The Reading Habits of Insomniac Signalmen

The post-midnight train back from London. Victoria to Brighton. 1am tiredness. Everyone else drinking wine and brandy in the busy carriages. Staring out of the window at abandoned buildings, the milky silver of moonlight on the rails. Watching the empty alleyways by warehouse wastegrounds. Lingering tracts of snow or frost on empty car parks. This is street lamp country, glowing halos in haunted streets, watching the night. This is their dominion. We stop for a while by a train station building. A light is on inside. Insomniac signalmen. Can see nothing of the interior, just a row of books in the frosted window, their titles illegible and forever lost. The train rides on.

Crash on Andy's sofa for the night. Can't be bothered to walk home, or suddenly superstitious at sudden Saturday night dangers on the streets. Not drunk enough - not drunk at all, had only had a half all day - to wonder happily home. Strange dreams on the sofa. Echoes of November. The freezing air of his flat.

I leave early afternoon. Andy is still asleep. Meet Jen at her house at 3:00pm. Walk up London Road to Preston Park, past Somerfield, where I first worked as a shelf stacker ten years ago. The Sunday skag-heads. The Sunday pubs. Crowds of men watching a football match. Cold, cold air. I eat sandwiches bought from Tescos. Wishing January would end, but knowing it is replaced by February. Cold, drear February. Memories of Worcester. Bleak street corners with Joe, ranting about tarot cards. That cold second month sun. The Hollow Deathlights.
We have a cup of tea at the Rotunda cafe in the park. Shutting up for the day. Twilight creeping from the corners. Sit outside and smoke cigarettes. Lizzie joins us. I watch a man pick up a fragment of ice from the pond and place it, almost delicately, on the table. An offering to the uncaring gods of January perhaps. I watch a dog try to leap across the pond, and doesn't make it. Wet dog in the water. He gets out of the pond. Isn't bothered. Shakes himself and continues bounding about.

Sunset behind bare trees. Sharp branches delineated against the sky. Walk through the darkening Preston Park, up to the churchyard, haunted by a woman, who is seen only on January afternoons. Tombs fading into earth. The locked up church. Skittering noises in the undergrowth. Climb over the low walls and onto the back lawn of Preston Manor. Only a few shreds of daylight left now. Sit on benches and tell ghost stories, but the place is too serene. London Road traffic noise lulling like the sea. The red lights like flares on the other side of the dark pool of the park.
Down into the pet cemetary. Walkways and bushes. Walled in. Look back at the church. Italian rumours reaching up into the sky.
The frozen pond.
The pleasure of cracking the ice.

End up at the Prestonville. I drink a cup of tea while Jen and Lizzie drink pints. We talk about tarot cards and gypsy ancestors, family tales and comedians. I leave them in the pub, walk back through Seven Dials. The temperature guage says that it is 4'. Four minutes above freezing. Walking down the hill just past St Annes Well Gardens, I look behind me at the city. A blood moon, pink and milky, sits above the horizon, a pregnant premonition floating motionless in space.
A deception of course. Nothing stays still, but sometimes the lie is enough.

I think of those insomniac signalman, wonder what they'll be reading this frozen winter night.

