by David Southwell
Today was full of that sunshine you think only existed in childhood. Pavement hot to touch before noon, heat blurring end of road. I wanted to be by sea. Maybe it was nostalgia for trips with Mum, maybe primal need for cool water. Mad decision to take bus along coast road. Got off at Black Point because if I got bored of beach, I could explore lighthouse after reading about it being haunted by invisible steps in Phoenix guide.
Nearly killed myself making it up to great lens at top. I listened, but only heard my heart and breath collapsing. Ghostly steps clearly don’t like a heatwave. It still felt like a threshold place though. Being at edge of England, its stories spluttering out in blue horizon totality, the empires of the waves taking over.
-Diary of Matt Adams, 1981
About Hookland: Hookland is in part a response to the weird, the paranormal content in culture when I was growing up in 1970s. In many ways I look at Hookland as an act of re-enchantment, a putting back all the weirdness edited out by the modern world. I grew up caught between space-age dreams and the last gasp of hippy culture where the main BBC news moved from reports of IRA bombs to reports of UFOs or poltergeists. Where documentaries about ancient aliens or witchcraft were shown on prime-time without sneering. The 70s were a high-water mark for weirdness. A strange, febrile time to be a child exposed to the psychic chaff of the mass media.
Hookland is also creating a haunted space that anyone could play in. As authors, we often create spaces where we want others to feel they have lived, but then deny them permission to stay. Permission to build and explore in their own way. It is an open, shared universe to explore those connections between place and our sometimes forgotten myth-circuits.
Ghostwoods Books plans to publish at least one of the Hookland books currently in the works.
About the author:
David Southwell is an Essex boy, word spiv and landscape punk. He works as photographer, folklorist and curator for the Hookland Museum of Curiosities. A reformed author of bad books, he now follows the advice given to him by J.G. Ballard to: ‘Concentrate on place, nothing without a sense of it is ever any good.’ You can often find him talking about Albionic ghost soil at literary festivals and art galleries.
Find more Hookland on Twitter at @HooklandGuide. Follow David at @cultauthor.
