A Post-Industrial Travelogue Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 The world came to an end in 1983. It was late summer, the stormy season. They had just put the Doomsday Clock forward to 'one minute to midnight'; we were teetering on the grassy verge of the apocalypse. I remembered waking up when I heard the noise - the explosion. I had never heard anything so loud or so final. There was a taste of blood in my mouth - tin and panic. I turned over on my bed and looked out of the window towards the red sky, and I waited to die..... I still think about that night; it no longer haunts my sleep or my daytime thoughts - I have other skeletons poking the ribs of my conscience now. These bones are my regrets and can not be explained away or exorcised. Perhaps they will fade with time. Perhaps? The world did not end that night, but of course you know that, or you wouldn't be reading this, but I noticed something was different. The magic had gone. I'm sure I looked for it in all the wrong places. The world seemed grey place, hollow, dry, filled with tragedy and there was no appreciation of its mystery. Society had made despair into an art form and social realism into its religion. It was four or five years later when the breakthrough came. I was at school and probably not having the happiest time, although if there are any skeletons left lurking from there they are very well hidden. I had spent a year or so wearing black and reading Shelley and generally failing at being intellectual and interesting by dint of having no one to talk to. I sat in the large, wooden halls, and wandered the institutional corridors isolated from the outside world by my walk-in and my X-Mal Deutschland tapes. I was lonely. Sitting here and writing this I remember walking away from my only friend, I don't remember why I left her standing there - some sort of overblown idea that I was being magnanimous and doing her a favour; in retrospect I probably was; in the grand scheme of things perhaps it doesn't matter. Perhaps? As I walked away up the hill towards Hampstead tube station I think I might have cried. I remember repeating again and again "Don't ever look back, Don't ever look back.". I suspect, that if I had turned around and looked at the place I left her standing, there would have been no one there! Anyway, I don't remember the exact question that I asked the quite famous visiting poet who came to the meeting of the Literary Society in the library one wednesday after school, but I wanted to know (somewhat pretentiously if you must know) if he thought religion was as important in contemporary poetry as it had been in the nineteenth century. I sat in my chair, probably drinking a plastic cup of coffee which was black with extra sugar but also managed to be "whipped" as well. His answer to my question was long and involved (he used to lecture on Literature so he knew his subject well), but the short of it was "no, but it should be!". Why is religion important to poetry and to art in general? Because it talks of mystery, of nature, of higher things. In the broadest sense of the word it implies faith or belief in the ethereal. It does not matter if it is a kindly father figure in the sky or an impersonal philosophical force - religion implies supernature which in turn implies magic. Of course I didn't realise that then. I was looking for magic I remember, but I don't think I wanted to find it. I became what I find myself now accusing others of being - a catharsis junkie looking for the next fix of tragedy or drama. To be honest I always had a bit of the 'drama queen' in me. Often disappearing from friend's houses at the slightest provocation and walking through the streets like one long tree-lined sigh. Even today if I slam a door and it doesn't make a satisfactory noise I will often open it and have another go. But back to the question of magic . It has been quite recently that I decided to link the decline of magic to the rise social realism. I spent much of the 1980s listening to interminable Radio 4 plays about Nuclear War and Unemployment. These were important social issues, and I don't want to be accused of trying to sweep them under the carpet. But in times past, entertainment did not always reflect the stresses and strains of society. It seemed for a while that everything had to have a message, and the message was the same - "Today is a grey day". I decided that 'social realism' was the great evil and set out to ignore it in all its forms - that was then I noticed that traces of the magic were still there! The school of social realism was the bastard offspring of the Industrial Revolution. This is a quite arbitrary declaration on my part, but I think it is useful to isolate a point where the decline began. I found myself in the 1990s and immersed myself in darkness. There were 'party' times, dark times, happy times, and skeleton times. I walked along the stone wall by the grassy verge myself. The edge was a glorious place - those of us who hung by one hand above the fall were like revellers in the plague pits - we had nothing more to fear. You can only stay there for so long - then you either have to pull yourself back up or let go. The advantage of the former is you can still go to visit, but you daren't risk swinging your feet in space again - not unless you are braver than me! It was the closest to magic I have ever been, I'm just not sure it was the magic I am looking for. I met death during those times. I don't mean I came within inches of dying, I met him socially, or at least a reflection of him. He smiled at me! Towards the middle of the dark time, it appears that two friends and I were filmed for a television show on youth culture or somesuch. They described as "self-conscious post-modernists", so it was probably Channel 4. And so I found myself surrounded by "post-modern industrial culture", but still there was no magic. I like to think of myself nowadays as a member of post-industrial culture. I'd like to see society reclaim the fantastic, the rebirth of mystery and return of magic to the world. Well that's the depressing stuff out of the way, and, with any luck, that's the pretentious stuff out of the way as well. So, let's get