31.12.2022 — Today I went to the churchyard, for about half an hour. I go there when I feel cracked, wrong, not sane, because more than anywhere else around here it seems not to mind. Next to each other at a shallow angle round the side of the church are two knackered benches, the flat part of each being made of two long slats of wood. One of those benches is missing the front slat, and one is missing the back slat, rendering them ridiculous perches. I think their backs are similarly broken, in a matching or complementary way. Often you find that this churchyard is a brief haven for people whose lives, you can tell, without even talking to them, are fucked; whether it is drugs, drink, homelessness, madness, abuse, all or any of the above. It is never busy. People are sometimes unconscious there, on the mud and the leaves, in the day. I am housed, and in that I am very lucky; but I am still a mentally ill alcoholic, and I go to this place and feel calm, and feel like I am not going to be judged. All of which is entirely contrary to my experience of churches, of The Church, in the past.
I don’t mean the church though, I mean the churchyard. Much of its ground is raised, a metre or two above the surrounding streets, so that when you walk around three sides of it, you are on a level with the remains on the other side of the red-brick walls. Maybe you could pull a brick out and shake a bony hand in the soil. Against one of the walls parents line up to collect their kids from the primary school opposite, to the North, leaning on the dead as they wait.
It is absolutely not one of those churchyards in which committee members and volunteers over the years have managed to neatly assemble the dead; it is not a tidy, bright, well-tended lawn, graves lined up, by which the building itself is somehow prettily moated. The graves are scattered at angles, disorganized. One of the stones which stands in an area where there are few others is so worn that it’s completely unreadable, but it is round, and looks like a torso and head poking from the soil. Some of the trees look like they began as the shapes of people, as they were turned excruciatingly into skeletons. Thick tufts of thin sucker-branches sprouting from the ground at the bases of others might testify to severe root damage; they have been let grow til they are yards long, and then been curled up into loose wicker circles, as if Sycorax is making herself known.
The church itself is a foreboding, dark, blockish thing: the blackest I’ve seen, it looks like it has been dipped in soot, and reminds you more of Victorian industry than of worship. I’ve never been inside. It does have services, it’s a functioning church. The churchyard I’ve heard rumours is deconsecrated, which would make sense; its solemnity seems more gnarled than holy, sourced from something older than a nineteenth-century church building. In the summer it is a wildflower meadow, but in the winter it’s an absolute dark lake of ghosts. I have seen few places, even at this time of year, which look more comprehensively dead. More than just deathly, since all graveyards must be that, it looks like it actually died, all at once. As if there was a single moment in which something happened to it. It’s easy to imagine that Death itself circled the outer walls three times, in a curse, and then walked away: that a sudden obsidian rain broke from the sky above, not a drop of it outside the walls, and killed in an instant everything it touched.
Today it was wet, completely soaking wet, and the rain did feel like it brought with it an appropriate, attendant darkness, even though the dusk is always inevitable on its own terms; something was going on. I stayed there until I felt a little better. I watched a worm go across some concrete, for a while.
This is not a ghost story, though I feel like it perhaps could be. Maybe at some point it will be, if I tighten it up a bit and have an idea. But honestly I just wanted to tell you where I’d been today — I guess, to pay tribute to it, to be grateful for it, and to wish everyone a happy new year from a very ghostly place (in a strange way, typing this at home, I feel like I am actually still there: maybe that’ll be the case til I feel wholly better). Sometimes I get anxious that people think I just go on and on about ghosts, and nothing else, but, I mean, so what: I just think they’re great.
And thank you all for subscribing to this, which sometimes really is just a diary. I’ve no idea how it is that it’s getting a slow, steady stream of signups, but it is. I’ll open comments today: say hello, if you like.
Once the chaos of Christmas is mostly past, and as the new year approaches, I always find myself, though I couldn’t say why, thinking of those weird, glowing words from Penda’s Fen: “Child, be strange. Dark, true, impure and dissonant. Cherish our flame. Our dawn shall come…” — and I always remember how a very close friend of mine, dead now, glossed them with “be queer, basically”.
Lots of people are doing year-end lists and things like that. They sound fun. I don’t think I will do that. But, it reminds me! I want to tell you a true story, soon — not a ghost story — about a man who wrote a very, very long list, who pretended to be two men, and who knew people’s memories better than they did. For now, in solidarity, and with love, I wish you a happy new year.
T.x
Hi Tim(othy?),
I have been reading for a while and am sorry I only became a paid subscriber this year (means come and means go…). However every time an email notification comes through I am excited to read, it is always a small joy in the day. Your stories are pure magic. A highlight from this year — I read the bird facts out to anyone willing to listen.
Wishing you a happy new year as well, and take care.
Alex