Extollagy!

I had expected somewhere deep, dripping, lost; the kind of woolpit children could wander into and never come back, green. The reality was more prosaic: a wedding venue, well-tended countryside, barbed wire and new fences. Yet it lives in my memory: the hulks of flint rising in the deep copse, a mile from the nearest road; bedding down and finding the tree that had seemed such a haven in daylight mysteriously threatening, its roots among the ancient dead; the cracked and battered once-were-walls unexpectedly welcoming, a kind of second-best to home. Something deep, lived-in, in the softness of the night, the clouds barely visible as they shift and wink the starlight above the turning earth, the benign, tamed, townless country, the subtle working of roots, leaves and knapped flints beneath a soft wind. This is why Wild Sleeping is so powerful: like a dream, it lives on in the memory, returns to repeat itself.

What I wasn’t expecting was the 2am synthbleep of the reception, resounding over the Suffolk fields:  //let’s get this party started/I lost my phone and my keys on the dancefloor/forget you, forget you too//. I couldn’t work out where the sound was coming from, and stumbled through a pheasant covert and across a rutted field, half awake, never to return….