… lying in bed moaning and holding my head. Worst flu ever. Came on last wednesday, just as I was walking back over the Broom Hill in brilliant sunshine having dropped the boy off at the nursery. Started with a strange pricking sensation under my scalp, then by the end of the day — blam. Just felt like I was going to die. No cold symptoms, just overall viral nastiness.
Now I feel better, in that “life renewed” way you get after an illness. Probably because I spent 18 hours a day sleeping. What I have been doing is:
1. polishing off a garage-cum-broken beat track that uses a wicked Methodman vocal. Sounding good to me, very complex though.
2. Doing a d’n’b re-rub of an old acid house / belaeric classic.
3. Reading three books simultaneously —
* John Michel’s At The Centre of the World (actually, when am I NOT reading this wonderful book?)
* Hamlet’s Mill, the 1968 academic magnum opus on mythology being a medium for transmitting astronomical (and much other) information from the neolithic, if not the meso- or even palaeolithic, which is weighty and mind-blowing, though you have to skip lots of it to get the explanations
* and the main event, Paul Devereux’ Haunted Land. For the first 20 pages I thought this was a re-hash of old idea, but it actually takes themes he’s covered over the last ten years or so and brings them up to date. We’re talking the Dutch death roads, Amerindian stuff, all the material you got compressed into five or six pages in, say, his revised Ley Hunter’s Guide.
Anyway, you stick all those together and you’ve got a pretty comprehensive model for understanding ancient landscape consciousness, using the best evidence available and using both your head and your heart. I’d like to synthesise this into one easily digested framework, but I’m sure it’s been done before — these are well-worn furrows after all. Even so, it’s some good shit. The new John Michel one on Jerusalem turned up today, so I’ve been giving that a good skimming too.