These Midsummer Fires (part 2)

‘… pulsing with presence like a great wingless angel’, Happisburgh church tower.

Hello again, between the moons friends.

As promised, here is the second and concluding part of my seasonal essay These Midsummer Fires. I hope you’ll enjoy it.

This is where we finished last time:

This evening I am on the track furthest from the sea. Not the reckless one. I have come to witness the full moon and this is the quickest way to reach the best place to look over the bay. Each succeeding route has gradually cracked and slid down into the waiting tides. The path I loved best and often sat beside with my flask exists now only in memory or perhaps as a differently-patterned layer in the air, hovering several feet beyond today’s edge. I mourned that path when it was lost, and now the safer and therefore less alluring one has become the daredevil option. One day of course, it too will be gone. The colours of the cliff top are extraordinary. Everything is a heightened version of itself, in the same way that colours become more vivid and the atmosphere shimmers when you fall in love. And coming towards me is the photographer. 

Now read on …

I recognise his fast, rangy gait, cameras slapping against his left side. On the beacon evening I had never met his gaze, unwilling to be captured like some apparition. Now there’s no choice. We’re on the same rabbit-cropped path, surrounded by a ghostly caravan site. Each grass-flower shimmers pink, sharply defined within its rose-touched cloud. As the photographer and I draw together he pauses and half turns. Just the briefest of practised pauses, finger on shutter. The church tower with its tangerine aura looms half-silhouetted and pulsing with presence like a great wingless angel.

Hardly breaking his stride, camera to eye then clanking by his side again. It’s in his nature now. You can see that. We’re witnessing an altered nature, altered world, and there’s no-one on the old caravan site but the two of us.