30 – What does fog make you think of?

Here's a tricky question. When I think of an answer, am I really thinking about what fog makes me think of, or am I really thinking about what this question makes me think of?

Fog makes me think of lots of things. I like to trigger all the spooky reminiscences of those stories that feature fog - The Fog, The Mist, The Others, Springheel Jack, Poe and Lovecraft stories, of saucy Jack and Victorian London - as well as the stranger than fiction (amazing real tales of mystery) stories that I used to read when I was a kid.

I remember the time we drove up to the Royalty on the Chevin for bonfire night and the fog was so thick we had to lean out of the car window to yell out where the sides of the road were. Even the bonfire was swallowed up in it, an orange glow diffusely directionless, the muffled thump of fireworks.

I think of the time our car suddenly filled up with fog as it neared a pass in the Corsican mountains.

I think of seeing the ground hundreds of feet beneath me as the fog shifted while we climbed the ridge from Tryfan to Glyder Fach.

I think of the knee-deep mist on my first walk out to the H1 particle detector in Hamburg. I think of the slight stirring of wind that drew back the curtain like a magician to reveal a fieldful of rabbits.

I think of the sea smoke on the Baltic as warm air slipped over cold clear waters, of the seaweed that swayed in the shallows like the hair of the drowned. Of the glacial stillness of that morning and the uneven dragging tracks of some creature that had pulled itself heavily, laboriously from the waters to the woods.

Of Lakeland valleys full of fog, with peaks like islands.

Of the black forest where the fog flowed downhill between the trees like water.

Of the red Devon cliffs disappearing in a fog that rolled in off the sea, when the temperature dropped 10 degrees in a minute. Of the way it snaked up the rivers and burned off the land.

Of peasoup and pollution and cloud microphysics, of condensation nucleii and aerosol loading, of radiation fogs and boundary layers. Of bokken spectres and sun haloes.

Of the muffled step, the strange intimacy of it, the scattering of distances, of what it hides, of being hidden, of the weird singularity of objects in the fog, of the feeling that you are walking off the Earth