Ash Slid Thursday

Out from the darkness came the quintuple organisers of the apocalypse, their shadows softened by the clouds of ash that surrounded them, billowing against the ground, pulled down by the gravity that they themselves created. Their horses crowded together, steam climbing from them, a second nebulous collection after the ejecta of the volcano from where they entered this world.

All is bathos, for the world's end is not this; it is the misery of queues, the boredom of the long wait at the airport, day-dreaming about a lazy afternoon in a sunny orchard you remember from home which as far as you recall did not have any orchards close by. All sentences end sometime. I remember the small wood that sat on the very top of the very furthest hill on the horizon viewed from my house all those years ago. I wanted to be there, walking over the dappled ground, cooler than the baking air of the plains and hills outside but my father could never be persuaded to visit. Many times I tried to cycle straight towards it but the roads between here and there confounded me, turning away and never seeming to revert to the correct direction, always returning me close to home after the point of no return. The countryside seemed to be folding itself as I moved through it, creating its own hills and lakes, moving the roads. It feels now like I stayed still while the ground span and moved under me, always seeming in the control of someone else.

Maybe I should try again, use the map, borrow a satnav, arm myself with photos taken from the air to prove that the place still exists for I still see it when I go home, a dusty green bump on the smooth line of the furthest ridge. Often it is lost in the haze of summer, a possibly-imagined thing, blending into the hills and clouds. Sometimes the weather turns the distance into a strange mix of land and sky where the clouds become mountains of impossible height, with Everest, K2 and Kanchenjunga brought to us from far away. And at these times my little forest is lost in this giant world and yet it still exists, untroubled mostly by any human activity, left to the birds and rabbits, litter-free and quiet, a Little Nirvana, mysteriously hidden and yet left in plain sight to entire counties on clear days.