21st Century Fog

Something evil this way comes. Or at least a strange and unseasonably foggy evening, descended from who knows where after a day of sunny interludes and mild April briskness.

I could hear the fog horns blasting from out on the shipping lanes before I even left the house and decided to deviate my dog walking route to first take in a High Street stroll. There were a few people about determined to squeeze every last second out of the last hours of the last day of the wonderful four part weekend that is Easter. A small gaggle of men in jeans and football shirts stood outside The Goat smoking and drinking cold pints of lager as their more colourfully clad girlfriends reapplied lipstick to their reflections in the curved glass window. The four men from the Turkish kebab house lounged against the fruit machine in their chefs’ whites and waved and smiled cheerily as we passed. Excellent neighbours, who have, I think, unofficially adopted Kaos as their mascot since they present me sometimes with left over meat for him to enjoy.

A bit further on and the dog stops to sniff a section of pavement with great intent. We’re in no hurry and I loiter too, reading the handwritten adverts on postcards in the window of the newsagent. A sturdy woman of about my own age passes us. She’s deep in conversation on her mobile phone and rather incongruously dressed as a school girl complete with blonde hair tied in high bunches, drawn-on freckles, short pleated gym skirt and over-knee socks. The loosely knotted tie around her neck doesn’t quite disguise the straining gapes between the buttons of her white shirt. But then maybe that’s the point.

We loop right round the High Street and reach the beach by way of the access slope next to the Catholic church. It is still light but the fog is thickening fast and I can only just make out the edge of the sea from where we are on the promenade. Rather unhelpfully, my subconscious decides to conjure up a memory of a film called The Fog. Based on James Herbert’s horror story of the same name, the finer details are lost to me except the parts that relate to long-undead sailors mysteriously coming murderously to life during, well, thick fog. This recollection is not helped by a number of spectral silhouettes that I can just make out down on one of the big sandbanks that’s been exposed by the tide. That they’re young people larking about at the water’s edge is neither here nor there.

For all it diminishes the ability to see, fog definitely enhances the sense of hearing. Although the teenagers on the sandbank are several hundred yards away from us now as we walk along, I can hear them as if they were just over my shoulder. This amplification effect is clearly also true for the dog’s hearing as his big ears keep twitching radar-like, his head turning, to find where the sound is coming from.

We walk further and leave behind the illuminated part of the promenade for the more remote section that ends at the docks. This part of the beach teems with bird life although tends to be populated only by dog walkers and fishermen in human terms so I let the dog off his lead and he charges down to the water’s edge. Splashing and crashing around in the shallows he gallops along the shingle and disappears completely some way off in the distance. The foghorns are deafening now, their regularity increasing as the weather worsens, and I – subconsciously perhaps – lengthen my stride and quicken my pace. Suddenly, the dog comes running towards me, looming out of the fog bank like some sort of demonic wolf. Just for a heartbeat I am Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes, battling for his life on the treacherous misty moors in the wonderful 1939 version of The Hound of the Baskervilles.

I call the dog to heel and he trots towards me wagging his tail, panting and wet through from the sea. I clip his lead on and we turn briskly for home. Enough imagined filmic terrors for one day I think.

Picture of Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes in 'The Hound of The Baskervilles' (1939) - 20th Century Fox