The Fourth Wall

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Two things have occurred to me since yesterday about this year's visit here. The first and most obvious is the parched and parlous state of the gardens (pictured). In the quarter of a century of holidays here, I've never seen the area so dry, and frankly, today, airless. This part of Shropshire is normally one of the greenest and lushest parts of the UK: some of the best agricultural land you'll find. At the moment, everything has been toasted crisp and dead, with almost no respite in the form of rainfall: a portent of things to come?

The other thing is more abstract and psychological in nature. We've been holidaying here on and off since 1998, and one's internal narrative is always that during one's stay, the place is somehow one's own, despite the knowledge that hundreds of other people have stayed here in that same theatrical mind-state. Yesterday, to find another family settling in somehow broke the fourth wall of that narrative, disrupting the illusory notion that we keep of the place and our relation to it. Interesting...

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