It's about 2:00am when I say goodbye to Al and Claire. I don't mean to walk home, but somehow I do. The streets have a pleasingly abandoned quality to them. The arctic spring seems to have stolen the streets of people. I watch the snow in the street lamp halos. My god, it's cold. I stop outside the darkness of St Annes Well Gardens. Peer into the dark park. The silence of the place always impresses me. Even in the brightest of sunny days, there is always something very still and old and watchful about the place.
Old, old trees, and they're like gods here tonight, or perhaps not gods, but something as old and watchful and silent. How many times have they watched me walk these small hours under their darkness? I used to think of them as a
court of trees, a conspiracy of bark and leaf and root. Used to pass them by at the end of summer in the first of the evenign twilights. Walk under that thickened darkness that falls beneath summer trees.
Peering over the low brick wall into the grounds of a building whose purpose remains obscure. I have always assumed it to be an old peoples home, but I have never seen anyone here. The buildings are often hidden by bushes, but they have been cut back. In a courtyard I see a bench lit by a pale street lamp. It feels like someone is sitting there, alone and invisible in the night, preoccupied as a phantom. I feel the rain, the snow, and I think
this could be any time, and I could be lost here.
