I watch visitors wander by, walking into the Tapselteerie magic, or just heading for their rental for a week or two. They seem happy, wave to me, or, more correctly, I wave to them and they respond. Not all do, heads down, even though I know from my goldfish bowl, that they have clocked me. It wonders me, even as I absolutely know the head down, don’t make eye contact thing of not just Englandshire, but of many big places wherein people have forgotten their place, their identity within a dynamic that actually needs independenties. I’m amazed I was ‘allowed’ to create that one. What I am saying here is that we have become a smudge, a number and why the hec are we doing that when who we are is fire and water, sky, smoke, wild, intelligent, vocal, skilled, powerful? I get ‘polite’, no gawping, all that, but it does sadden me somewhat. These visitors, many of them, have never witnessed the wide sky, the lack of intrusive noise, the call of owls at night, the black sky when the sun has blown out, the stars. There is no threat here beyond inner fear, and that’s a whole different thing. I won’t even go there.

The clouds are shouty today. A collusion of confluence, a bumping which may have upset the ears of the upper eschalons. We can’t hear it in the down below of down below. It just manifests in a bout of tooth grinding, or of over-the-top outrage in a car queue, or ditto in the wrong sandwich for lunch, or of someone arriving late for a meeting, so hefty are the pressures of down below. It thinks me. If we could, if we just could, for one day, decide that the pressure is pressure? That’s all. And, then, detach. Who am I? Who do I want to be? Any response will be inchoate, unformed, but I know that beginning. I remember asking this, mid five kids, mid Tapselteerie, sunk, or so I thought, beneath the pressure of many clouds. I want to be someone different, to see things differently, to go beyond the limitations perceived and learned from before.

We might see ‘finite’. We don’t need to. More and more we subverse our own story. I know I write this beyond the wild of influence, watching more those who become a smudge, and wanting to remind them of the rebels who changed so much, eventually. We need them now. Not drunk nor drugged, not hiding away, but here. Right here, under shouty clouds.