About 20 years ago I spent a summer taking photographs in the Swedish countryside (Smaland, around my ex- in-laws house on a lake, and Narsholmen where Tarkovsky shot his last film, ‘The Sacrifice’) with my little Lomo camera, and writing a kind of folk horror Ladybird book fairy story about…

Sometimes in the still hours there’s a wondering, a wandering from memory to possibility to presence and back, a driven drift idly focussed, attentive to the chance that one passing thing might entice further dreaming, a mesmeric analysis of its obverse, its edges and corners, its unnoticed blemishes, textures, microscopic…

The row of houses — bungalows, seaside shacks— stretches out for about half a mile either side of the straight road that runs parallel to the shore. Some are newer than others, some more rundown, different colours, shapes, construction. They all make me wonder who lives there, in each one…

Romney Marshes A shallow place, a thin place, fathoms sounding place. The waves mesmerise: long observing, listening, the soft spray, the deep green aura: the atmosphere of the waves envelops, drowning all senses, rolling in over, back out, again, again. The waves come and go. The ocean is still, fathoms…

& ahead and into the future: I don’t ask why. I go. I try to concentrate; to think clearly. I am by the sea, staring into the water for a long time The shop is very small. A strange object. It is about the size of a small desk, or…

I am a wizard: who but I Sets the cool head aflame with smoke? From The Song of Amergin Who cleft the Devil’s foot? Robert Graves Socrates was afraid of myths. The chaotic, suggestive, moonlit nature of the imagined proved far too unruly, too unfettered for his scientist’s mind —…

This is nostalgia; out of the bag, sometimes tearing and peeling off the thin plastic wrap, a single envelope or a box with posters and a book and photos and others in between; sometimes a little plastic box, and later a plastic case or a card one or something else…

I will tell you my memories; they are spirits; they are the shifting air; they are the storm; they are all I have. Standing. A corner in New York. Inside a bookshop looking through the floor to ceiling window out into the shopping mall. On a fire escape. The sea…

How wretched this life of ours is!-so full of false conceits, so futile, that it is little more than the shadow of the chimeras loosed by memory. p255 When age encroaches, or more truthfully, pounces, the trivial melancholies of days and years ago slip into deep shade, fading and fading…