Yesterday’s sleep was fitful. I awoke rather early – soon before 5am. On my way down the stairs to the bathroom I looked out of the small window out onto the street and saw what I took to be at first glance a ghost. A figure of a man standing squarely looking at our house. I’d like to try to describe the feeling of thinking he was a ghost. It was a mixture of delight and horror. He was a big chap, tall, well-built and yet on the first glance he seemed weightless and like a relief stuck onto the flat plane that was the street scene. The street lighting at that time of night rendered everything pale orange and he was part of and yet distinct from everything around him, also coloured pale orange. [on reading through this account, I find myself trying to remember if any shadows were to be seen in this light, if everything was as flat as my memory tells me it was. Excited that I was seeing a ghost I retracted my foot from completing its action and continuing to step down to the next tread and stopped on the stair where I could best see out of the window. Even now I am amazed that I made that very quick decision to look at the figure given that, were it a ghost, that would seem terrifying to me. Curiosity and the need to disbelieve any ghostly possibilities were what made me stop to look again. When I did I saw his figure continue to stand, feet slightly apart, face on to the façade of our house but then his head inclined slightly and I saw that his left hand was attached by a lead to a small, dark dog. He was just a man out walking his dog in the early hours. One reason I had seen him as a ghost is that he had been filling the frame in which I am used to looking in anticipation of seeing a ghost. When I get up in this way to visit the bathroom early morning, I usually look out of this window to the street and beyond, across and over the flint wall, searching the view to see if there are any ghosts abroad. This mainly since S. told me that one day he had seen three nuns float along near one of the buildings then disappear into a wall. As he told me this story of his experience I felt the pleasurable tingling in the back of my neck, which is where my friend J. who is a Shaman and can see the dead, says they enter and leave the body through a kind of trap door. She is very matter of fact about this. So matter of fact that I sometimes think it rather a pity that her extraordinary abilities inhabit such an ordinary place in her own account to herself about what she gets to experience by dint of whatever particular gift she possesses.

The man tugged slightly on the lead to encourage his dog to start walking again and they both turned on their heels and headed up to the top of the street by which time I had lost interest in them both, the tingling had ended and I reached the bathroom door.

I must draw him as I saw him as a ghost and try to convey both his solidity and flatness in that pale orange light. How he seemed like a relief (as in solid within a plane). How his figure asserted itself within the frame of my expectant looking. How the expecting to see something plays such a part in the conjuring of ghosts.