I'm your burning empire

I've always enjoyed walking in fog. It's safe and strange at once. You feel cut out of time. Lights are diffused. You don't know how close or far away the sound you just heard is. I felt at one time that I could happily disappear and appear wherever fog was. I think I wanted to be a ghost without all the unpleasant death business; I was an odd kid. I don't usually do too well with cold damp weather but I can wrap myself in fog. I don't tend to walk on misty nights any more; there aren't many pavements on the way down to the village, and no lights on the towpath and I'm less sanguine about the risks now.  But I remember one November evening where bonfire smoke had thickened everything and the fireworks sounded like a war in another world. There are summer dusks where the mists drift in over the canal and creep towards the house. It looks like a Kate Bush video. I've longed to go down into the fields, curl up in the dew and watch the mist roll over me.

Two fogwalks at the weekend with two friends: Saturday with JH in Elmdon Park. There are a lot of scraps of woodland there, a crumbling walled garden with an overgrown well that I'd like to have shown him, but the ground was too raw and the paths seemed to tangle back in on themselves. A good chat anyway, about Wells and radio and some other things that went off into the fog. J lent me Grim Glory, a book of contemporary photos of the Blitz, mostly taken by Lee Miller. It's heartbreaking at times. But plenty of deadpan "we can take it, so sod you, Mr Hitler" humour in the captions too; one building reduced to window-gape and columns becomes maths: 1 Nonconformist chapel+1 German bomb = Greek Temple.

Sunday was spent with C in the local lanes, helping her gather moss, lichen and leaves for crafted gifts. I did tell her about Aickman's The Stains but it's probably just as well she's not read it. Plenty of sloes still growing in the lanes around Ravenshaw so we harvested them so C could steep them in gin - shaking the branches in places to bring down the berries. There was one oak with what looked very much like a huge keyhole in the trunk.

My Saturday night in was very much enlivened by a radio documentary on interactive fiction and the discovery someone bothered to create a text adventure game of The Archers for Amstrad. It bombed of course - with gems like Peggy says pigeon breasts with apple sauce remind her of the last days of the Roman Empire how could it work? I'd play it though (me now, as opposed to thirteen year old me. The BBC Acorn baffled me then and we hadn't got the budget for a micro. I am slightly less baffled by tech in my late forties).