down to business. Where has the magic gone? That is what I intended to find out! I'd like to type "The world is getting better", I think many of you would disagree, and I'd take exception to it myself, but in terms of magic I think the prognosis is quite good. Over the following months I'm going to visit some of the places where it is said that magic can still be found, at the same time I'm going to include some of my general meanderings on the topic - just to flesh out the bits when I'm waiting for my train. Well a month had passed, and my exploration had not gone so well. I d decided to turn a ready scheduled trip into my first exploration and I ended up lying drunk, in a graveyard as Juliet pointed out the star signs which insisted on spinning rapidly in an anti-clockwise direction making it rather difficult to see any kind of pattern in them at all.. It might have been the sprint up 199 steps to St.Mary s churchyard at Whitby that made the stars spin, or it could have been the combination of a long journey and the Strongarm Bitter which I d had in the Elsinore earlier that evening - whichever it was the world was sitting still and the universe was spinning around me. After a few minutes, the spin cycle came to and end, and I noticed that the ground that I was lying on was cold, and somewhere towards the soggy end of the damp spectrum. Juliet, who I have not yet introduced, is my companion on these explorations. She comes a long partly because I like someone to talk to and mainly because I live with her and think she is the most wonderful thing under the stars - whether they decide to rotate or not. On this particular trip, we had an ulterior motive as it was time for the Whitby Gothic weekend and we both needed a break. There were quite a lot of people there who we knew, I ll introduce them as and when I see fit, but suffice it to say we drove up with Nic and Shawnee. Back in the graveyard, we listened as the clock struck twelve. Midnight. We were lying next to a gravestone (Juliet gets very upset if anyone treads on graves), at midnight, in a churchyard on the clifftop above the port where Dracula landed in the novel, and the stars were still. Living in London, I rarely see the stars. Speaking to the landlady at the B&B on Sunday morning I asked her "How do you know you ve got good air up here? You can t even see it!" "We go to Leeds if we want to see the air" she said. In the minute after the clock finished announcing the time when all good horror films start to get really camp I looked up, amazed, at the night sky. There was magic there, not a lot, not enough for that stomach floating excitement like you got as a child on Christmas morning, but a spark. The view was, and what I remember of it still is simply - beautiful. It rained for most of the rest of the weekend, but we were to busy to notice. As far as finding magic went, it wasn t really a success. I didn t really know why this trip would be a part of the search for magic, I just happened to stumble across something which I don t often see. I suppose it was more a romantic vision than the rediscovery of magic. Shelley might have believed it I suppose, a religious man might have thought he was staring into the face of God, but in retrospect I think I was a slightly inebriated software engineer staring open-mouthed at an unpolluted cloudless sky. Juliet had told me that her mother showed her where all the stars were and what the constellations were called, but I can only see the sky as a whole I seem to stop myself from looking at any one star for too long in case I drift away! When I was much younger, six or seven possibly, I had my first visible-invisible friend. He was called Jim. Quite a lot of things were called Jim I remember, my knitted dog (whom I still have), a matchbox lambourgini, and the man who drove the underground train. Jim, or (more properly) Captain Jim was from Mars. When I squinted my eyes I could see the message capsules coming down from the planet and I could catch and read his messages. At night, the bed folded - thunderbirds style - into the wall and down a tunnel to the control centre where I flew a starship - away, and..... I knew a lot about Mars when I was younger, I also learnt the table of elements off by heart. I suspect that if it had been required learning for O Level Chemistry I would have done slightly better. Well at this rate, I was going to be left with a less than inspiring second chapter - as someone searching for the last vestiges of magic does not usually drive half way up the side of the country in order to drink beer and lurch around in the dark. I decided to talk to Tim. Tim was in a meeting. Tim is a wizard by the way, and therefore a very busy man. In fact it took almost a week before I was able to track him down and arrange a couple of minutes of telephone time..... Well I spoke to Tim, but I m not going to tell you about that now - it was really just a list of places to visit and people to talk to - I m not sure if it will help; the whole process seems to be much harder than I thought - I don t know why... It s about twenty past eleven and I can t sleep. No, scratch that, I m not tired. My body is, but my mind doesn t want to sleep - not yet. I ve turned out the lights in my office and I ve still got these sunglasses on, everything is lit up by the white luminescence from the screen. My hands look old in the light. Juliet says I have old hands - I think she might be right. We all have ghosts inside us. Somewhere there are images from our past that will not go away, they come back to us on nights like these - quiet nights, no wind, no rain, hardly even any traffic. Have you ever seen a ghost? Perhaps yours have left you or faded away. I hope so. When I was in my mid-teens I flirted with the occult. I read various books on the subject, drew circles in the sand and made a pact with the ocean one late summer evening. I suspect that my quest will eventually take me back to cliff tops of North Cornwall, and I expect that it will also be an excuse to get back into the surf and play with the waves. There was, in one of the ancient tomes of secret wisdom (now available in paperback), some ceremony involving a new moon, a black