This year, Mark Hooper found beauty in the fog.
Some mornings it just feels too much. The fog comes in and envelops everything, so much so that you can’t see the way ahead, or even where you’ve been.
This entire past year was like that. The landmarks and waypoints were obscured. There was no fixed point to get your bearings from. All shadows and no reflections.
It was a year where everything seemed to be turned upside down. The arc of history bent towards the wrong path. Too many good people died.
It was hard to see the light, let alone try to follow it.
But fog can have its own beauty.
On those mornings where you can barely see beyond your own face, when it seems all you can do is put one foot in front of the other – that’s exactly what you need to do. Walk into the mist. Let it embrace you. Get lost in it. See where it takes you.
For reasons I’ve already mentioned here, I’ve had to curtail my walking of late – taking shorter routes, but taking in more as I go. One particularly dark and gloomy morning – the morning of November 6 – I woke up to a suffocating blanket of fog. The view outside my window had disappeared. There was an eerie, confused silence as I joined the parents of the neighbourhood, trudging with our children towards the local primary school at 8:30am. For me, it’s a short trudge uphill, over cobblestones and onto a slippery worn-brick pavement. Familiar houses emerged from the haze and slowly came into focus. After, I kept on in the same direction, passing behind the school, continuing down a lane, into the fog.
The lane led me to an empty park. The fog had parted a little around a lake as the steam rose from it. Everything was turned upside down again. The trees on the far bank met their reverse image in the still water. Shadows and reflections. It was stunning. The patterns they made on the lake resembled oversized soundwaves in autumnal colours – just like the cover of Kate Bush’s Aerial LP.
Aerial is an album I’ve revisited a lot this year, together with another perennial Kate Bush favourite, 50 Words for Snow. Of more recent releases, The Cure’s Songs of a Lost World has been on constant rotation ever since it was released, the same week the world took a turn for the worse. A grown-up Disintegration for the times we live in, informed by personal grief and the inexorable passing of time. Will Hodgkinson brilliantly described it as a ‘decaying masterpiece’ in The Times. If all this sounds a little grim, it’s worth also saying it is a beautiful reflection on late life. It struck a chord, particularly the words that finally emerge out of the fog after 6 minutes and 23 seconds of the album’s closer, ‘Endsong’:
…And I’m outside in the dark
Staring at the blood red moon
Remembering the hopes and dreams I had
And all I had to do
And wondering what became of that boy
And the world he called his own
I’m outside in the dark
Wondering how I got so old
Timing is everything of course, and I’ve found I’ve had that particular album – and that song – on repeat this last month of 2024, with Robert Smith’s plaintive ‘I don’t belong here…’ haunting me.
Others have articulated the same mood – a sort of collective existential angst – just as well this year, from Nick Cave to Eddie Chacon, Bill Ryder-Jones to Little Simz, Michael Head and the Red Elastic Band to Massive Attack. The last those acts provided two live highlights of my musical year – Massive’s ‘Climate Action’ mini festival on Clifton Downs bombarding the senses with a claustrophobic, audio-visual summary of the state of the world today, whilst, by contrast, Mick Head treated us to an intimate acoustic gig at The Social, full of wry humour. And when no-one could come up with a request he liked the sound of, he opted for the one I’d been too shy to call out for – the one I want at my funeral.
And the world is full of lovely happy smiling faces.
Something like you…
As a sentiment, it’s probably a better way to go than with Robert Smith’s doomsday wailings echoing in your ear. Head into the fog, find the beauty on the other side.
I can’t mention those two gigs without adding Cat Power in Bloemendaal, the Netherlands – delivering her interpretation of Dylan’s legendary ‘Albert Hall’ gig, complete with note-perfect backing band, from an amphitheatre in the middle of a beautiful forest clearing, the stage separated by a moat. More shadows and reflections, with the odd streak of lightning.
As well as walking, I’ve struggled with reading this year, so I’ve limited myself to short books – after discovering Robert Macfarlane’s inspiring pamphlet The Gifts of Reading in a local Oxfam, I reread James Baldwin’s masterfully bleak Giovanni’s Room, Samuel Selvon’s wonderful The Lonely Londoners and, best of all, Max Porter’s Shy – another decaying masterpiece, drum ‘n’ bass ‘n’ social services.
More routes out of the fog. It would be great if all this worked as a metaphor for our troubled times. But sometimes fog is just fog, people are people and politics is politics.
