I Get Called Hawkeye Alda Time

Listening to something about 23% of the way through the giant playlist.

(Actually Beth Orton)

So here is Annie in her high perch, snuggled down but peeking over the top of the backpack. She is about one but she does not speak much preferring to command by being cute. Obviously I cannot see her most of the time but her serious face is sometimes reflected in shop windows or any mirrors we might pass, and when she sees herself she will straighten up, making me lean forward to balance her properly.

But now we are inside some worthy building, a local noteable’s house I think, and one reported to have a ghost. We are immediately shown the main attraction of this Elizabethan house (though the queen here was Mary). It is a large and damaged fresco on the mud wall of one room, broken up where the plaster that was put over it has fallen away. What can be seen is a number of people in typical Tudor dress engaged in strange activities that are made more mysterious by being so fragmented. No amount of local research has turned up anything about what this is though a guess has been made that the scene is something from the bible done in contemporary dress. I say that it reminds me of a similarly revealed fresco we saw in a church down south somewhere. Later this turns out to be in a completely different style but here and now it excites us as a possible solution.

And here, behind us the head shrine of Saint Margaret – the Scottish one rather than one of Saint Joan’s confidants. Well actually a reconstruction, because in another mystery, the original was stolen leaving no modern clue to its whereabouts. I imagine some strange and remote European castle, that of an ancient family, hiding this gold thing, looking after it over the years of turmoil that came from the wars between Scotland and England.

Annie up there is lost to something we cannot see and we know that this is the room where the ghost is supposed to be seen. Annie must be able to see him for she talks incessantly and without real words, burbling what she knows to be true at the monk or whatever he is. The chandelier seems to be some sort of focus and I turn so I can see her in the mirror, delighted by the gold of the light and its ancient keeper, though I struggle to see anything, being firmly in the reality of now.