Thought I would set off for a twilight walk the other day.
I took my bag and change of clothes to work with me, and when it came time to leave I popped into the toilets to change (it was quite liberating being at work in only my pants, even if it was for just a few moments) and then drove up to the top of the North Downs.
Down in the Medway valley it had been an overcast day, but the clouds were high and you could still see a good way even if the sky was like looking up through a Tupperware bowl. Though once atop the hills it was wet and the wind was gusting, like something from a Bronte novel. I was now in the clouds with the squalls. Field of view was no more than a couple hundred yards, slicing through clouds and drisk.
So I stepped on to the North Downs Way, making for a chalk scarp – a familiar place like a second home, hoping it would give me some respite for a mug of earl grey and the apple I had with me. No, it didn’t. But that didn’t stop me. It was whilst sitting there, tightening my hood around me to keep the wind off, that the light finally passed, moving from murk to gloom. At twilight we see things at their sharpest. Our colour vision may wane, but the focus tightens – at twilight we see the world at our best. The light dims, the eyes open, and we touch the world and experience it. All this half-light – the fog, the moonlight, the twilight.
I was taking a circular route, back up the hill, through a stand of beech and birch, slipping on the mud, and back on to the chalk and mud-sloshed trail.
Tied to a fence was a bedraggled bunch of artificial flowers – a memorial to a loved one. They flapped in the strong wind, lashed and scoured by the weather, like the heart that had been scoured by the loss. The twilight of memory, the twilight of movement, the twilight of evening.
The wind and rain wasn’t letting up, and being up on an exposed Down wasn’t helping. The sky had gone from a washed out grey to a washed out dark blue – no stars, no view below, just a white smudge were the moon was. I had seen no one else. No other hikers, no dog walkers, no wind-swept souls. However, it was barely 5pm so everyone else would still be at work.
Last stop would be the modest remains of a castle – just the flint rubble fill of a few walls is all that remains. I was hoping to see an owl, but the weather was too harsh for anything but poets, madmen, and philosophers to be out. So time to head back to the car, time to come off the hill, have myself a bowl of special fried rice from the takeaway, to get home and put out the darkness with the flip of a light switch – to exist on that cusp between light and dark.
I took my bag and change of clothes to work with me, and when it came time to leave I popped into the toilets to change (it was quite liberating being at work in only my pants, even if it was for just a few moments) and then drove up to the top of the North Downs.
Down in the Medway valley it had been an overcast day, but the clouds were high and you could still see a good way even if the sky was like looking up through a Tupperware bowl. Though once atop the hills it was wet and the wind was gusting, like something from a Bronte novel. I was now in the clouds with the squalls. Field of view was no more than a couple hundred yards, slicing through clouds and drisk.
So I stepped on to the North Downs Way, making for a chalk scarp – a familiar place like a second home, hoping it would give me some respite for a mug of earl grey and the apple I had with me. No, it didn’t. But that didn’t stop me. It was whilst sitting there, tightening my hood around me to keep the wind off, that the light finally passed, moving from murk to gloom. At twilight we see things at their sharpest. Our colour vision may wane, but the focus tightens – at twilight we see the world at our best. The light dims, the eyes open, and we touch the world and experience it. All this half-light – the fog, the moonlight, the twilight.
I was taking a circular route, back up the hill, through a stand of beech and birch, slipping on the mud, and back on to the chalk and mud-sloshed trail.
Tied to a fence was a bedraggled bunch of artificial flowers – a memorial to a loved one. They flapped in the strong wind, lashed and scoured by the weather, like the heart that had been scoured by the loss. The twilight of memory, the twilight of movement, the twilight of evening.
The wind and rain wasn’t letting up, and being up on an exposed Down wasn’t helping. The sky had gone from a washed out grey to a washed out dark blue – no stars, no view below, just a white smudge were the moon was. I had seen no one else. No other hikers, no dog walkers, no wind-swept souls. However, it was barely 5pm so everyone else would still be at work.
Last stop would be the modest remains of a castle – just the flint rubble fill of a few walls is all that remains. I was hoping to see an owl, but the weather was too harsh for anything but poets, madmen, and philosophers to be out. So time to head back to the car, time to come off the hill, have myself a bowl of special fried rice from the takeaway, to get home and put out the darkness with the flip of a light switch – to exist on that cusp between light and dark.
