Friday, May 1

Last night I dreamt I went to Minchery again

‘We can never go back, that much is certain. The past is still too close to us.’

- Rebecca

Last night I dreamt I went to Minchery again. It seemed to me, as I stood in front of the locked gates to the ground, that I could not enter, for the way was barred to me. Then, like all dreamers, I was possessed of a sudden with supernatural powers and passed like a spirit through the barrier before me.

The passage closed around me, cloistering me from the moonlight as it once had the sunlight, the air inside cooler and still. The blotched and stained concrete echoed slightly to my soft steps as I followed the way round to the left, past the shelves now empty of wrappers and bottles. Darkened doorways to booths and toilets and shuttered refreshment bars bore silent witness to my passage. The breeze blocks and sandy cement felt rough to the touch as ever, cold under my fingers. Signs that once guided now seemed to loom over me, their intentions redundant and unclear. I hurried through the shadows toward the pool of moonlight in front of me.

And then I turned to my right, and there was the pitch - our pitch - silent and suggestive as it had always been. A torn square of blue paper, missed by the groundstaff, scuttled past my feet, blown by a sudden breath of wind, and made for the darkened grass.

Moonlight can play odd tricks upon the fancy, even upon a dreamer’s fancy. As I stood there, hushed and still, I could swear that the ground was not empty, but lived and breathed as it had lived before. A slight sigh of wind ruffled the grass, and I saw the forms so familiar to me, in formation to take a free kick from the corner. The wind seemed to collect as a voice that cried out to them. A figure drove the ball low across the box, a foot connected with it, and it flew through a crowd and into the back of the goal. Figures wheeled away, seeming to revel in a sense of invincibility, others rushed to collect the ball, and from the privileged position of the dreamer, I saw the inexorable momentum of inevitable victory, certain as it had been many times before.

A cloud, hitherto unseen, came upon the moon, and hovered an instant like a dark hand before a face. The illusion went with it, and the figures disappeared. I looked upon a desolate shell, soulless at last, unhaunted, with no whisper of the past about its staring terraces.

[Some editorialisation that we usually try to avoid too much of:

For this piece we borrowed from our ‘inspiration’ even more so than usual, so if you liked some of that, you can probably be sure it was lifted pretty much straight from
Rebecca, and we should make the debt to Daphne du Maurier even more explicit than we usually do for writers we use. It’s the close season: why not
read or watch her story? It’s a dark, thrilling, some might even argue modernist, take on the romantic novel. And it seems appropriate to end our coverage for this season on a dark note for a romantic story, because that’s what we just witnessed. There is one more thing we might post here, but to be honest, the ending of the above piece reflects the way we feel right now: those of us who have followed this unlikely story through the season have been robbed of the chance to see if the most romantic of endings might yet have come about.

And the past is too close to us.

So, we’ll see you all
at Court Place Farm again in a few months no doubt. The blog was intended as a one-season experiment. What was planned isn’t quite what we ended up doing, but we’ve enjoyed it, and so long as we feel we’re not repeating ourselves, there’ll be more. In the meantime, we’ll be making a few cosmetic changes over the summer, but mainly spending our time hoping to read and see interesting things. If you fancy doing the same and would like some ideas, then anything you’ve read on here and liked over the season was inspired by/pilfered from somewhere – search for the title after the quote at the start of the piece, or follow the links to our sources for the art.]