Lamp posts…

Sometimes something, usually something very ordinary and usual, will catch my eye and my imagination, and take me to another place.

Lamp posts on the seafront at Pwllheli - dozens of them, far too many of them, too close together to be just for lighting, much too tall, ornate in a not-quite-antique sort of way. Just lamp posts on the sea front at Pwllheli, but here I go…

What if there were a steam train puffing through the sky between them, or a bowler-hatted man with an umbrella standing atop each one? What if an impossibly long spindle-legged, skeletal, flare-nosed, snorting, horse reared in the background? What if a winged boat full of strange creatures floated high in the air above the clouds weaved their way down and through the lamp posts like a celestial obstacle course?

Magritte, Dali, Breugel.

We are on the edges of the surreal all of the time. The surreal sits on the fringes of our normal, waiting to slip into our world like those children who slipped through that ordinary wardrobe into Narnia – or at least it does for me. I wonder what would happen if I let it in?

Narnia - now where did that come from? Ah! Maybe that explains the lamp posts.