On a walk to the exhibition, William Blake in Sussex: Visions of Albion.

Start at the railway station, Pulborough. (Let the train go on to London, without you). This is off The Downs, off the chalk, in a dip, but the Downs stalk alongside. The way leads you over suburban metalled and gravelled paths, then red-green sand, wet meadow, sand again.

Copses where the beech trees have grown free of the serfdom of crop and cut, crop and cut. Pines trees tall and straight like retired officers (whose hearts are in the Highlands, but who look south, seaward). A dull regimented wood where the art of murder is declaimed by cages and barrels and the odds and sods of shooting. A pheasant clacks and belches erratically into the air, then slumps into cover, relieved.

Halt at a church. A high saddleback tower, three tiers of undecorated Norman windows. A yew is black with age. They say that one of the names on the war memorial (of those who didn’t come back from Flanders) is the same as one who fought with Charlemagne. This is a land of names, houses, manors.

The Big House, Petworth: Fuck — the ladies, officious, said I was too late, the gallery’s closed.  They’re in charge. At The Angel, Angel Street, a local says, in parenthesis,  — oh dear, they are not very — a pause for words —  community-minded. I open Blake at: I have always found that Angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the only wise.

I thought he meant them, the guardian angels of our culture. But the next day I got a phone call — you can come back another time, free. Perhaps he had me in mind, after all.

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