They've stood watch over the flat, rich farmland of the Thames Valley for decades. Almost a lifetime. Most of my lifetime.
I've moved on, but I visit them sometimes. Still standing. Guarding. Watching. Providing.
They are pylons. Electricity pylons. Majestic pylons.
I watched them being built.
By ant-like men. Huge giants, built by miniature men.
Men who made giants.
They're still there. They re-assure me. They're a constant, a link, an anchor. Whatever happens to me, they stand. They watch. They guard my childhood freedom by showing me pictures. Pictures of a small sun-dazzled boy following cow tracks across green water meadows. Now and then he pauses to shoot Hopalong Cassidy bullets into the sky, and the sky throws them back.
More pictures.
The same boy has dirt on his shirt as he lays belly down on the banks of gravel-bedded watercress streams, keeping tabs on mallards, coots and moorhens building nests of reeds on the crystal clear water where they will raise flotillas of fluffy fledglings. .
The boy is not alone.
Flashes of iridescent blue and green betray the presence of birds and insects, Admirals and Emperors, Kings and Dragons. Theirs is another dimensions where time moves at a different pace, yet all of us tied to the rhythm of the year.
In mine it was all new and full of discoveries; discoveries which frustratingly revealed yet more mysteries. I didn't know then that this was the powerhouse.
In my world the sun shone hot.
The snow fell feet deep.
And the rain swelled the stream.
A new world called reality lurked around the corner, waiting to shatter my life.
But today the sun was warm upon my back.
The pylons shimmer in the heat haze which is hovering across the meadows.
And the cables crackle with power.
