Midnight Walk on New Year’s Eve 2020 – 2021: the Grinshill / Clive Ridge
Fog.
Stay in. Don’t drive.
But I am alive –
let me remind myself
of that fact:
I am alive,
this is not fake news.
So I drive –
it’s hardly enough
to warm the engine –
and it’s 11.55
as I enter the ghoul-grey
blur of the woods.
Darkness deep,
mist clotted thick,
air droning with silence.
My torchlight
draws trees to it
like spectres to a feast:
ghostly, scabbed birches,
pocked, pink Scots pines.
Adrenalin-waried,
cold-freeze hurried,
I am soon on sandstone,
the frost-and-chisel chiselled
apex of these ancient
quarried labyrinths
of greened, lichened rock.
Tonight at this year-turn
no Telford lights to my left,
no Shrewsbury lights to my right –
just touchable, tasteable fog.
I beware the edge.
Back in the woods
I miss my path
but soon find its parallel
in the honeycombed network
of old trods, archaic trails.
New batteries in my torch –
that was good thinking –
then a branch snags out
with something dark dangling:
indigo woollen glove, sodden,
fibred fingers dripping
like slow-melting teats,
helpfully picked up and drooped
for some careless owner to retrieve.
I skirt this lost property apparition,
hurry on down:
this night-wandering
has peer-reviewed
and test verified
the theory that I am alive –
I am not leaving empty-handed.
Ted Eames, 2021