Moonbathing and Other Adventures

My visit to London yesterday had three purposes: to plot out the route for my proposed next history walk; to pop to the Victoria Library for the show of art by the late Paula Hibbert Lewis, who I didn't know but various of my Goth friends did and I'm sure I've been in the same space as her at various points; and finally to meet up with Lady Wildwood, MaisyMaid and Ms DawnStar to Moon-bathe, which I will explain shortly. The first obstacle was a signalling failure at Waterloo which basically closed the whole south-eastern rail network: 'What should we do?' I asked the helpful fellow at Swanvale Halt station, to which his answer was 'Go home and forget about it'. I thought that instead I could catch the Tube at Morden, the most accessible station on the Underground network to me. The most accessible - until it came to parking the car. That took about 45 minutes, longer than it did to drive there, and involved deleting the RingGo app account I didn't know I had, and setting up a new one. 

Anyway, I eventually got there. The route I'd worked out for the Walk was a bit too long: we will have to lose Carlton House Terrace, for instance, one of the more charismatic locations on the original plan. Together with my diversion to the Victoria Library I ended up traipsing about six miles at some speed and so it was no surprise I felt a bit footsore and achey at the end. Ms Lewis's pictures included some beautiful portraits and small, colourful collages, so it was worth the walk to pay a silent trubite to a soul from the Goth world. I even finished, amazingly, a bit early so I was able to have a tea at a little café in front of Kings Cross Station. Very oddly, the barista insisted to me that not only did they have no decaffeinated tea, but that such a thing didn't exist, so I gave in and had a full-fat one.

Lady Wildwood currently works at Kings Place, the Kings Cross arts venue which not that long ago hosted PJ Harvey discussing poetry with Don Paterson, and she alerted us to the Moonbathing event which is one of a series of sound installations. You lie, or sit, in a darkened room while a big inflatable Moon hangs impassively above you and your fellow audio explorers, gradually changing colour or lapsing into entire darkness, while noise goes on around you which I would describe as a kind of sonic massage. Like massage, it isn't always gentle and the floor vibrates and pounds before everything shifts a gear and the industrial noise is replaced by tinkly bells and the like. It rather reminded me at times of being in an MRI scanner, something which I have only done once and which I quite enjoyed but I know not everyone does. I felt it teetered on the cusp of the relaxing and the disturbing. This might be because of the images you end up thinking about - Lady Wildwood, who has done it before, found herself imagining 'alien creatures running across the ceiling and preparing to abduct you ... giant spiders scuttling at the edge of the room' while I was reminded of someone going through a drawer trying to find a pair of scissors. On the other hand, my sense of 'disturbance' came from the slight worry that all this aural pounding might not be doing me all that good. Has this been tested on mice first, I wondered? Anyway, it was worth doing (once).

The floor slabs at Kings Place have ammonite fossils embedded in them. Lady Wildwood had never spotted them before! I don't think they're Dorset stone, so I wonder where they come from?