A Return to Clovelly Heath

After I left Worcester in 1999, I spent the next two years or so writing stories that were set in Worcester. Over this period, I must have written well over a hundred short stories, before, in a Lovecraftian fit of pique, destroyed everything I had written at the end of summer 2001. I've not written a story since then.
They were ostensibly ghost stories, and the Worcester in these stories was the nightside of the Worcester I remembered. I called this shadow Worcester, Clovelly Heath. Through these stories, I tracked the fragmented history of the vanished writer, Vincent James, in the Clovellyshire countryside, explored the emotionally poisonous railway platforms of Clovelly Hill Station, and investigated that mysterious black dog, The King of Stations, and it's insane industrial infections of the Darkspace Cathedrals. Below Clovelly Heath Cathedral itself, there was said to run a portion of that diseased river, the Noxis-Nibris, a tributary of the insane Black Rivers. There was a museum in which people vanished in an eternity of stairways, and in the university, a corridor wind, that dreaded interior breeze, would push lost students into patterns of geometery that never existed. In a small shack by a canal, forever boarded, Lucifer would control the world through literature, imprison life in a sentence of sentences, literature's darkest serpent. The river that ran through Clovelly Heath, the Nerve was home to something that invited people to drown in feverish rapture, on bright and unreal summer days.
In the cathedral gardens, students smoked drugs scraped from the walls of forgotten churches and woke in the morning, heartbroken, for no reason they could remember.
I mythologised Worcester in these stories, a mixture of dreams and desires, fanatasies and memories. Perhaps I stopped writing because of this, because I didn't want to return there any more.
And now I consider the possibility of living again in Worcester, a return to Clovelly Heath.
No sea, only the Severn and the canal. No Brighton Marina, but instead Diglis Weir, and instead of London, Birmingham, an hour to the north.
It is impossible to see what would happen if I move there. I try to see the future, scrying into the crystal ball of hypnnagogic imagery as I fall asleep. A new beginning or relative isolation? Will I start to mythologise Brighton in stories as I did with Worcester? I already have Brighton'n nightside name, North Lane Station (from a misread sign as I was smoking a cigarette outside the call centre). There will be the Malvern Hills to go walking on a Sunday, instead of Falmer Woods, and, yes, I imagine there will be ghosts there too.
It was a year ago this weekend that I left Wilbury Crescent for the nightmare flat on The Drive, and the darkest year of a dark decade.
In a strange set of coincidences, at the pub last night, Joe has decided he is leaving Brighton too, and is considering Worcester. In an even stranger coincidence, we met someone who was in the same year as us in Worcester. I don't remember her, but we have mutual friends.
Strange.
Maybe there will be, as I have said before, some last minute reprieve for Brighton, but I am growing to hate this place.
It feels like the Book of Revelations here, the last days of Brighton, but I am no believer, and there will be no rapture.
Just a sadness that I ever came here in the first place.
But I have to leave now. A shower, and maybe a coffee on the beach, and a trying to forget this dreadful, dreadful time that seems to be spreading from the last decade into this one.

Another Transmission from the Crisis Lands

January is a bastard, it really is.
2:00pm in the afternoon, meeting Andy for a coffee in half an hour at the Meeting Place (or is it Meeting House? I can never remember). Sunny outside. Drops of rain that look like Spring Rain. Sounds of footsteps in this house of bedsits, and my washing still in my laundry bag I can't be bothered to put away.
The clock ticks for Brighton. Two minutes, or two months rather, to midnight for this coastal town I've lived in for the past ten years. Leaving here at the end of March? The shadow that has, for me, crippled this city since we lost the flat on Wilbury Crescent, tightens it grip. The increasingly difficult terrain of living in Brighton is now proving impossible to walk on.
Paralysis reigns.
Maybe there will be a last minute reprieve for this place, but, sitting in the launderette this morning, I rang my Dad, asked him if it was possible for me to come home for a few months. To put it simply, I cannot afford to live here any more.
Perranporth? And then what?
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Black dogs, it seems, aren't just superstition. The Old Shuck smiles, and in it's red burning eyes, I see myself reflected there.
Not a particularly comforting reflection of yourself.

