Most days, when I’m not at work, I take the dog for a walk, and most of the time we go to the same place, which is some woods near us. I’ve written about them before – I like walking in woods, the dog likes having lots of space to run around and bark at squirrels, and they are full of intriguing military wreckage.

A couple of weeks ago I suddenly stopped in my tracks. Following a path through the trees that I follow every single time I go there – let’s say every other day of my life, on average – I saw something I had never noticed before. Can you see it?

About fifteen feet to the left of me, fifteen feet away from a place I walk over a hundred times a year with my eyes wide open, was something I had literally never seen before. A whacking great big concrete pylon.

You literally can’t miss it. It’s huge. I suppose it’s the same colour as a tree and about the same size as the tree trunks around here, but even so, I might miss it once but I don’t see how I’ve missed it every day since 2023.

It looks like it’s been there for decades. It looks like something from the 1940s that’s been disused since before I was born, slowly being forgotten in the depths of the woods.

But I can’t help wondering if that’s true. Has it really been there all along? Or has someone just put it there in the last month or so? Are they trying to mess with my head? Is it me they’re targeting? Is this something I have genuinely never noticed in all this time? Can it be true? Am I losing my mind?