Carrying a Jack in the Green in what is arguably the biggest May Day celebration in the UK.

This may need a little more exposition.

My hometown of Hastings on the Sussex coast has what is arguably the biggest traditional May Day celebration in the UK.

Hastings Traditional Jack in the Green takes place every early May Day weekend and sees a seven foot tall conical tower of leaves - The Jack - being processed through the old fishing quarters of the town before being led up to a steep hill overlooking the sea where it is slain to release the spirit of summer as the gathered, fervent, crowds take home leaves from him as symbols of luck and fertility.

I have been one of the bogies - green men who carry and look after the Jack in his journey through the streets of the old fishing quarter, for more than 30 years.

It involves being with The Jack from the moment he is released from the Fishermen’s Museum in the morning to when he is ceremonially slain on a hill overlooking the sea in the afternoon.

Each year I rise early in the morning on the day of the procession and each year, without fail, I am filled with dread at the idea of carrying him - essentially becoming him.

Often I feel I just want to return to my bed.

Yet as soon as the green face paint is applied in that early light, the green, leafy, rag suit pulled on and an ivy wreath placed on my head, I become somehow energised and ready.

I feel possessed by something that is much older and larger than me. There is essentially something flowing through me that feels wild and ancient.

The nature writer Robert McFarlane described one of his deep encounters with the force of nature - ‘As if I am being slowly flooded from within’.

Exactly that - it is a transformation that can only take place at this point of the year. A sudden becoming. Nothing you could ever deny.

Beltane is a familiar way-marker of the year which always feels strange.

A time of transition.

In an intangible way it is like shedding everything, becoming a proverbial force of nature.

You lose yourself in that moment, relinquish identity, become one with all things.

It is that raw unbridled energy your mind fears as you attempt to sleep, that heightens when you first awake.

You are exposed to the day, naked to potential, set to harness some uncontrollable energy.

It breaks over you like a relentless flood.

History does not serve you well in carrying the Jack. Past experience is not carried forward. It always feels like the first time. A perpetual virgin in trance to the intangible energy that has somehow carried me through 35 years of this.

Yet somehow, against the odds, I always triumph, emerge exultant, weary and tearful, just happy to have played my part and survived the day with all its chaotic energy, wild madness and shining greenery.

I may, or may not report here later on how it all went

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Set in Dublin on one day in June 1904 it centres on the lives of three people, Stephan Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and Molly Bloom.

My bench mark to acclimatise to a book these days is 50 pages. I was wrong-footed and left floundering by the first five of Ulysses but totally submerged after 20. I had 100 pages in the bag after one day.
So first thoughts and perceptions -
The writing is visceral and elemental. I Love the melding of words to form new phrases, the word-play: Brightwindbridled; Bigdrumming; Ghostcandled.

The second chapter with the introduction of another key character Bloom, is an intense and unrelenting staccato torrent of observations, images and immediate sensations.
It’s a blaring cacophony. I like the way Joyce employs all the senses, touch, sight smell, sounds. The writing is rooted in the subjective nature of time and consciousness.

Going forward on this strange,

compulsive journey, and with many more pages to go, I sense it’s going to be a wild ride. I am buckled in for the rest. Expect more here from time to time as the book unfolds.

Rousing himself, he walks on stiff limbs, to the door of the room and dream-walks out into uncertainty.

His mind scrabbles for the familiar, fails to gain any foothold.

The corridor, with its worn carpet, lined with blank doors, creates it’s own unfathomable mystery.

Continuing on, he encounters an elegant, sweeping staircase.

Following it to the ground floor, he becomes aware of beautiful glass chandeliers blossoming above him - unexpected flowers of dead light.

And suddenly he finds himself submerged.

Walls are lined with upward facing Art Deco fan lights in frosted sea green and drowned blue glass.

Elaborate floor tile mosaics in the Classical Greek mode depict mermaids, sea nymphs, mythical creatures.

A brilliant circular gold and black section pierces the blue and sea-green turns out to be the baleful, staring eye of a kraken.

Tarnished, silvered,

mirrors have elaborate gold leaf frames, carved to depict shells and seahorses.

Even the fading carpets bear designs that look like the gently swaying fronds of anemones.

He was, he quickly realised, in a deserted and long abandoned hotel of considerable grandeur.

Everything breathed desolation and past opulence.

The whole space was a dream of the past that had expired yet somehow still remained. An act of defiance.

It was as though the hotel, with all its aquatic imagery, was determined to find the sea that lapped at its doors, submerse itself beneath those waves.

Then I came to realise there is also much to be gained from sitting in the same spot, whether that be on the seafront overlooking the shore or in a local park or gardens.

By repeatedly sitting in one space, you are occupying all spaces.

Each time you return to the chosen spot, it is never the same. Everything shifts around you constantly and the best way to perceive that is to become a fixed point.

When you are sitting still, simply being and seeing, time coagulates around you.

There is a strange intensity in this.

You exist in the moment, become aware of cloud patterns, wind direction, the nature of shadows and certain light that moment by moment is changing and transforming.

Everything is flux and mutability.

You can breathe all this in, take everything from it. Note it all down.

Record clouds, light, every observation. Feed into that how it makes you feel at any moment. Everything is valid and worth recording.

The simple act of responding to what is around you can generate feelings and words.

This type of writing does not require any context.

What you produce can reliably be fed back into any number of future writing.