Confessions of a Childhood Ghosthunter II: Burnside and the Myths of the Dark Force

We moved to Burnside, the officers married quarters, over the summer of 1981, when I was 9 years old. This was a great event in my not-yet-decade; the houses were older and larger, the gardens were bigger, my bedroom was huge in comparison to my old one in Abbey Crescent, Southside. Burnside itself was smaller than Southside, about a third of the size, judging by Google Maps. It was a large square of houses really, and in the middle a large green, lined by crab apple trees and bushes.
At the back of the house there was a marshy area, inevitably called the Burnside Marsh. There was another secret stream here. When our garden fence was being repaired Craig and myself explored this swampy area. We spent a pleasant few days playing amongst the strange rushes, until the farmer's son came over and told us not to play here or we would be in 'very serious trouble'.
Surrounding the marshy area were farmers fields, and in the distance, cottages, the railway line, Monaughty Forest. A vast panoply of sights that greeted me each time I looked out of my window.
I would play by myself in our garden, looking across the fields to Southside, and think to myself it was a 'terrible little continent'. I'm not quite sure where I got this phrase from -I must have read it somewhere, or heard it from the television. It seems a remarkably precocious phrase to use, but Southside did seem so paltry compared to Burnside. The year and a half I spent living there were without doubt the happiest in my life, certainly the times I am most fond of.
To the North of Burnside was a small wood, lined by what we called the Burn, a small river. The wood, tiny as it was, contained more RAF Housing (Northside) a mansion, also owned by the RAF, where my sister went to her Brownies meetings, and a small playground, where much discussion and planning of our ghost hunting expeditions occurred.
It was a magical place to us, this U-shaped wood. I remember spending most of my time at Burnside here, usually with Martin or Craig; building bases, playing Secret Agents (on those rare occasions when we had grown bored of ghosts - I think a book in the school book club was responsible for this 'The Secret Agents Handbook, full of codes and tips for would be spies). There was a rivalry with the kids from Northside, though there were often truces, shifting alliances, gangs formed and destroyed, dramas and heartbreak.
Most of it would be forgotten by the next morning.
Craig had lived for a time in the nearby town of Forres, but had moved back over the long winter of 1981. Whilst in Forres, he had formed a gang called The Efrafa (named after the Nazi inspired rabbits in Watership Down for some reason), and the Efrafa (a highly organised gang) had spent most of their time ghost hunting. The hauntings were, it seemed, far more serious than we had first envisaged, and actually originated in Forres. The controlling power behind the hauntings was something named The Dark Force, an invisible malevolence that lived deep within The Black Woods - the large wood that dominated the hill the town was built around. He told us of running battles the Efrafa had with living skeletons that rose up from the graveyard just inside The Black Woods.
I was 9 years old, old enough to know better really, but I think I really believed it. I say 'think', because the notion of truth is a curious thing. Did I really believe that Craig had been chased by living skeletons? That there was an evil presence controlling everything called The Dark Force? It is impossible to tell. I try to reach back through the years, and I can't believe I believed, but I can't believe I didn't believe either. There was a suspension of disbelief, that dizzying feeling that life had strange undercurrents beneath the surface.
Perhaps I didn't question it because I was just too young to. I was ten before I stopped believing in Father Christmas, so perhaps living skeletons weren't too difficult to believe in.
Notions of belief aside, there were far more enthralling things happening in Burnside. We discovered that the Woods (The Burnside woods, not the Black Woods) was home to a werewolf! I'm not entirely sure how this werewold first came to our attention (I think Craig probably had something to do with it), but it had it's lair beneath a tangled pile of branches in the corner of the woods we went least to. This creature we called King Hairy, and it worked voluntarily with The Dark Force - it's agent if you will. We took our werewolf hunting very seriously. One summer evening, I remember Martin being severely admonished by Craig for not wearing gloves - the sight of bare skin might alert the werewolf to our presence! An ex-Efrafa member, Stuart McMichan, sometimes joined us, and one Saturday, we discovered what we thought to be the werewolf's print in the mud. This so terrified me that I had to return home early, on the basis that I had to 'tidy my room' even if it was a Saturday.
There were occasional ghost hunts involving the mansion, but all that seemed to happen was that we would hide in rhododendrum bushes, and watch the graying structure from a distance.
The old image of The Strangling Tree was also incorporated into this Burnside mythology. It transpired that The Strangling Tree had actually opposed The Dark Force. One night though, before the three of us had lived in Kinloss, there had been an apocalyptic fight between King Hairy and The Strangling Tree. The Strangling Tree had been destroyed and now existed only as a ghost!
The school was no longer haunted by The Green Hand, but a new entity known as The Blue Mist, a wispy thing that lived in the ventilation shafts. Bored during maths lessons, I would imagine I could see it's tendrils in the gratings fixed into the ceiling above me. There was something we called The Nightmare Tree in the woods. If you rode bikes underneath it, then, much like The Green Hand, you would be visited by dreadful nightmares for an undefined period.
It was a strange world we lived in, an all encompassing fantasy, our own mythos that stretched right over the seven years I lived in Scotland. There were serious arguments over whether or not one of the living skeletons (which acted as kind of stormtroopers for The Dark Force) could actually become allies, and one afternoon at school, I was convinced that The Dark Force was trying to possess me, (Images of black shadows in dark woods, something brooding and ancient). One time, when Nanny Mole visited, and I accompanied her to the newsagents, I was quite concerned at our path leading through the Woods - might she be attacked by King Hairy?
It's strange, but as I write, I remember more and more. This mythos we created and at least half-believed, seems so complex now. Compared to the relative greyness of adult life -unfulfilling jobs, money anxieties, mundane days, I am not surprised that people (including me) romanticise their childhoods, no wonder childhood flings its long light down our lives like some kind of inverse darkness.
That intense alive-ness of childhood is something hard to replicate after puberty, perhaps impossible, which is why we must return to our memories, our own myths, our intimate legends.
There were tales from Burnside of course, but I think I'm going to split the Burnside chapter of these ghost hunting confessions in two, else this post will be as long as the shadows our childhood seems to cast.

