Round a friend's house. Rain clogging up the window panes, fracturing the street outside into fluid, untrustworthy angles. Mock-Tudor building across the road. Tall streetlamps, pink-beige modern glow. Always prefer the orange lights. Seem to be phasing them out now though.
Street lamp incident. Clanging noise from the street. Look out. Big white lorry pushed up against the lamp post, now swaying and swaying. Vertiginous dance. Half expecting it to fall. Lorry drives off, and the swaying stops. Still shining out there now, still again. Won't trust walking underneath it though.
Rained all weekend, not that I particularly mind though. Rain, gloom and wind. Walking here tonight, I was fascinated by the rushing rivers in the gutters. Dams of drowned leaves. Blocked up drains. Floods stretching across roads, blossoming in nightswells.
Woke up on A's sofa at lunchtime yesterday, slightly hungover. Ale and whisky. A. snoring in bed. Sat and smoked cigarettes, watching it get dark outside. A certain sense of triumph when I saw the streetlight (orange pleasingly) scar the curtains.
Go to Tesco's. Pot noodle, the Guardian, apple juice. A. gets up when it is fully dark. He feels guilty for sleeping all day, but in a strangely gleeful way.
Inevitably, what we call 'the capsule' descends. The Capsule is one of those shared concepts that often exist between friends who have known each other a long time. Difficult to explain to anyone else, particularly as such concepts have a tendency to evolve over the years.
Christmas of 2004. I was still working at the petrol station then, and was unable to get the time off to go back to my parents. Only A. and me left in Brighton, a strangely deserted place on Christmas day, streets full of drunks and people who had nowhere to go. A bottle of Baileys, sat in A.s flat, curtains shut, telling ghost stories. Inevitable really. At some point we become aware of the atmosphere in the flat changing, becoming charged with a strange air. Felt like we had been in there forever, and that outside the flat wasn't Cromwell Road, but some bleak moorland, suburban-Carpathian landscape. Felt like the flat was becoming haunted, a capsule in the midst of a sudden mystery. Continued telling ghost stories, until I probably fell asleep on the sofa, careering toward the Boxing Day Baileys hangover.
Over the next few years the concept of the Capsule evolved. It usually occurred on a hangover, or the second day of a hangover. A. would have woken late, seen no-one, then, by the time night fell, he sould say that the Capsule had descended; a skittery, haunted feeling, like being watched. The mundane becoming different, pleasingly, disorientatingly sinister. I remember one time I met A. at his flat one evening. Much to my initial amusement, I found him crawling around the floor on his hands and knees. 'My doorbell keeps ringing!' he explained 'I think it's the TV licensing people!'. You would think, as this was not my flat, that I would find Andy's behaviour very amusing, but somehow I ended up -caught now, as I was, in the Capsule- being drawn into this strange atmosphere. We turned off the lights, convinced that the TV licensing people would be looking through the curtains. The doorbell rang again. How would we get out? What sinister authorities were trying to get into A's flat? Who was that figure in the car outside? We came up with an escape plan; if anyone questioned us, we would say we were from a fictitious 'flat 18'. I felt certain that I was going to get into some form of unspecified trouble. We managed to escape the flat, but not the Capsule. No-one was outside. The mysterious figure in the car turned out to be a dummy in the passenger seat. This made us feel even more uneasy. So we went down the pub, taking unfamiliar streets, in case the doorbell ringers were following us. We discussed later how the streets seemed changed; haunted and mysterious, a kind of suburban gothic. I'm sure after a few pints we felt better.
A. bought a TV license the following week.
The Capsule then, could be best defined the following way; a feeling of supernatural mystery in familiar surroundings bought on by waking up late, being hungover, not going outside until dark, and a mild hysteria.
Isolation, even relative isolation, plays strange songs in your imagination.
I digress though.
Back to last night again. After A. had said that the flat had turned into the Capsule, we decided that the best course of action was to go down the pub. We decided on the Prestonville, a considerable walk away (well, about 25 minutes) and a pleasingly hartrowing one through the wind, rain and hail. We were hoping for a quiet night in the pub, and we were initially dismayed to find that there was some kind of music on. 'Louis B Delta influenced blues'. A well dressed black man of indeterminate age was playing the guitar, occasionally singing. Pleasingly incongruous, he looked like he had stepped in from another decade. I know nothing of blues music, all deals struck with devils at crossroads, prohibition-era moonshine, rail-riding and switchblades. Delta influenced blues? Is that something to do with Mississipi? Hmm.
'Listen' said A. 'he seems to be providng the soundtrack to the Capsule!'
As I listened, I realised the kind of blues he was playing was quite unlike any other kind of blues I had heard before. Echoey guitar effects, hypnotic rhythm -actually the rhythms were dreamy and fractured - and use of strange almost atonal scales. This was excellent. I had never heard anything like this before. It was quite busy in the pub, an old man and drunk woman arguing, ('you're accusing me of doing something I aint done!') a group of students discussing tree surgery ('in Canada they don't use chainsaws, just axes as big as your face!'). We stood at the bar and listened to the bluesman, Louis B, strange time traveller. Louis B noticed us at one point. I don't know why, but said 'are you two musicians'? We shook our heads and he carried on playing. What would have happened if we had said yes?
Went to another pub after The Prestonville, met another friend. A. headed off to another friend's house to drink rum. I walked home through the rain and the hail, got back soaked, and fell instantly asleep on the sofa.
I don't remember dreaming, and woke up at midday. Left the house before it got dark though. A. just waking up, was complaining of having drunk too much rum, and of how he didn't want to go out and see old hippy experimentalists, Gong play that night, but had bought the tickets and couldn't get out of it.
Means of course that I'll get back before him.
Wonder if The Capsule will be waiting for me?
