I was walking from the station to the car earlier in the week when I fell into step and starting talking to a man who was perhaps, as my mother used to say of me, 'not quite with it'. He was small, had an odd marching walk and talked in a jumbled way and with a strong local accent. He wore Brylcream in the style of my father's generation. I gathered he usually took a short cut back to his house through the allotments, but was worried about doing it now as it was getting dark, so i offered him a lift.
He told me he'd lost his father a few years ago, that they'd been scrap metal merchants. I guessed he'd lived with his father like Steptoe and Son, and the loss of his father had been a massive blow in his life. He said they'd had a yard where the multi-story carpark next to the police station now is.
How different Tunbridge Wells must have been then - what, 30 years ago. Nowadays it's so tidy, so manicured, so glossy. A stretch to imagine a scrap metal yard in the middle of it.
Those kinds of places fascinate me. They're sites of different forms of consciousness - men who are happy to walk around all day black-skinned from oil and grease - places of numen. I went to one recently to get a spare part for my car, and an unexpected feature of the landscape was that cars of the same make are piled one on top of the other, so you find yourself walking among ottering, unsafe looking towers of Renault 5s, Jaguars and so on. Perhaps that experience influenced me to write the bit in my book about Abraham wandering our the skyscrapers of Uruk.
Over the last 2 weeks 2 junk/antique shops have closed down in Tonbridge. I went to Lewes the other day to try to find an esoteric device for my paperback cover, and the biggest antique/junk place had closed down. Other traders looked understocked. All down to the Internet, they said.
Sad. Browsing on the net just isn't the same. There's less scope for serendipity.
Of course that word was coined by Horace Walpole. I had a load of material on Walpole, William Beckford, Alexander Pope and other occult minded people of that Gothick and fanciful era who used to fascinate me, but didn't use it for fear of too anglo-centric. Someone once told me that Brighton Pavilion was constructed with a system of pipes in an occult configuration intended to help fairies materialize. If any one had any research on that, I'd be intrigued?
Last weekend I went to Ashdown Forest to find the site of an old iron works I'd stumbled on a few years ago. There's no signpost, but there is a plaque up now, and apparently it was the first blast furnace in Britain, built by Henry VII. Last week-end the blue bells were not quite in full bloom, but the place was covered by them and the air was quite heady. I sensed tellurian forces, and was reminded that blacksmiths were once thought to wield occult power.
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