A Dream of the Language of Cats

A room. Two women in the room. Despite the fact that they were human, I was aware that this was only my perception, and they were actually cats. They talked about another cat they knew called Pearl, who had died from old age. One of the cats said that 'dinner times were always fun with Pearl'. I said that I had always had a soft spot for Pearl, and that she used to curl up on my lap. The two cats continued to reminisce about Pearl. It struck me that these two cats had an awareness of the past, of personal histories, which led me to conclude that cats must possess some form of self consciousness. I asked the cats how they communicated with one another. They told me that the feline communication system was a psychic language system that only operated in the present moment, and had no reference to either past or future. This psychic language system was called 'Eedoc' and was not really explainable to anyone who wasn't a cat. I myself was quite impressed that we were having this talk. The first inter-species communication!
I then woke up and had to go to work.

Gloomy Bedsit Thoughts (A Heart Breaking)

January seems to have lasted forever, and even though it is getting dark later and later, the night still seems to eat up the day. Snow-cold again today, bitter cigarettes outside of work, prison camp air burrowing beneath the skin. Grey skies. The sun all muted, when it does appear, and then only briefly, hidden behind banks of blank cloud. January stretching on into forever.
It starts well, January. the washed clean optimism of a new year. The novelty of new numbers when dates are written, but by the time these weeks have passed, feeling like months, January is dirty, an industrial month, crawling out of dead factories, polluted and poisonous. I swear I feel it's leprous skin in dreams. Not even sleep provides an escape.

Been living in the bedsit for not yet two months, and it's breaking my heart living here. The claustrophobia seems to have got worse after last Friday's day of isolation here. I begin to dread the weekend, days off. Wake up, plan means of escape. Easy in the summer; morning coffees on the beach, afternoons lying in St Anne's Well gardens, but here in January you are trapped, condemned to pacing shops and cafes, waiting until the inevitable point when you have to return.

Only just turned 10pm, and already I am thinking about sleep because I cannot bear to be awake here.

I think the worst thing is that the bedsit seems to be an echo of my studio flat in Buckingham Street. At least the hot water works, but the room is smaller, and I don't have a comfortable chair to sit on. I was so unhappy there, and being here is like being thrust back into it again. Bad echoes. Bad energy.

