Fog becomes a blue-grey blanket that folds you into itself and allows a few moments of a waking dream when anything could happen.
I stopped and stood on the river track earlier this week to drink in the silence and savour a fleeting feeling of belonging to the circle of solid air and dripping trees.
I felt I was the only person in the world at that moment, which was comforting and troubling in equal measure.
Even Dezzy, the infinite battery dog, stopped snuffling in the long grass and looked up at me with two quizzical, pleading eyes.
C’mon there’s nothing to see here, let’s keep going. There are new smells over there, I just know it, he pleaded.
I used my Star Trek Vulcan language decoder to tell him there’s plenty to see, just get your nose off the ground and look.
Things were close and far away at the same time.
But Dez was right about one thing: I could see nothing beyond the trees in front of me, so I stood in the stillness swaying slightly like a ragged sapling waiting for life to begin.
The mute shroud surrounding me was punctured by the occasional soft chime of a bird somewhere far away. I hear it every morning.
But this morning it sounded different. It was like a bell in cotton wool.
I don’t think I’m a depressive sort, but I do like to stand inside these moments as they present themselves.
It’s not often you can be still enough in the day to sort through the tangle of worries we all live with, rather than toss them against the ceiling at three in the morning when everything seems so bleak.
So I stood for a while in the chiming grey forest and thought about what’s brought me and all of us to this point in time right here, right now.
I thought about all the people who are so unhappy with their lot in life, they are prepared to hand over control of their destiny to fools and charlatans.
I thought about the deep and ultimately unknowable world around me at this moment in this forest being reduced to an AI slogan like Dig Baby Dig or Australians First or Shut the Door.
I thought about that time we left London on a foggy -10℃ February night with our son in a carrycot strapped to the bulkhead of a long-distance jet liner and a suitcase full of hope, and getting off the other end in 35℃ and going to a barbecue and being told welcome with a beer and a fly swat because that’s what you do in Australia. If you’re white.
Suddenly, something moved on the other side of the river.
A small dark shape lurched along a track through the fog.
Dezzy pulled on his lead, so it was definitely real.
Was it a border guard?
No, it was just a wallaby making use of the grey blanket to grab the last few green shoots before the morning light exposed its suspicious nocturnal wanderings.
Later, the fog lifted, and a sliver of blue sky appeared.
It was going to be a beautiful day.
John Lewis is a former journalist at The News.
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