It stole in suddenly during the night, stalking like a Saxon Sceadugenga through the streets, obscuring everything that lay beyond the double-glazed panes of the windows.
It persisted.
I woke up during the night for a drink of water, and even the simple act of letting one of the cats out was suddenly flipped around by the disorienting greyness, becoming instead the act of letting something else in, the cold grey tendrils of the outside air slowly twining around my bare feet, between my toes, and insinuating its desire to slink in even further as I watched the cat disappear and closed out the chill night, cutting off only a few captive fingers of cold before returning to bed.
It persisted.
When I woke in the morning the fog was still there – just. A phantom retreating from the advancing wakefulness of the day, it had fallen back, abandoning the streets and hovering instead up in the hills where it obscured the top hundred feet or so, flexing and bobbing like oil on water.
Last night’s frosty touch still lingered prominently in memory – cold but not unfeeling; sudden yet not unwelcome; and so I found myself, less than fifteen minutes later, dressed and halfway up the nearest of the hills.
By the time I reached the fog line it was a very conspicuous band of grey, a fact that struck me as a strange paradox for something so indistinct and intangible. I had walked in thick fog numerous times before, had played that time-travelling game that allowed my imagination to place me in Victorian London or some Renaissance-era Italian valley at dawn, but this was the first time that I had actually gone in search of the fog, the first time that I had reciprocated the visit of that stranger in the night.
I knew instantly that it was indeed that same stranger for, stepping into it, I felt the temperature fall by a couple of degrees and sensed that cool touch again, this time across my brow, reaching down into my lungs with every breath.
Within this vacuum, all external stimuli were removed: I could see nothing beyond the path a few feet in front of me, and all sound of traffic and various other ambient noises was muffled into indistinctness so that now, with every step, I could feel a prepositional shift beneath my feet meaning that I was not so much on the hill as I was in the hill, immersed and wholly complicit in the tryst between hill and fog and, now, man.
But far from a bare, sparse experience, this only seemed to make the scene somehow fuller when things came my way. The dark shadows of trees materialised out of nothing like outline charcoal sketches of themselves, the unexpected flap of a pigeon made the hollow air burst into applause, and cobwebs nestled in gorse bushes and bare blackberry stands sagged, weighed down by the jewelled garlands of dew bestowed upon them by an unseen benefactor.
Such an atmosphere of generosity is never easily abandoned, and so I gave in to the urge to explore the entire circuit of the hill’s upper path, driven by the need to see whether this relationship was as involved and all-consuming as it seemed, whether the fog’s attention was just a fly-by-night fleeting dalliance or whether it would linger awhile yet.
It persisted.