In some ways it feels like the last chapter in a book. Talking about leaving Brighton of course. Last Friday seems to be the first in a series of last straws. I hope I stay in Brighton, but I can't bear the thought of continuing to live in places like this.

I feel insomnia on me already.

Maybe a cup of decaffineated coffee and watch 'Shameless'.
At least the reception on Channel Four is not so bad tonight...

Confessions of a Childhood Ghost Hunter I: Southside

After living for a year at my grandfather's house in the tiny village of Stone in Worcestershire, my Dad, a sergeant in the RAF, was posted up to Scotland. So, in January of 1978, we moved to a village called Kinloss on the Morayshire coast. It was far up north, on a level with, and about a half an hour drive away from Loch Ness. The village was small, no-one there really but RAF personnel and their families. We moved to Southside, the sergeants married quarters, just outside the base itself.
Southside consisted of houses and playgrounds, nothing else. Surrounding Southside was farmland and distant forests. We were out in the middle of nowhere. Apart from the north edge of Southside, the whole place was surrounded by a high wire fence. At the back of our house was a railway line. The whole house used to shake when a train passed by.
My interest in the fantastic was already well in place. I was addicted already to such programmes as Doctor Who, Star Trek and Space:1999. There was the incident of the cowled monk-like figure I had seen at my grandfather's house the year before, and that ever so fascinating documentary on ghost hunters I had seen.
Our house looked out onto a playground, a death-trap collection of slides, swings, tunnels and logs, all on concrete. Wouldn't be allowed these days. At night 'Big Kids' would gather on the swings and under the slide, singing songs of the day. 'Mull of Kintyre' by Paul McCartney was one. 'Sailing' by Rod Stewart was another.
My best friend, Carl Haslam, and I, had any number of early dealings with monsters and ghosts. We were convinced that the logs in the playground were home to a sinister collection of entities called 'The Beaming Eyes', and then there were the mysterious 'Dizzy Lights'. The latter were street lamps that could be seen from our school, Abbeylands Primary School. Over winter mornings, if it was dark enough, and that far north it usually was, the lights would still be on, exerting their maleficient rays upon us. Helplessly we would spin ourselves around, under control by these mysterious woodland lamps until we fell over.
Then there was the case of 'The Green Hand'. Maybe it was something to do with the isolation in Kinloss, but rumours would spread like fever. I can't remember how tales of The Green Hand started, but I well remember when these stories were in full swing. There were sightings of The Green Hand all around school. One girl feinted as she walked home, convinced that The Green Hand was waiting for her on a lamp post. i remember Mr Wright, the sinister caretaker, having to carry her back into the school. This Salem Witch fever of Abbeylands came to the attention of the teachers. An assembly was called, and we were absolutely forbidden to mention, or even discuss, The Green Hand. Strangely enough, in later years, it was the teachers themselves who fed into the Green Hand legend. It was a sculpture on a gravestone in the Old Abbey, a crumbling building a thousand years old or so. If you touched this sculpture, the teachers said, you would have nightmares for a week. Oddly enough, on a return visit to Scotland over the summer of 2006, I found the gravestone, and couldn't quite bring myself to touch it.
Then there was the legend of The Strangling Tree. It was said that if you blinked your eyes 30 times, then you would see an image of The Strangling Tree imprinted on your eyelids. I never had the courage to try.
