Taken from Not Quite Lost: Travels Without a Sense of Direction by Roz Morris

I’d spent too many hours at the wheel, racing the December dusk to get to our destination before darkness fell. Too many hours scrutinising every junction, traffic lane and sign, of passing through new places and barely seeing them. Now, at last, we were here. While Dave unpacked the car, I stood in the chilly twilight and finally looked at where I was.

An ornamental folly built in the 1740s; our home for the week. It resembled a miniature chateau, with tall windows, classical pediments and a roof like the lid of a square teapot. Behind was the darkening hulk of a wood. And just beyond, which I didn’t expect at all, an enormous power station, softening into the fog. A boiler chimney stitched with a line of twinkling red lights. A row of cooling towers blooming steam into the sunset. It was so close it dwarfed the house. Yet it was completely soundless.

Dave pulled me into the house. “Come on. Let’s get in. We can look at that tomorrow.”

Tomorrow came. I bounded out of bed, eager to see our new world in daylight. And to check this spellbinding structure that hung outside in perfect silence.

I opened the shutters and saw the thickest cotton-wool mist. As if something had breathed hard on all the windows. A skinny winter tree managed to make itself seen, but beyond that there was nothing but white. There was no trace of the power station, not even its twinkling lights.

The mist receded hour by hour. It revealed a rolling sweep of meadow, sloping steeply down to a river. The power station was far away on a bend. It wasn’t close at all. The previous night it had seemed huge, like a galleon berthed right behind us in the woods. I was convinced we were mere yards from the foot of the cooling towers. But now the fog had cleared, it was several miles down the river and would barely dwarf my thumb.

We established a routine. Out early for exploring, walking and shopping, then return mid-afternoon for tea on the lawn as dusk fell, watching the power station do its thing in the distance. One day we came back to find it was dormant. Usually smoke and steam rose steadily from all its openings. But at three on a sunny Sunday afternoon, it was dozing. Just a faint puff from the main chimney and hardly a wisp from the cooling towers. We made a cup of tea and continued to watch. As we did, the smoke from the main stack began to thicken. Two of the cooling towers began to mist. We were witnessing it fire up as the world came home and put the kettle on. Sitting outside our 1740s chateau like time travellers, watching the rhythms of the 21^st century.

Still, I puzzled about that first looming glimpse. Especially returning from the bathroom in the middle of the night, half in a dream. The bathroom was downstairs and we left a lamp on so we didn’t grope and crash around. Coming back up the stairs, a trick of the light meant you’d see your shadow growing gigantic on the bedroom door. Was that it? Had I read somewhere about fog having a mysterious magnifying quality? If so, where had I read it? Was it in a sensible work of fact or the Hound of the Baskervilles? Or did my brain play tricks in those first moments of arrival, unplugging from the hypervigilance of driving, the luxury of finally being able to stop and look? Wow – there’s the house. Wow – there’s a power station. Every day I checked for it, never quite believing it would not be giant again.  

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Roz Morris is a novelist, book doctor, and writing teacher, and has sold 4 million books as a ghostwriter. In her first collection of essays, Not Quite Lost: Travels Without a Sense of Direction (Spark Furnace), travel writing intersects with memoir. Morris visits off-the-beaten-track spots, mostly dwellings in rural England such as architectural follies, medieval gatehouses, and a leaky stone fort built to thwart foreign invasion. She has a weakness for houses that are unfinished or have a mystery about them. She has two novels, My Memories of a Future Life and Lifeform Three (longlisted for the World Fantasy Award) and a series for writers, Nail Your Novel. She teaches novel-writing masterclasses for The Guardian.