Lady, That’s My Skull (Terrae)

[Alan Moore]
November 1997, and the cue-arm of the century jumps in its lead-out groove. The old Dutch called it 'slachtmaand', slaughter month. You wouldn't send a dog out on a night like this.

The Highbury job appeared straightforward; one more metropolitan collapsar faced with Dreamtime relegation; the whole postal district bleaching out, charisma-challenged, one more municipal flatline seeking voodoo CPR. It's common nowadays.

The calendar gets ready to ejaculate a string of zeros, and our map is bed-soiled in the premature congratulation. Brute thermodynamics kicks in, and the meaning bleeds away into hard vacuum. All the hot-spots cool down, mammal lights smearing on the surveillance camera.

This where we come in: think of us as Rosicrucian heating engineers. We check the pressure in the song-lines, lag etheric channels, and rewire the glamour. Cowboy occultism; cash-in-hand Feng Shui.

First you diagnose the area in question, read the street-plan's accidental creases, and decode the orbit-maps left there by coffee cups, then go to work. Slap up a wall of ectoplasm, standard Moon and Serpent contract. Tables tilted while you wait, Manifestations 'R' Us. Money for old brimstone.

Obviously, this was before we'd seen the patient. Highbury wasn't at Death's door, it was halfway down Death's passage, hanging up its coat. An antidote-free zone. No serial murderers, no ghosts, it didn't even merit bold type in the A to Z. You might as well be on the moon.

Highbury was amnesiac, whole sections of its past were blank, a geriatric out on day-release and lost somewhere on the Victoria line, only identifiable by dental records, Iron-age crusts, a Saxon bone or two. Originally a Roman summer garrison, the area gets a walk on in the Domesday Book as 'Tolentone', the higher town. The 1600s find the site of one of London's designated pleasure hills, a place where Samuel Pepys could blow tobacco snots upon the cobbles.

Come the nineteenth century's end, the carnival is shut down, following complaints from neighbours. One of London's sexual organs is made flaccid. All the tantric energy moves on, leaves an exhausted absence in its wake, a drained erotic void safe for the middle class.

By 1892 the area's a byword for monotony, a steampunk Neasden. George and Weedon Grossmith set 'The Diary of a Nobody' within the area, with their protagonist, Charles Pooter, settled comfortably at Brickfield Terrace, Holloway, within the suburbs of oblivion.

To make things worse, the whole place is alive with Germans. Writing in 1915 Thomas Burke sets up as an early Euro-sceptic. Quote:

[Moore portraying Thomas Burke]
The Highbury region certainly has everything germanically oppressive: mist, large women, lager and leberwurst, a moral atmosphere of the week before last, and the physical sensation of an undigested sausage.

[Alan Moore]
Unquote. Highbury does not come recommended, will take hardboiled psychogeography to penetrate. Best start with the foundations. Subterrania gargling in the lower reaches of imagination. When we excavate the place, we excavate ourselves. The inside is the outside. These steam-flooded tunnels, rising up about us—lady, that's my skull!