Essentially, what you are doing is harvesting raw material from what you see and perceive in a moment while occupying a single space.

It’s about slowing things down. Observing every shift and nuance.

Trust me. Things will blossom from this repetition.

In this way, you sit still, with an open and perceptive mind, and things will inevitably come to you.

When you consider solitude, there is never emptiness, but a subliminal force that is always there and demands attention.

We are never truly alone but at the mercy of the swirling forces of the universe, manifesting in transient clouds, shifting light.

We are held captive by what we see and need to embrace it.

The room unfamiliar. He struggles to recall preceding events, memory has been subsumed - no longer available to him.

The room reminds him of nothing. He knows it is a room only because of the crowding dimensions of floor, ceiling, walls.

For a while he lays motionless, gazing up at a frozen garden of plaster roses, watching dust motes scale pale ladders of dirty light.

He hears the wind gusting outside.

On the wall a clock, the hands on its blank face have not moved since he woke.

In this way he enters, half blind into a new state of being where memory struggles to gain a finger-hold.

Beyond the room is the restless motion of the sea.

He crosses to the window, which stretches from floor to ceiling, a translucent ghost, framed by the decaying threads of a faded gold curtain. Sills piled thick with dust, deep with the fragile husks of long dead insects.

Below, the beach is precipice, stones spilling down to a colourless sea. What is this place?

He is suddenly aware of a tremendous absence, like an encroaching tide expiring into a hushed susurration of anticipation.

In a deep wooden wardrobe he finds neatly folded clothes. They are plain and unfamiliar but seem to fit.

Overwhelmed by a sudden heavy sensation of nausea and tiredness he returns to the bed stretching out above the covers in his newly acquired clothes, allowing the sound of the wind, of water caressing stones, to carry him to that strange hypnotic half-state, somewhere between sleep and waking

This is an extract from an ongoing work where I undertake a psychogeographic journey exploring Hastings, the coastal town in Sussex where I was born.

Miniature steam trains cross the tracks of my childhood. Locomotives, carmine red, sunburst yellow - all sleek gloss enamel, polished brass, shrouded in rising smoke.

I watched them pass, boarded occasionally. Being within them never had the same thrill as watching from close distance. The slow flash of colour, the excitement of flaring light, blank faces paling in a procession of painted wood carriages.

I loved those maternal excursions to the seashore railway, always uncertain of what locomotive colour I would encounter on any given day. Those particular colours still buried in my head. I can summon them at will, reach out to touch them, even though they have slid out of existence. An arbitrary act of conjuration.

And in that way the past flows through you, finding its own way, exposing undisclosed veins of memory. Reality is what you recall. What you cannot quite remember is destined to haunt you forever. It tugs at your mind like a wind blowing in fast from the sea.

Beyond these half occluded memories, unhulled boats still haunt the shore. A tide of hag stones possess the coast-line curve. The ritual has long since been enacted, the spell summoned. Conjuration is strong. You can never leave. The salt air you breathe anchors you. You will rust here like the chains and bulldozers on the beach.

Ghost sails haunt the shoreline - long gone luggers with torn, dispossessed sails.

Even the fish have gone now, moved to better waters. Boats that put to sea only ensnare the past in their nets, dredge up rusted mines or rumours best laid to rest.

The sky is judgemental, we can expect nothing less. Weather contorts, smiles and scowls. It knows I am washed up here.

One of my reading goals for this year was to explore classics that had somehow slipped through the net.

Among these is To The Lighthouse. I have read every other work by Woolf, but strangely had never got round to her most talked about book. Here are my thoughts and impressions.

It is a novel that not only charts human interactions but burrows deep beneath to explore the fears, anxieties and hopes that burn steadily within us. The whole book is a sustained, poetic howl of anguish.

The formality of a long, drawn-out dinner party, where every social nuance and reaction is examined in forensic detail. The impossibly fast thoughts and random tics of the inner mind. She traces the untraceable, breathing substance into the abstract. Colliding thoughts and emotions flare up the die in a heartbeat.

The second part of the book breaks like a wave, soars into poetic reverie, literally taking flight like a seabird. It extends and distorts time. The writing goes deep, penetrating the soul. Woolf pulls off the seemingly impossible capturing the human condition and emotions in the reflection of a dew drop on a blade of grass.

This is transcendental writing, spectral yet piercingly real. It is a master class on how to convey the nuance and essence of raw emotion. The heart is concealed and laid bear at the same time. It captures the turmoil and intensity of life. Sadness, despair and wild hope is breathed out in every sentence.

It is also an exploration of the difference between those who give and those who take, albeit sometimes unwittingly.

Woolf is buried deep in archetypes - sea, moon, sun, light, darkness, the unpredictable beauty of nature. Yet she imparts this with an incredible sleight of hand, a feminine steely softness and insight. The book could not have been conceived or written by anyone else but her. A force of nature, whose energy, like a wave, continues to flow through and beyond us.

It is a book that subtly shows you new ways of perceiving life, that ultimately redefines you as a reader.

Woolf was always pure poetry, energy and movement, unrelenting like a river. She met her tragic and poetic end in an actual river, the Ouse in Sussex, close to her home and perhaps 30 miles from where I sit writing this. She filled her coat pocket with stones before giving herself to the flow, allowing the current to carry her toward the sea - toward the lighthouse.

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