Wood Street is full of surprises and fantastic surprises at that what with this day being February 29th. This evening Wood Street did not disappoint a rambling field student of E17s supernatural phenomena.
Change is afoot in Wood Street and the field student has been tracking some of the changes, looking out for the various paw marks that belong to some of the instigators of the changes. He has encountered pink bears and flesh eating ghosts and obviously survived to tell the tales. On the evening of this one in one thousand eight hundred and twenty six days rarity he believed his chances of encountering more mythical phenomena were greatly improved.
Acting on intelligence gleaned from his reading of 'Electric Eden, Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music' (Rob Young) he set out to track down Wood Street's resident 'beastly depraved woodland denizen who uses sweet intoxicating music and 'well placed words of glozing courtesy' to charm and incapacitate his victims', namely, Comus.
Equipped with an ipod Field Study's Man in E17 jigged about in peripatetic abandon, losing himself to the sonic strains of late 1960s /early 1970s psychedelic folk. Delicately blossomed trees, sentinels of Spring, lightened his steps. For a moment all was well in the night garden of Field Study's Man in E17, despite the ominous chance of foul enchantment. Ah, but the sirens, and the songs they sing in (the) harmony of emergency service, are enough to darken any bucolic vision.
Wood Street is a site of many auras and hazes, even more so since the creatmospheric intervention of flourescent municipal regeneration; and this coupled with Nature's own powers of renewal! Field Study's Man in E17 was caught in a reverie, enchanted by pink and blue tinted blossom, such was the liquorice sweet synaesthetic intoxication in which he danced to all the colours of darkness.
One of the problems of imbibing music via a personal stereo is the blissful ignorance of what is going on around you. Field Study's Man in E17 had all but lost sight of his mission to track down Comus but Comus had not lost sight of Field Study's Man in E17. Surely there was a rumble or quake that forewarned of the dreadful apparition? He, FSMiE17, was wrenched from his pink blue haze by the awful sight of Comus erupting from a lair deep within the decommissioned public convenience at the Forest Road end of Wood Street. There Comus stood, a terrible looming assemblage of splintered wood, crushed brick, twisted metal pipe and smashed ceramic latrines.
Had someone at the council mistakenly thought the erection of hoarding around the defunct convenience would contain the odours of discontent past?
What can a field student of E17 do in such a gut wrenching predicament? To avoid the fate of being bound 'to a marble venomed seat with gums of glutinous heat' (Rob Young and a bit of Milton) he resorted to what little remained of his reality; a rattle bag of defences against witchcraft and sorcery, created after a visit to Vestry House Museum's current exhibition, Witch Hunt. Phew, thank goodness for the foresight of the London Borough of Waltham Forest's leisure and culture services. He fumbled through his collection of bellarmine jugs, holed stones, horse shoes, mandrake roots, salts and nails, shoes, owls, animal bones and glass bottles - for that which would dispel the vision of grotesque debauchery towering over him. It was a stuffed owl, held up along with the proclamation, 'get thee gone, Comus!', that saw the depraved assemblage collapse, and remarkably so, within the confines of the hoarding.
What amazed Field Study's Man in E17 was how so many people carried on as if nothing had happened. As the video clip shows, some ran by Comus' lair, but others walked as if without a care. Perhaps they had also been to the VHM exhibition and were equipped with reassuring talismans.
Now why has Lost and Found in E17 resorted to Field Study's Man in E17 in the third person? Rumour has it the ghost of Matthew Hopkins, Witchfinder General, is in town. Watch out.
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