The Engines Choice; Ghost Stories and a Figure on the Roofs

It is feeling distinctly autumnal out there today, though I haven't drawn back the curtains to look yet. The sound of the seagulls are muted, and even the passing cars seem softer, more consolatory, as if the road is some distance away, across sleeping fields and shadowy woods, rather than two floors below.
I used to find the sound of the traffic at my grandparents house in Stone quite daydreamy. They lived in a quiet Worcestershire village, and in the calm of their house, the sound of the traffic was softened by the fields and trees. It sounded more like an ocean or a river that things made of metal and running on petrol.
Beginning to ramble now... Their house also always makes me think of those Castrol GTX engine oil adverts, the ones that had the tagline 'The Engine's Choice'. This would have been back in the late seventies / early eighties, and the adverts themselves (what I remember of them) were semi-abstract journeys into the landscape of the engine; all whirring pistons and... uh... other car-things... (I know nothing about cars as you can probably tell.) The final shot would always be of a pool of oil filling the head of a spanner. The music for these adverts was mysterious and even eerie, evocative of night-time and falling to sleep, almost cathedral-like in its soporific tones. The adverts would always make me think of petrol stations in the countryside, and beyond the garage itself a cluster of trees, and against their trunks would be lain planks of wood and metal poles, and around their base a scattering of tyres. These petrol stations of my imagination would always be lit by sunset, places of inimical mystery and dream-like resonances. They would, of course, have all used Castrol GTX...

St Anne's Well Park on friday evening. A barbecue held while the days are still warm enough and long enough for this to be possible. Seven or eight of us gathered, just up from the cafe amongst the rose bushes and the trees. The cafe was still open - I hadn't realised that it turned into some kind of restaurant at night - and they had a man there playing Spanish guitar. As it got darker - that soft late summer twilight blue - the light from the cafe spilled out into the park. A pleasing dreamy ambience. Ghost stories at the start of autumn; a dark and empty language school, the sound of footsteps on stairwells a few floors below, following someone up. No-one there. Reaching out for a doorknob in a darkened corridor, and then, from the emptiness of the classroom, a distinct knock from the other side. Another ghost story from someone whose job is to fix up camper vans. He told us how in the garage they had a van that dated back to the second world war, and one evening, passing by he swore he glimpsed a figure in the front seat with a helmet on its head. Glancing back of course, no one there.
The engine choosng shadows.

(A crossword clue in the paper last week. 'A region of shadows', the answer was 'umbra' - latin presumably, but that phrase stayed with me, 'a region of shadows'. Was there an epidemic of these regions that people had to come up with a word for them? Grasshopper mind this morning, jumping from one thing to another...)

More ghost stories at the pub last night. Someone telling us that as a child he had glimpsed a figure at the top of the stairs, a child he thought was his sister, but discovering that everyone else was in the living room. Discovering after they had moved from the house that the last owners had left. They couldn't bear to live in the house after their daughter had died there...

A sudden movement across the street from the pub. Somthing on the roofs of the houses. A black scuttling shadow. A man jaggedly clambering over the line of roofs, in that secret chimney geography. He was a sillhouette only, and at first I thought he might be a chimney sweep (not that I've ever seen a chimney sweep for years though...). He seemed to be wearing something on his face, but I couldn't make out what though, but it looked like some kind of snout, a gas mask shape. He dropped out of sight behind a line of roofs and we never saw him again.