TILE 20

Meandering along life's highway, with sunset not far off, I found myself wondering whether or not to divert from this pleasantly surfaced highway.

I had been having vague misgivings triggered by childhood memories of religious admonitions about the road to Hell being broad and smooth and the one to Heaven being rocky and hard to follow.

Even back then I had found this dubious, because wouldn't God be trying to encourage his people to head in his direction? These rebellious thoughts assailed me as a choirboy, innocent in appearance "looks like a little angel don't he in them robes?"

The older men were behind us in a choir stall higher than our front row one. This was so they could swat you with a hymn book accidentally on purpose when you sang "while shepherds washed their socks by night" and other peccadilloes likely to invoke the wrath of the old buggers.

We had quite a repertoire of similar malapropisms for use during service but done carefully so only the oldsters caught us at it, not the congregation or the vicar or choir master.

Once you knew them you could often pick them out even years later as an adult member of the congregation and sometimes we choirboys spotted a grin that gave away a person in the know enjoying themselves. I did once sing the wrong version one Christmas service but my wife shushed me fiercely like Queen Victoria, she was not amused.

Still musing on the wisdom of taking a diversion from this metaphorical highway, I remembered a very early example of my artwork that had caused a furore for no reason I could understand.

It was an imaginary composition that showed a road running dead centre and off into the distance. On this road was the figure of a person running. On the left of the road was a mountain path along which ran a canine figure, dog or wolf you really couldn't tell.

It was a stark picture done mainly in primary colours with a lot of black, so I suppose it could have seemed a bit gloomy. I thought it was full of promise and the roads end was a sunrise, very bright yellow against a vivid blue sky.

If this picture had any meaning at all to me, it showed a boy and possibly a future dog friend both escaping from the foreboding foreground shadow lands.

My art master not the decent human being that soon replaced him, had a bee in his bonnet about subconscious meanings and persuaded my mother that I was a troubled boy probably trying to escape from something and a potential runaway.

Well okay so home life did have its ups and downs but this idiots imaginings were completely wrong but mother brooded on them until summer holidays when she had me delivered into the bizarre world of trick cyclists (psychiatrist).

If this was an autobiographical excursion, honesty would compel me to add a few more details that would bias the reader heavily in favour of psychiatric help being indicated.

However it isn't that at all, its a glimpse into my imaginary world of Brythan and the Barrier and if that means nothing to you then you haven't been paying attention! Let me see now, I should be helpful...

ONCE UPON A TIME...

[Extract from the Elven Tome of Times. How it all began]

The island of Brythan was a part of the continental mass (now known as Europa) but when the ice age covered it in glaciers they gouged out huge channels in the sandy soils over which they lay.

Those same glaciers ruthlessly thrust aside any and all rocky outcrops that lay in their path, often transporting the most obdurate within the ice only to deposit them far from their place of origin when the ice age ended and the glaciers melted.

Thus Brythans corrugated landscape was the end result and one of the largest rocky orphans deposited far from its point of origin, now dominated the central plains of Brythan and in time would become the fortress capital city known as The Citadel.

Ironically the preceding geological activity that had created Brythans benign contours had also severed its connection to the continental mass from which it was now separated by a tapering channel running from the North at its widest to the South at its narrowest, thus creating a turbulent seaway that also channeled the warm ocean current flowing from the tropics to the polar region.

Thus this happy accident of various geological and climatic occurrences gave rise to the birth of a nation blessed with a benevolent topography and temperate climate kept aloof from exploration or invasion by the various belligerent continental tribes who had driven the fey folk almost to extinction. They had narrowly escaped the fate of their forebears by escaping to the North of Brythan where they established the Barrier which kept them safely shielded from any further assaults by the world of men.