Back in Southside, Carl Haslam and myself would forever be trying to climb the green wire fence that surrounded the houses. After another failure to scale this fence, maybe in the late summer of 1979, we stood at this fence, gazing at a small wood -nothing more than a clump of trees really- by the railway line. I pointed out to Carl that I could see something in the wood. A patch of shadow surprisingly human shaped. Watching us. A ghost! It was obviously the cowled monk figure I had seen at mny grandfather's house! What was it doing here? Why was it following me?
More delighted rather than scared, this ghost was quickly named 'The Black Phantom'. If you stared at it long enough, it seemed to move... Carl and myself would stare at the woods, until we thought we had 'seen it move', before running away to the safety of the playground, where we would discuss, quite seriously, 'the hauntings'. This was obviously too good to keep to ourselves. I remember one probably summer day when I managed to get 30 kids to follow us to the wire fence. We would stare dutifully at the Black Phantom until someone would scream 'it's coming!' and then we would all run back to the playground again. Huddled under the slide we would discuss what had happened. One boy, who was 'bad at running' and was therefore, last back, said The Black Phantom had actually come into Southside and had 'pointed a stick about'. Another boy claimed he had once climbed the fence and actually gone into the wood, where he had discovered 'a box covered with moving lights'.
I was very pleased with all the hysteria I had caused.
At some point Craig Mackenzie joined us in our ghost hunting team. We began to formulate ideas that maybe the whole of Southside - even the whole of Kinloss itself - was haunted. My Dad told me The Black Phantom was 'probably a rubbish bag' caught on the branches of the tree. I think even this is optimistic. No more than a patch of darkness in a small clump of trees. Not that this, or my Dad's explanation, meant anything to us. One day we asked the farmer whether or not the wood was haunted. He said yes it was! This was evidence of course, proof of the existence of some malign influence!
Over the three and a half years we lived at Southside, my interest in all things paranormal was cemented. In the late 1970s, there seemed to be any number of ghost books and ghost hunters guides aimed at children. Television also seemed to be full of ghosts and supernatural dramas; 'The Clifton House Mystery', the utterly terrifying science fiction / paranormal series 'Sapphire and Steel', and one day, when I was sick and off school, a short adaptation of an M.R.James ghost story, 'Mr Humphries and his Inheritance' aimed at children. I only found out the origins of this programme when I was studying for my dissertation (on the Victorian/Edwardian ghost story) in 1999 at Worcester University College.
Most of our games centred around ghost hunting. We would feed in whatever television programme we had been watching at the time; Scooby Doo, Doctor Who, Blakes Seven... One time my sister came up with the idea that the evil force responsible for all the hauntings was something called 'The Energy Beast' from the Godzilla cartoon. 'It must be the Energy Beast, it must' I remember her saying, in all seriousness. Carl Haslam, for a time, became convinced that a secret river we could hear, not see, on the other side of the railway line was responsible. He had seen a girl we knew, who was 'in a trance' or 'hypnotised' standing in the spot where we thought we could hear the stream. I had no idea what 'trance' or 'hypnotised' meant, but they sounded very sinister anyway.
One night my Dad took me ghost hunting in the Old Abbey (as it was called). This place was rumoured to be haunted by a procession of ghostly monks, and the churchyard was a magnet for 'devil worshippers' - bored kids scrawling satanic graffiti on the tombstones. We found nothing, of course, but our dog, a lovable orange (!) mongrel called Bruno, became quite alarmed at the sight of a stone angel, barking at this white figure in the darkness.

