JOURNAL ENTRY

30th October, Friday

“Dropping down Horse Hill to the canal
 Mist hangs heavy and Maggie
 Gives the five apostles a wide birth.

She looks up at me
 Unsure if she did the right thing.
 The jackdaws are making a racket
 I tell her she’s alright
 We all get the wind up at times

She still looks worried
 So we head along
 To the wooded cutting.
 I watch the rooks
 While she watches squirrels.”

[MUSIC]

WELCOME

It's Halloween and a heavy fog has settled shrouding the canal and surrounding fields in a damp blanket, ghost grey. It shifts and moves with unfelt winds, wrapping around the Erica like twines of bindweed. Cabin lights smoulder dimly. The warmth of their yellowish heart haloed by an aura of cold pewter. Across the fields cars lights glow worm down unseen lanes and house lights smear into mere hints of life.    

This is the narrowboat Erica narrowcasting into the darkness of All Hallows' Eve to you wherever you are.

You made it! How are you? I am so glad that you could come. Come inside where the stove is warm and the kettle is singing. I'll take your coat while you make yourself at home. Take the weight off your feet and from your shoulders and let's enjoy this night awhile. Welcome aboard.

[MUSIC]

NEWS FROM THE MOORINGS 

October has gone out in glorious style. A couple of storms notwithstanding, October has been a benign month of mild temperatures and showery rain. The last three days have been classic ‘golden October’. We have so far escaped the fogs a little further to the east and enjoyed dull but evocative misty dawns, wrapped in chilly damp, that cast the canal into a storybook. Warm sun and very light southerly winds showcase October’s softer side. Late afternoon, now falling as early as 3 o’clock, casts long shadows over the fields and, across to the west, the Cotswold hills and the uplands of the Welsh marches are softened into hazy blues, greys, and mauves by the lowering sun. In the foreground, below our feet, the gun metal strip of the canal glints placid and unspeaking. It’s almost too perfect. But the mantel of golden October can cover a multiple of sins and imperfections. And sometimes, it does us well not to look too closely, but to accept the scene as it plays out to us to the soundtrack of jackdaw and robin, the clatter of ducks and magpie rattle, and the barking of a dog softened by distance.   

The colours of autumn are now beginning to blaze. The ash and oak, as usual are still holding onto their green – although they are also noticeably yellowing, and the relatively damp few weeks has meant that the colours aren’t quite as spectacular as they were a year or so ago. Nevertheless, gold, bronze, yellow, russet are all showing. The chestnuts have been the most stunning so far. A couple of storms back-to-back have stripped a fair bit of foliage from the canopies. The towpath and canal littered with little (and not so little) twigs upon which leaves – still not ready to fall – cling.  

The squirrels have been at the berries, particular the candelabras of rosehips. Scissoring the thin stalk-light stems and sending clusters of hips to the ground. Like school children scrumping apples from a neighbour’s orchard, they take a bite or two from one, discard it and then sink their teeth into another, before moving onto a third… and so on, until, I presume, they feel gutted. Such extravagant profligacy sits uncomfortably with our human sensibilities. Our thoughts naturally turn to the future. Images of hard winters, ice bound and unforgiving, with starving birds and mice (and squirrels) flash into our minds. What is wasted now, is lost forever – or at least until the next autumn. I catch myself becoming irritated; ‘For goodness’ sake save something for winter.’ But that is as unfair, as it is unreasonable. The problems of imposing all too human constructs of morality and ethics onto lives that are not human aside, it may also suggest a sort of ignorance about what is actually going on. It is true that squirrels appear to show at least some awareness of the future – after all, they do hoard away stashes of nuts. They will even keep an eye open for crows and rooks doing the same with the idea of plundering the hidden treasure as soon as it is left. But rosehips and other berries are not like nuts. Hide them beneath soft soil or leaf mould, when you return a few months later you will not find a tasty stash pristine still within their shells, but, if lucky, small scatterings of rosehip seeds returning to the soil. No, squirrels are creatures of the now and the now is the time of abundance. There’s a sense of celebration in this generous abundance being offered to them along each branch, each twig. There is a sense of ‘harvest home’, the glee-party and pot-roasted feast here, along the towpaths and hedge-ways – and after the travails of summer, which of us can really begrudge them that pleasure? And, anyway, return here in a couple of days and you will see that the number of uneaten and casually nibbled fruit already begin to diminish. Such lavish excess from the squirrels’ hard-work at foraging is appreciated by their more earthbound neighbours. Mice, rats, voles, even badgers, fox and deer, welcome the careless diligence of their squirrel hosts. Even ducks are not averse to having a forage, as do the blackbirds, robins and wren. In such ways, planned or not, the bounty and generosity of the rosehip is shared. And, in truth, the rosehips do not mind whether they are half eaten, wholly eaten, or just simply discarded along the wayside by little rodents with eyes too big for their bellies, so long as they fall to the ground to let the nature of life take its course.     

[MUSIC]

CABIN CHAT

[MUSIC]

MIST ON THE WATER

For me, autumn, definitely has a mythic feel to it. Maybe, it is that sense of the hidden being once more revealed as the plants and vegetation dies back and the twisted, interlinked knuckles of oak and ash roots can once again be seen. And even that sense, as leaves fall and berries blaze and then subside, that something deeper is happening. Something old, something chthonic. Something about the different types of dying and of the natures of rebirth, of the growing and the fading. Something whose deep workings, even in this modern age of instant information, still remains largely a mystery. The seeds, once part of this year’s flowers, now lying broadcast upon the steep bankside slopes. The apples rotting into the leaf slick soil, the rosehips, half-eaten, cradled by archangel and the rusty tines of sorrel. And within the trees, the slowing of the sap; a marker of tree-time. That measured movement of life from above ground to below. And there too, are bees, over wintering, butterflies too, where they can find shelter that they can seal from the coming cold. And within the canal, the offspring of damsel and dragonfly, in larvae and nymph. Tiny eggs burrowed into tree bark and leaf, hold next year’s life. Waiting for the return of the light and warmth. Chrysalis caskets foster the great unknowable transformations from caterpillar to butterfly.

