Flags at half mast, again · Rally Mortis diary

A watercolour of a pastel seaside hotel on a wet promenade in morning rain, its flags hanging at half mast, palm trees along the front, a lighthouse on the rocks in the distance and a small black sedan parked by the kerb. — The Halfmast Hotel on a wet morning, flags lowered as usual. The lighthouse keeps watch from the far end of the front.

Nothing new went into the game today. After a busy week the build is resting, and so, in a manner of speaking, are we. A quiet day is a good day to look at what is already there, and in Port Saffron that means two buildings.

We wrote back in the summer that every town gets a few landmarks you can steer by from anywhere in it. Port Saffron has a lighthouse on the rocks at one end and the Halfmast Hotel at the other. Between them run the promenade, the sun loungers and most of your first afternoon of trouble.

Ink drawing of the Halfmast Hotel, its flags at half mast — The Halfmast Hotel in the studio notebook. The note in the margin still explains that someone always just died.

A hotel in permanent mourning

The flags on the Halfmast Hotel are always at half mast. Nobody in town asks why any more. Someone has always just died, and in a game that begins with the reading of a will, that is less a joke than a weather report.

We like the hotel because it does two jobs at once. At speed it is a marker: pastel, tall, impossible to mistake for anything else on the front. Standing still, it sets the tone. You are in a pleasant seaside resort in the summer of 1975, and the pleasant seaside resort already knows how this is going to go.

Flags: half mast
Reason: someone just died
Use: steering by

The Halfmast Hotel, in brief.

It also has its own music. On side two of the soundtrack there is a track called Halfmast, After Hours: brushes and electric piano, written for the garage, for the hour when the race is over and the dents are being counted. We played it a great deal today. It suits a quiet day rather well.

The one thing you may not hit

At the other end of the front stands the lighthouse. It is the one thing in Port Saffron nobody is allowed to drive into. Everything else on the promenade, from the bollards to the bandstand, has a line waiting for it on the statement at the end of the race. The lighthouse does not, and we intend to keep it that way for now.

Port Saffron lighthouse on the rocks — The Port Saffron lighthouse on its rocks. Still standing. Still off limits.

That restraint matters more than it sounds. A town where everything breaks soon stops feeling like a town. One building that will not move gives the rest something to be measured against, and gives you something to steer by when the rain comes in off the sea.

Do not drive into the lighthouse.

So that was the day: a hotel in mourning, a lighthouse with a clean record and a garage tune on repeat. It is pre-alpha, the sea in front of both of them is still a little too tidy, and the sun loungers have no idea what is coming. Tomorrow we go back to giving them reasons to worry.