tell me what happened and I'm not sure that as a young man I would have been able to receive the message. Now that I am old, I would like to hear her story from her point of view but of course her voice is silenced. I hope that I could listen with unconditional positive regard and sincere sympathy and that my listening would be helpful to her. Even after all these years I still grieve for Mmm.

Writing this tale has taught me some things about stories in general: the tone of a story depends on more than the content, the facts; it also depends on where the storyteller starts and ends their tale and what point of view they choose to use. If I had chosen to end in 1952 or 1953 then the tale would have been an unrelieved tragedy for Mmm but not for Ccc. By 1956 it becomes a triumph over adversity for Mmm but much complicated when you include Ccc and my father (). In 1957 I () add a further layer of complication.

And the story does not end there. There was more turmoil to come as together we all entered the Swinging Sixties and the age of the atom bomb and the space race.

[3rd February 2025] 

   

Incident in O'Brien Street

Today is a day for interesting occurrences which I feel are worth noting down.

I was driving my car, waiting on O'Brien Street to turn into Earl Street (which afterwards becomes Freemount Road). A large earth mover (Volvo, 4 wheels, hinged in the middle) turned left out of Earl Street. A car on O'Brien Street moved forward and blocked my turn into Earl Street. At first I was a little annoyed, but then the driver started gesticulating wildly a the driver of the pickup truck which was just about to follow the earth mover. There was a large piece of metal, invisible to the driver, which I suppose had fallen from the earth mover. The driver and passenger of the pick-up got out, retrieved the piece of metal and moved it to the side of the road. I exchanged friendly waves with the driver of the car which had blocked my path. He had done the right thing for all of us. He only had a moment to make the decision too. 

(17th September 2022)

 The Grounded Star

I was standing outside on the drive, near the front outside tap, when something caught my eye. It was a bright light shining from the asphalt pavement. I could keep the light sparkling by walking towards it, keeping the sun over my shoulder. When I reached it, I stooped down and picked it up. It was a tiny fragment of glass, an irregular cuboid or spheroid. I am holding it between the forefinger, second finger and thumb of my left hand even as I write. It is pale green, transparent tinted glass, a remnant of the incident with the rear window of my car. When I looked on the ground nearby I could see other similar fragments, each one a little facetted shape. I had not noticed them before now except that I saw this one - barely 2 mm across. Each one is a tiny gem, a facetted jewel, a grounded star.

I thought about how this incident could be incorporated into a detective story: someone noticing a fragment of broken glass on a tarmac drive, noticing more fragments and deducing that a broken car window had been nearby. I'm going to throw the glass away and get on with my day.

(17th September 2022)

Gateways and Boundaries

Do you like mysterious doors or gateways, maybe even to ways to other dimensions? Of course you do, everybody does! Here's a little tale for you. Of course it's all true, but maybe the contrast and brilliance have been turned up to eleven in places.

When you were in K???? I remember taking you along the road and through a field to go and look at the River A????, which flows down from F???? village to where the river joins the larger River D???? in K???? town. 

Every year, when I cut the hedge which forms the boundary of my place, I have to trek along the road and then back through the field, so I can inspect and cut the back of my own hedge. It's all a bit of a nuisance. The hedge itself is Leylandii and somewhere inside of that is a chain-link fence supported on concrete posts. As I'm sure someone must have said, sometime, "it ain't going anywhere". Fortunately, I took the growing heads off the plants shortly after we moved in, so it’s not going to get out of control. Now I wish that the people who built the house had used something other than Leylandii, because it's too vigorous, but I'm not complaining because it’s attractive and maintenance free apart from once a year. 

Last year, I cut the inside and top of the hedge and had got to the stage of thinking about going round to the back. Cutting my hedge takes several days, so the job can spread over weeks. For some reason, I cut a little deeper into the hedge than I do usually in one back corner, and I noticed that the hedge growth was a little less dense there than normal. I poked around a bit more and found that the posts for the chain-link fence had been arranged in such a way that they formed a gateway inside the hedge.

This potential gateway was intriguing, so I showed it to Noreen and said that I thought it would be practical to make a gateway out into the field. The effort of creating the gateway would make the exercise of cutting the back of the hedge a whole lot simpler for the current  year and all future years (no need to walk a hundred yards along a busy road and back through the field). Noreen agreed, and a day or so later I had a gateway. 

I think the background story of my gateway is that when my house was being built, the builders constructed the gateway for access. They even put a threshold sill stone in place. When they were finished with the house, the builders filled the gap with an separate bit of fencing and planted the hedge, which over time obscured the potential gap.

A little more work, and I had constructed a little wicket gate to fit the gap. I can even point to evidence of the gate being completed on 25th August last year. Gate construction was made easier by having square upright concrete posts to work to. Not only is the gate easy to open and close, but it is invisible from both my garden and from the field! From my garden it is camouflaged by a piece of trellis covered by plastic pretend hedge, and from the other direction it exits into a wooded field boundary and is invisible from the field itself. So, now I had a hidden, secure gateway between my garden and the field beyond. It’s the sort of thing children love (and that includes children of advancing years).

The gateway served its intended purpose in simplifying the maintenance of my hedge, but it gave more. Now I have the gateway, I'm in the habit of walking down to the river, typically once a week. The distance is 150 metres as the crow flies or 350 metres around the perimeter of the field (which is the way I go, 'cos I'm good). 

Nobody would describe my place as urban and to call it suburban would be a positive insult, but access to the river takes rural to a new level. All you can hear on the other side of the hedge are natural sounds and the gentle whispering of traffic on the distant road. 

It really is peaceful down by the river. Having access to the river is a great improvement to my amenities.  Come the summer, I may spend a bit more time down there. My neighbours don't mind (because they walk their dogs down by the river), and I don't think the person farming the field will ever know!

When I’m walking around the field something strange happens. The atmosphere changes and everything becomes much quieter. The sounds of traffic from the road cease completely. This always happens in the same place. The effect does not change with the weather, in sunshine or drizzle, the same peace descends. The silence is welcoming, waiting to be filled by the sounds of the river. 

When I reach the river the banks are clothed by mature native trees and beyond the margin on the far bank there is a dark plantation of commercial conifers. Upstream there is short length of rapids and downstream the river broadens and becomes much quieter. On the opposite bank a tree trails a dead limb into the water. When the river is high this branch is dragged forward with the current and flicks back when the tension overcomes the water. The motion is repeated rhythmically. The atmosphere is quiet except for the sound of water, no houses are visible, not even my own, which is only 150 metres away. I am in another dimension, separate to, and completely insulated from, the modern world. Every time I go there I pass through a hidden portal and traverse a zone of silence and when I return the experience is reversed.

I’m afraid there is a prosaic explanation to my inter-dimensional portal. The field has an uneven slope between my house and the river. The steeper slope in the middle means that when I'm at the river the houses are hidden and all the sound from the road passes above my head. Whatever you may think, unnaturally, I choose to ignore the obvious and continue to visit my magical realm via a hidden gateway and barrier of silence.

4th February 2023

Pressing the reset button - May 2022

 For my own reasons I've decided I may be using this blog again. Nice to see that it's still here and still functioning.

Some of this may be factual, some may be fiction. I'm going to do a limited amount of self-censorship and also rely on "security by obscurity".

Cheers, Tom

26th May 2022