Recursive Recession

I bring things home with me to the fens. Sometimes like treasures to be stored away, sometimes to be slaughtered like rats and tossed in the deep, hungry ditches.

After my quite possibly sleep-derived ramblings about recession I returned from the dust of the desert to the frosted fens, armed with my new theory of the toning of the low sun lying sideways, I watched the sun rise. It came up behind a low hill on the edge of the Isle. Beyond the hill, to the right, the flatlands graded away into the distance and I saw two things. One was the endless shading of the recession, lone tree after lone tree, low hedges and the occasional church spire, rolling miles away across the fens. Each lit by the morning sun. Each a shade darker than the other. I expected that the tone of a single tree would not shift its shade as a mountain would, but they did. The trees and hedges stood in fields stained white with ice and the reflections of the sideways sun graded them individually in a very subtle way. The air was so cold and so dry, and the light so clear and so brilliant, and the thinnest layer of mist over each field, reflected the sun into their faces, so that the trees stepped back to the horizon in an almost infinite regression. All of that, I noticed, was the colour of Old Vegas. Neon. Red-orange lit by a sun appropriately the colour of brilliant helium.