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Note on Copstone Hall.  

Near where I live there used to be a manor called Copt Hall. I’ve changed this to Copstone Hall because I like the new sound. I imagine the ghostly shape of this mansion; it is watched, under starlight, by night creatures and the dead. I ask what they divine of past inhabitants. (Presumably little.) In the ‘Mind turns’ section I conjure up my own past: Portsmouth Harbour; sex after dance-halls against beach walls; mind-altering books from second-hand bookshops. In the last part, as I write now in my comfortable kitchen, I wonder what future creatures might guess about me from looking at my house. Also presumably little, except that I have spoken, rather too revealingly of ‘vanity and waste’.

Alan Marshfield

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