These fenland nights are as black as a glass of Guinness. On these same nights a year ago, the skies seemed full of stars. This year the night is full of rain. Nothing is seen, everything is felt and felt in the bones. The clouds glower all day and at night they press in like blankets soaked in cold ink. The ploughed earth is fat with peat, the furrows metalled with water, the ridges like fallen drunks replete from the sodden summer. The drains are a mile across, scudding with sooty, ripped trees which roll past, sticking against the bridges which they will soon flow over. The only colour is the red and yellow of the road-closed sign afloat on the water. Dark moulds creep in from the bathroom windows. Dark mud creeps up through the grass. The sky gathers bark-like against the moon, if the moon dares show its face. The last colour of the summer sits in the trees and drips and shivvers. All other colours are lost to the earth like broken soldiers. Crows in joyous hundreds, fountain into the sky to pay homage to the ancient swamp-born beast who rises with the risen flood and finds easy prey in the agued mist.