Fungal Flips

Last night I dreamt that where I lived was covered in all-enveloping fungus. It kept growing and drooping over the eaves of the house like a covering of snow that is too heavy and slips. There were things I knew about this fungus: it was soft, it changed colour - from green to orange - and it exuded a vapour that I couldn't smell or see but nevertheless changed anything that it encountered.

I knew I needed to run away from it, but each time I did it made me stop whatever I was doing and then leap through time, so at one time I would be on my way out of the door and then immediately afterwards find myself where I had been a few minutes before.

It's been haunting me all day - that, and my enduring conviction (since last Wednesday) that the world, as we know it, is about to end. Maybe I have not been getting out enough.

Prestatyn in November

Prestatyn, it turns out, is a town of contrasts: a sheltered avenue of trees



and then a mill-pond (the mill, alas, tucked away behind 'No Admittance' notices) with dirty-looking ducks.


Then another walk down another lane and a school - peering through the windows I saw children with their hands up and I had the odd feeling I was truanting from life, doing nothing, just walking, or maybe trespassing


through a hushed estate of houses which added to my sense that I really shouldn't be here, that I should have something else I should be doing


then into town and its interesting vernacular architecture of old-time inns

and public houses, and chapels


converted so easily into curry houses; the arches above windows conveniently close to the curves of an Indian temple, and the listing of evening service and morning Sunday School quickly replaced - with the flick of a sign-painter's wrist - to the prices of a good tandoori.

Ah, Prestatyn dreams of being hot


with palm trees and lidos and beach huts which seem sadder still under grey skies and the cold damp air of November.


But still, there is the soul-soaring loneliness of the beach,


a glorious emptiness of pale sand


with the impressions of waves set hard enough to turn my ankle. And as I limped from them I thought again of all the ripples I have seen preserved in sandstone, and that moment: the one when something catastrophic happens, when everything changes - a sudden shift of the tide - and these tiny undulations are fixed, like these could be now.

Ha, back to the end of the world...

Which takes me, quite neatly to this.


Pontins.


It is a shock to come upon it and a shock to see how far it stretches behind its prison-like perimeter. Its resemblance to secure accommodation is striking. Are the bars to keep people out - or in? I imagined a few months from now: the noise, the enforced jollity, the group entertainments and the organisers with their determined grins.

But for more than half the year Prestatyn lives without it. Half the year the parks are empty


and life can continue unguarded.


Back in the town there is the bustle and cheer of a thriving and affluent place. The shops are full. The faces smile. Maybe it is a little like blanking out pain or grief. It is there - but there is no need to dwell on it.

Cold ending.

They were resurfacing the road into Mold today. I had to stop and for a few moments admired the way white birds wheeled around a snow-covered field and as they dropped below the background of the dark sky immediately became grey. For some reason they reminded me of scavengers, as if there was some half-eaten carcass that had attracted their attention, and it seemed to me that this might be how the world ends - with scavengers - the end of the food chain.

What if it ended now, I wondered. It is something that used to occur to me a lot when I was younger. Who I would try to run to or phone in those last few minutes - my parents, my brothers, my husband, my sons, my friends...? Then I thought of how it would be to have no one... And then the sun caught the hills. They were still covered in a patchwork of snow, the dark hedges like seams of crude sewing, and the sun glanced off the crest and made it glow white and I felt that if the world were to end this would be my perfect final vision.