I was making a 16mm short film on the island of Stromboli. Suddenly someone rushed up to me and warned me that there was an imminent ferry strike and if I didn’t want to be stuck on there forever I better get the next boat leaving in an hour. Had I really thought about it, being stuck on Stromboli forever might not have been too unpleasant but I panicked onto the ferry and found myself in Palermo with some time to go before my flight from Naples. So I thought , I’ll go and find Aleister Crowley’s Abbey of Thelma at Cefalu.

I arrived in Cefalu on a blistering hot day. I spotted a taxi driver and I think he thought Aleister Crowley was a pensioni but another car pulled up as if the driver had spotted my long hair and knew exactly where I was going. Not long after I found myself left on a small lane in the Santa Barbara area…in a scrub of villas and more scrub overlooked by a big rocky outcrop…..The sound of the cicadas was like Tinnitus. I was thirsty. I wondered where the spring was that poisoned Raoul Loveday, one of Crowley’s acolytes. I had no idea where the villa was except this was the region. I was just in the mood for the sight of a woman dressed all in black, and there was a woman dressed entirely in black coming along the road. Feeling like a complete idiot I said, “Dove Villa Aleister Crowley?”

She looked at me as only women dressed all in black can and said, shaking her head,” No , no molti pericoloso”!

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It’s a bright September day and I have decided to find some remnants of Austin Osman Spare’s life in London. I start at Smithfields Meat Market. He lived beside it till he was  7. The ice house of the fish market has a veil of green shrouding it. Cock Lane, Giltspur St, good solid street names shiny as brass. I go to the church of St Stephen’s Sepulchre nearby whose tower rises beyond a solid mass of scaffolding. Spare went to a school in its shadow. When you are a child you look at small insignificant things with such sharpness. In my case I could stare at a carpet and see animals in the patterns or spend forever examining a Tarantula fixed in a block of perspex or contemplate the islands of damp on a playgrounds tarmac. Did Spare stand and gaze at the pinnacles of the church impaling clouds or notice how the light glittered on the stained glass windows in the afternoon sunshine? Did he have a whipping top and start making patterns of chalk on it?  It was a world bristling with railings and spikes and  patterned ironwork.

Just down the road was the police station where his father worked Over the road the Old Bailey would have been rising from the dust of Newgate prison. A tunnel once linked the church with the prison so a priest could visit the condemned discretely.

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I am stood inside the ruined abbey of Thelma at Cefalu. And there on the walls are the fragments of the paintings by Crowley. Not as much graffiti as there probably is now. People go there these days and do Facebook selfies. The roof has caved in and there’s talk of it being turned into museum. Maybe it will turn into the Bronte Parsonage. Crowley was a magnet. Fearlessness makes you charming. But Spare never became a follower.
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‘What the fuck have you done England?” I can imagine William Blake saying today, if he was stood in the middle of the Elephant and Castle maelstrom. Somewhere under all this psychic assault there is the spot where Spare had his studio, above a Woolworths store, the Woolworths of Walworth . One roll of a blue plaque will take you down Walworth Rd and spin to a halt at the library where Spare had his first exhibition. There’s been a fire and the gallery adjacent lost four of Spare’s works. That must have been a picture in itself, the flames coiling round his unearthly art.

I continue along the road. There are plenty of characters that I can imagine Spare appreciating. Spare liked the raw visage. I notice a kebab sign that exactly matches the  Shard in the distance. Spare wasn’t so much interested in cityscape and landscape as such, no ‘View of the Thames’ , no ‘View from Becket House in Tabard St’. If there are landscapes, they are the sort to be found in a cavern or while your eyes are closed in a cavern.

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I am noticing more graffiti than usual. I am reading a wonderful book by Mathew Chapman called ‘Medieval Graffiti’. Its about the little signs and marks made in churches sometimes to ward off evil or pin a demon down, even occasionally to curse. I know this will somehow work its way into the fabric of the film but I’m not sure where yet, just as the shape of the whipping top suddenly connected with the image of a bomb and got me all excited before I tucked it away in the dark to grow as ideas do like mushrooms in cellars.

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Molti Pericoloso!