(An interlude. As I'm writing this a strange memory is coming to mind. Strange because I've not thought about it for years, decades even. It was a story that Craig Mackenzie told us. A stone angel in the churchyard, deep red jewels for eyes... some luckless child plucking out the jewels... Then what happened? I can't remember. Was the angel supposed to scream, or was the angel found bleeding from it's now empty eye sockets? Ghost story stigmata, a malevolent Mother of Christ...)

I wonder if my recurring dreams of small woods in the middle of fields, have anything to do with that clump of trees by the railway line. That fascination at seeing something, but being unable to go there.
Fingers curled around the wire fence, watching for movement in the shadows of the wood.
In my dreams, it seems I am still watching, waiting for the secret, the forbidden mystery, to show itself.

We left Southside in the summer of 1981 whn my Dad was promoted to an officer. Burnside, the officers married quarters were just on the other side of Abbeylands School. Carl Haslam fell from my life, replaced by Martin Griffin, and my career as a childhood ghost hunter was far, far from over...

Home is Where the Darkness is

Wake up this morning. A listless agitation. Aim to go on a walk. Despite the fact I really do not like being here, it seems to take an age to leave the house. Meet Jen at her house at 3:00pm. Bus to Rottingdean. Despite only having had two pints last night, feel strangely hungover. Insomnia echo perhaps. Jen a saviour. She has Nurofen. A pot of tea in The White Horse. Feel better. Rural men watching the football, beer bellies and middle age melting into old age. A couple at the bar; 'I love Rottingdean. I've never missed a place as much as this when I moved away', 'It's a shithole here. I can't stand it, everybody knowing each others business', 'Thats what I love about the place, -community'. Leave at sunset, to begin the walk along the Undercliff Walk back to Brighton. The tide is high, up to the rocks. The path is littered with cycling children, families and dogs. Telling Jen ghost stories about dead clowns rising from the sea. Sit on the wall near the Marina, smoke cigarettes, and watch the last of the light fade. Beautiful. Through the Marina, all boats and peace. Along the coast, past Dukes Mound and the nudist beach. Street lamps in bushes. Pools of streetlight. Joggers crunching by on the pebbles as they pass us. Sudden unexpected sound. At the pier drinking tea. Walk round the closed down rides. Pier serenity. Strange peace. Start thinking about springtime, electric warm evenings. Suffused with a melancholy. Can't rid myself of it, despite a good walk. Have to return here. Back to the bedsit. Joe meets us at the pier. Trouble finding him. Calls on mobile phones. Tea getting cold. Sick of these early January nights. Jen leaves for home. Joe and myself walk along the seafront. A growing sense of dread at being here. try to shake it off. Haunted by memories of Wilbury Crescent. Nicest place I lived in Brighton. Gone now.
I've got to get out of this place. not healthy to sleep and live in the same tiny room. Begin to dread having to return here. Walls closing in, claustrophobia. Feel guilty, not the fault of this room.
Need to get out.
So many backwards steps over the last 12 months. Seems I've come back to a place I wished to never see again. My flat on Buckingham Street. Hated that place more than anywhere else. Lived there three and a half years. This bedsit is Buckingham Street's ghost, a poison echo.
Home is where the darkness is.

Dream Fragments from after 4:00am

As the title indicates, it had gone 4:00am by the time I managed to get to sleep. These are the fragments of dreams I can remember.

Sharing a flat with a friend I do not know particularly well. Possibly at my old flat in the Drive. A hand at the window (the flat is on the 2nd floor). I go to the window, and am surprised, yet oddly relieved to discover that the comedian Paul Whitehouse is trapped in the glass. Vomit on my bedsheets. I do not remember being sick. I am faintly disgusted by this worried I will get into trouble. At a fairground. Houses, looking rather Elizabethan. It is night. Lots of people are riding a rollercoaster through the darkness. Catching a train across the fairground to a remote station. I do this a number of times. I pass by the people on the rollercoaster. They deride me for travelling alone. On the platform at the remote station. There is some kind of fairground ride attached to the platform, a complicated piece of apparatus that resembles a ropeswing made out of plastic bags. I swing over the tracks. I catch the train back into the main fairground, then back again. I wonder why I am doing this. I attract more ridicule from the people on the rollercoaster. As I return to the station for the last time, I realise that I am afraid of the station. I do not know why I keep coming here on my own, in the darkness. There is a man at the station, a train station guard who also appears to be dressed as a clown. I swing out over the tracks. At the furthest point, the plastic bags begin to stretch and rip. I am going to be flung down on the tracks.

That is it. All I can remember.

