Okay, so I did it.
Now stop! Pack the fucker in, desist, abstain from further inflictions of this particular fetish of yours, as you know not what you do.
Mazes, you have to do them, and then you dream about them, you become the rat peered at and judged and then you remember being the umbrella man, separated from your family by willful children scuttling off, and you weren’t feeling well, some low level virus thingy (well before covid before you start), with hayfever and a hangover thrown in, and Longleat Maze.
Longleat maze has bridges and a tower near the exit where you can get your bearings and look for the wayward and the lost, me in my fugue becoming that figure, hearing my family and friends calling over the 8-foot-tall Yew hedges and holding up my brolly after an hour stumbling dazed and confused through the labyrinthian 2 miles. It’s an old English word maze that translates as delirium and that has never been so appropriate as that day.
All children are bastards, I should know, I was one, and there were many there that day above and beyond my own, clustered on the various bridges and sallying forth to peer at the English Theseus, calling out both wrong and proper directions to the effect where none could be trusted.
Physically I am safe now, this I know, but when darkness seals the gates and all infants are tucked in bed, still a parasol bobs along through that living warren, the other Umbrella man the one that wasn’t saved and still wanders the twisted caverns of my mind.