candle, and purging yourself of all your worries, fears, and bad memories. It s easy to rationalise the effectiveness of this sort of approach - I m doing it now using a darkened room, and you, dear reader, as my confident - a bit like a Catholic at confession? But I m not going to reveal any of my secrets yet - I might hint at them if you re lucky, but these ghosts are mine and not for sharing! When I was much smaller, I used to lie awake at night as listen to the sounds that the house made. In those days I has a night light and was afraid of the things that lived in the dark. I lie awake and listen to the sounds that the house makes even now, but this time it is footsteps on the stair I hear, and not the approach of a wolf, or something worse. The wolf was a recurring dream. It was a giant creature, mainly bluish grey with a red mouth and off-white teeth. In it s cave-like mouth lived a witch and her assistant - a creature who, for reasons I don t quite understand, was called Tonsillitis . I could draw him for you still. He was a floating spectre, a sort of melted pacman made from shadows with eyes that sucked in the light. The witch I don t remember clearly, she seemed to be a secondary character - just there because she lived inside the wolf with Tonsillitis I suppose. Strange to think about it now, but my younger brother was frightened of witches and used to have bad dreams about them - but I don't think that sort of bad dream is uncommon in children. And then there were the bubs , giant ovals of shadow which seemed to wear blue or red trousers . I knew they were coming because the shadows on the doorhandles grew a little longer just before they opened the doors to enter the room. (Would you believe I just looked over my shoulder to check the door behind me? Of course it is too dark for shadows in here). The effect of the bubs entering a room was to make me float up to the ceiling, at which point I would wake up in my bed. The dreams about the wolf always ended that way too. Up I d go and I was awake. It was never the floating that frightened me - I knew at that point I was safe and would soon wake up, but the moment I saw the shadows grow, or saw Tonsillitis flowing out of a corner - that was when the terror struck - it was the potential of evil that scared me then; I d be lying if I said it didn t scare me now, it s just I try to think less about it. I ve sat in silence for a few minutes and let my mind wonder - fortunately it seems to me getting tired now. I think I ve said something quite profound, but a re-read tomorrow might well prove me wrong. The shadows are there, all around us, as children we are scared of the dark. As I got older the childhood fears have not gone away. They ve been ignored, rationalised, or forgotten about, in some cases they ve been embraced - next time a horror film frightens you - start to root for the monsters! So perhaps the magic is similar - it s been ignored, rationalised, or forgotten about across the board, both by me over the years and by society in general. In which case it is still there. One of the things that Tim said (and I am paraphrasing him quite outrageously) is that magic, like any other energy, is a constant. In other words, it might change it s wavelength, but it is still there. Our perceptions of it have changed. I can rest now, I think. Perhaps I ll even dream... It came back to me while I was lying in a hammock at the bottom of Shawnee s parent s garden the evening after she and Nic had got married. I was busy making friends with a bottle of black label vodka, dancing to a song on my walkman and grinning to myself as I waved my arms around. It was something or other by Southern Death Cult - I don t really remember what. That trip was the first time for ages that I had really relaxed; this might seem a little odd if you take into account a deportation, aircraft engine failure and an eight hour journey taking almost thirty-six, but at that moment I was swinging backwards and forwards in a warm night breeze, looking out over the blue-black water of a slow-flowing river watching the stars go out. (I later missed a shooting star by dint of looking in the wrong direction). Once again I felt the same way I did in that graveyard in Whitby, but without the sensation of the world spinning around me (for I had yet to drink much of the bottle). I was alone. When you are relaxed, warm, slightly drunk, faced with a very powerful piece of scenery, and on your own introspection follows as surely as lending the keys to your car to the best man at a wedding reception so he can get something out of it will inevitably leave you stranded in the carpark as he empties his pockets with an expletive twenty minutes away! I don t usually have a tendency to being maudlin, but on this occasion I started thinking about dramatic exits. "Don t ever look back...." Perhaps,when I slipped away from people s houses, they didn t even notice. Of course, at the time I was wishing they would, as I slowly walked once or twice around the block before turning and walking away to a shortcut up the hill and home. One day, it was raining, I decided to walk a different way and headed for the woods. And in those woods I made a place . I still visit it occasionally, a clearing under the trees surrounded by evergreens and always ankle deep in dry dead leaves; a fallen tree trunk from the hurricane later made a useful place to sit, to write, to think, to drink. Sometimes I can hear it calling to me in a strange kind of way, and on that June night in Virginia, I could hear the woods from over the ocean saying come visit, come and see! . The magic has hidden itself in places like this, and comes out at certain times. I must listen for its call and go back to the woods to see what I can find. But, of course, I fear that all I will find are my own echoes, and a cache of memories left behind to rot many years ago. Interestingly enough, our new house is less than 15 minutes walk away from that very spot, and it is there that I will visit on my first and overdue part of the quest. You might also like to know that I didn't drink that lonely bottle alone, and soon we were all drunk as little bees and watching the moon on the water...