Entering a few weeks with no guests has given me the opportunity to peruse my navel, looking back through the fog of time.
Come to think of it, the bloody fog is everywhere. A few days before xmas, we had just bid farewell to Geoff & Bernie (Geoff; an old school mate and also a vet), their last words being how they will miss the wonderful weather. Well, talk about putting a hex on things, the very next day the clouds lost their footing in the skies and decided to hang around at ground level for a while.
A long while.
Our Christmas guests were somewhat short-changed. Fog kept us indoors, forcing us to eat and drink to be merry.
Fed up of all this gloom, we headed off for the South of Wales.
At this point you may question my rational decision making abilities.
And you'd be right.
This was one of the few photo opportunities that the soup-like conditions offered.
Here's another...
And so it goes...
Fog on the Wye.
People of a certain age will be reminded of the song 'Fog on the Tyne'. Memory tells me that this was a great song. It seems my memory has become infected with the perfidious fog.
This song has a back-story. When I was a young student, for one of my less salubrious years I lived in the East-End of London. This was a pretty grim area, being the only place we could find that accepted both students and dogs. On the ground floor was a long disused rat-infested restaurant. We had the next two floors, and above lived a couple of other students hailing from Newcastle. They tended to hang out with a couple of groupies, thus leading me to one of my greatest lost opportunities; sleeping with the Sensational Alex Harvey.
Don't ask.
The other inhabitant of that near ruin was a poltergeist.
I know this because the girlfriend of my room-mate saw it. Her sanity cannot be questioned. She got mad when you questioned her sanity.
We guessed something was up when we returned from the pub (see more such adventures below) to find her sitting outside the building in 'nowt but her nighty. Sitting outside fully-clothed would have been risky enough, thus we surmised that something was 'up'.
She explained how she had seen the incarnation of a tortured spirit, forever tied to the building in permanent torment.
"We must help this ghost by finding what is holding it here" she explained. "I had a vision of an old church and graveyard. We must help".
And so we spent a jolly half hour searching around the house for 'no one knew what'.
We gave up and retired to bed, where I spent an uncomfortable night dwelling upon my scepticism. The sound of mice beneath my bed did not help to ward off the tingles in my spine.
The next morning; a shout of "I've found it!" woke me early. The guys upstairs had spotted a picture cunningly stuck to the underside of the stairs above.
A picture of a church and graveyard. With blood dripping ominously down one of the gravestones.
Drip.
Drip.
(Actually is was an orange stain on the picture...)
”WE MUST BURN IT TO FREE THE SPIRIT" cried our erstwhile ghostbuster.
Thus, a ceremony was held, the picture burnt, the ghost freed. It has not been seen since.
Now some may question the veracity of this story. They should not. It is true. The mental health of my friends' companion may have been slightly suspect (it almost certainly was) however, the story was as told. If the ghost did exist (and, of course, it didn't) then was it the ritual burning that freed it, or was it the constant sound of Lindisfarne coming from on high?
The guys on the top floor both adored Lindisfarne, the band responsible for the above song. They played their one album ad nauseam. All the bleeding time. When their vinyl disc player was not available, they sang their songs. Many a night would find us stumbling back from the local boozer singing:
'But it's alright Lady Eleanor,
Alright Lady Eleanor.
I'm alright where I am.'
In retrospect, we probably sung it better than the original.
Since then I have avoided that band as if they were the plague. Now, 42 years later, and nearly recovered, my foggy brain has been once more directed toward the 'Fog on the Tyne'. Time for another listen.
Such timeless lyrics.:
'Cause the fog on the Tyne is all mine, all mine.
The fog on the Tyne is all mine'.
And then:
’We can swing together
We can have a wee wee
We can have a wet on the wall
If someone slips a whisper
That his simple sister slapped them down
And they slavered on their smalls'.
What more can one say? If they'd sung it in key maybe it would have marginally improved things.
It'll be at least 42 more years before I listen to it again...
In between fog dodging and reminiscing, we did see the old offspring, here's a blurry photo of one...
...and here's Sienna doing an impression of a famous Who song...
and then another impression of something scary...
One disadvantage of taking photos in the fog is forgetting to reset the camera when trying to take portraits. Despite this handicap I'm including the following photo of Tony and Sue because she really wanted to be in a blog.
This ones for you Sue..