There is something epic happening here, above our heads, below our feet. Wrapped in mist, the swans come swimming. They could be swimming out of Avalon. They could be swimming out of Prydain carried on the waters of the Hafren or the Afon Cynfal (KUN-VAL) where the Blodeuwedd, the girl made from mountain and meadow flowers, set in motion the events that led to her downfall. And in their swimming, they swim out of deep time into the troubled time of now, like some mythic messengers or envoys. Slow they come, with unhurried strokes, necks upright, proud in their bearing, as is right for emissaries of their standing. They barely register my presence. Nor should they. There are more important things in their world than a shadowed figure, lost in a world that is so alien and has so little time for them. And the robins sing from the elm’s crooked branches, male and female, lusty and loud, their melancholy winter song shimmering through leaves not yet ready to fall. A flock of wagtails stitch the air between the bankside trees with the undulating motion of their flight. They barrel into one of the alders. The swans have already moved on. Once more shrouded by mist, the closes in behind them. Swimming on into another world? Perhaps, …. perhaps. But will they find another as mythical and as epic as this one? I don’t think so.

Yes, I think there is something truly mythic about autumn that lays bare the big mysteries of life and invites stories to be told. Is that why the habit of telling strange and sad stories at this time of year seems to fit so well? A time of returning, that fills us with thoughts of decline and dying, and the great cycles of life and death and life again. A time when we can collectively, sit together, and stare into the darkness of night at things unknown, keeping each company in the presence of fears we try to hold at bay.       

That old pattern that runs through Samhain and Halloween. Rituals, remembrance, and above all stories.

Tonight is All Hallows Eve, Halloween. The time of Samhain. The thinning of the veil; that time when you can almost see a little more than normal, when still waters are stirred and myth rises with the mists. A time when we light the fire and watch the flames and become brave together as we swap strange stories that touch upon our older fears.

Last year Mind Shambles sent me a piece that he had written in response to the story I recorded this time last year called Morton’s Rise. I felt it was ideal for Halloween and so have saved it to share on just such a night as this.

So, let’s snuggle up cosy beside the stove, turn the lights down low, and listen to the strange and ghostly tale of ‘The Dark Lock’.

'The Dark Lock'

Upon a night of cold November,
 Air hung thick with lingering fog.
 A late arrival to the pound,
 A hazy lantern moving round
 And nearing softly came a sound
 A weary boater and his dog.

This day, our boater toiled along,
 The cut, in no mood to be kind.
 A lock gate stuck, and fought with force,
 A towpath lost to briar and gorse,
 A workboat wedged, a bolted horse,
 And one last lock now to be climbed.

As rounding past that final bend,
 The silhouette of open doors.
 A blessing! Met with chilly sigh,
 As lock gates rear up black and high,
 And somewhere, something shrieks a cry,
 That draws the breath and clenches jaws.

Now sitting in the narrow lock,
 Damp sides rearing like the grave,
 A slip of moon shines overhead
 And captures something, wispy, red,
 That fills the boater’s eyes with dread,
 Despite his wishes to be brave.

A minute, two, he steels his heart,
 And reaches out a murmuring hand
 To grasp the greening metal rung
 The up the ladder, one by one,
 Racing faster till he's flung,
 Breathing heavy on the land.

As the boater turns and looks,
 No sign of what he had beheld.
 The fog still hanging thick about,
 The lock gates open, big and stout,
 The clash of feelings, fear and doubt,
 But calming breaths, the terrors quelled.

So turning to the nearest gate,
 The boater moves and braces low,
 Slowly hefting mighty beams,
 To hold back torrents, floods and streams
 One final thunk, and now it seems,
 That blackness swallowed all below.

Our boater, nearing paddles hears
 A muffled bark upon dark breeze.
 A noise of panic, whining growl,
 A whimpering, then a mournful howl,
 A scratching from the unseen bow
 That fills him with a cold unease.

He leans to take a closer look,
 And sees in gloom upon the boat
 A figure prone, all dark and splayed,
 As if in some sick art displayed,
 At angles broken, now dismayed
 A gasp escapes our subject’s throat.

And then, from darkness comes a cry,
 Of some wild creature in the gloom.
 And to our boater, in his ears
 Came every one of many fears,
 That claims all sense and wring out tears,
 And all his courage was consumed.

Then as he took a nervy step,
 The mossy brickwork slipped his sole,
 His balance gone, his wild arms flailed
 Bright eyes wide, skin ghostly paled,
 Disappearing as he wailed,
 Back into the grave-like hole.

Come the morning, came the keeper,
 Wrapped in autumn wool and hide,
 Yawning, slowly turned his head
 And then in horror, growing dread,
 He saw the body, twisted, dead.
 A whimpering dog, sat by its side.

[MUSIC]

NIGHT VIEWS (THROUGH YOUR WINDOW)

With thanks to Jen Ratcliffe (UK).

[MUSIC]

SIGNING OFF 

This is the narrowboat Erica signing off for the night and wishing you a very restful and peaceful night. Sleep well and sweet dreams.

WEATHER LOG