Old Sun

I remember.
It's December 1992, and I'm walking across Uxbridge Common back from work. It's a Saturday afternoon, and already beginning to ease toward twilight. There is something snowy about the air - though no snow - it never snowed before Christmas when I lived in Ickenham. Frosty ground, brittle air. I'm listening on my walkman (chunky cassette tape) of Bathory's Twilight of the Gods album, or at least that's the album I associate with this memory. And there - hanging over the common is a huge and bloated sun, a sunset red globe both terrifying and beautiful. It was impossibly vast, a size caused by some atmospheric phenomena I don't understand, something perhaps to do with the light, or the horizon, or just a certain kind of winter day. The twenty years that has passed between then and now, a phenomena I understand all too well, has no doubt amplified the size, and that real sun I saw cannot compete with the sun that I remember, but it is the sun I remember that endures, hanging over the common like a portent or a god of some religion no-one could ever hopr to understand.