I wouldn't sail this ship if I were you
1. The ruins of an old coach house, it must have been miles from anywhere. There are trees growing through the windows and the roof is long gone. Everything is covered in moss.
2. A pile of mouldering pornography in a bush; it must be a remnant of the days when there was always a pile of mouldering pornography in a bush, as if that was how pornography came into being in the days before the internet.
3. A tangled thicket of dead branches and brambles. There is a nest of some sort at the other end, I think; it is impossibly large, as if it were a nest for a family of humans. But there is some kind of hair inside. There is no getting through the thicket to find out. The woods on the other side are their own place and cannot be reached without a machete; they stretch all the way to the mountains, even though this wood is bounded on every side by housing estates.
4. A winding path that leads down to a swampy valley, all yellow grass and mosquitoes. There is a small pond on the far side, unreachable without waders. Something white is moving in the rushes.
5. A den of numbers, newly hatched and wriggling. This is where they come from and where they grow alone, before they migrate to universities to perform elegant mating dances in a variety of exotic equations. Out here they are wild and you cannot be sure of adding them correctly. Sometimes they line up in the wrong order. I myself have been bitten by a particularly malevolent three.
6. Some actors. They are lost, and looking for the path. They are at pains to inform you that they are not performing a Midsummer Night’s Dream, although isn’t it funny that it’s turned out like this, ha ha. Not that one would be making love in these woods anyway. They are too damp. It is only a short way to the main road, from which it is twenty minutes’ brisk walk to the high school where they are performing.
7. There is a place where the morning mist lies heavy on the ground, beside a little stream. The first golden light of sunrise turns it all to sparkles and dew. The air is suddenly curiously warm and heady, even though everything is outlined in damp spiderwebs. Something large drops into the water, but one cannot see what.
8. There is an old tree, maybe it has been here for the full nine hundred years of an ancient oak’s age. It is split and hollow and surrounded by a crown of rotting branches. Inside, there is a hole leading down into the ground like a bottomless pit, scratched on all sides by the graffittied names of teenagers who must have slid down into its comforting embrace and ended up somewhere else.