The Insomniac Hour

3:12am, and I am wide awake. I'm not sure if it is the sea I can hear outside or passing vehicles. Silence, apart from that, and the whirring of the laptop. My room has that ox-hour feel; timeless, frozen. A capsule floating on illimitable seas.
I have actually been asleep tonight. I returned from the pub at about 10pm, rang my parents and was asleep by 11pm. I even remember dreaming. In a room with Andy, Joe and Ben. Ben lying on a mattress in a room I didn't recognise. The feel of some basement. Talking about mental illness with Andy and Joe. Some conflict with Andy because we were both talking at the same time.
Then I woke up.
I was fully expecting to fall back to sleep, but didn't. I had a cigarette, tried again. Nothing. My bed wasn't even feeling comfortable. My back was sore. Nothing. I finally conceded defeat, made myself a cup of decaffineated coffee and switched the lamp on.
The small hours, the hour of the ox. Weird space. It doesn't feel remotely haunted tonight though, this time. Maybe it is the house of bedsits I currently reside in, which possesses little in the way of unquiet atmospheres. Maybe my reception to any atmosphere has been superceded by the melancholy of this weekend.
Roll another cigarette. try to stop thinking.

After Friday's rain and isolation, I was pleased to see that yesterday (or today - where do the small hours belong?) was, if not bright and sunny, was at least tolerable. I headed down to the Meeting Place cafe on the seafront. Drank instant coffees and read the Guardian, soon joined by Joe who had been still asleep until I phoned him.
January closes in on us. Claustrophobia season. Still too cold to linger for long outside. We ended up at the art gallery, looking at an exhibition of the history of the land girls, women who worked on farms during wartime, while the men were abroad, fighting and dying. This was quite interesting, not so much for the history, which was already known, but for the photographs. Black and white, obviously. Smiling women by tractors and hay bales, hoisting spades, and walking down lost English lanes. Something obviously haunting about old photographs, ghosts caught on chemicals and paper, smiling across the decades.
There were other things of interest too, apart from the photographs. Relics of wartime; identity passes, guide books, a gas mask that both Joe and myself tried on. There were three illustrations I was particularly interested in, wood cuts from some contemporary publication, showing the women at work. This was quite eerie. It looked remarkably like my own drawings, unnervingly so. Insightful too, for it showed me the technique to use in my current drawing, the first illustration in the Book of Deleriums. Grass blades and foliage. How to use black and white and cross hatching so the different spaces don't interfere visually with one another.
We called in to see Sarah at her studio afterwards. A calm, pleasing place. Drinking cups of herbal tea, perched on stools. We stayed there a good hour or two. Joe went out into the alleyway outside for a long conversation with his mother. It was falling into twilight by the time we left.
We ended up at The Evening Star, and then at The Temple Bar. The former seemed like it was gearing up for a good night. Andy joined us from a day out in Lewes. Pints of ale, talking to a man next to us about his shop in Whitehawk. A thousand pounds a week in rent. He showed us the three thousand pounds in cash he had in his pocket he was going to give the landlord after he had finished his pint. A nice man, we both agreed, until we realised he hadn't asked us anything about ourselves. I'm still not sure what kind of shop he had.
The melancholy that had been threatening all week started to come down. Couldn't shake it off. Not surprised though, the past seven days have been full of warnings and black-eyed dogs. Headed to the Temple Bar - Andy and Al had relatives down. The beer was overpriced (£3:50 a pint) and I soon headed home, where after talking to my parents I lay down to sleep... which is where this post started of course.
3:39am now. Haven't even started my coffee. I really need to go for a long walk tomorrow, try to walk off this dreadful gloom hanging over me. Maybe catch the bus to Rottingdean and walk back along the Undercliff Walk.
Trapped in January, the limited horizons of the insomniac hour.
Roll another cigarette, and try not to think of black dogs a few steps behind.

A Day Spent Alone in a Single Room

Three posts in one day. Far too many, but such things happen when rain and financial concerns forbid any kind of expedition into the outside world. I quite enjoy my own company, but I don't particularly enjoy it when I have to spend it at home. I have never really got the hang of buildings, particularly not those buildings that I ostensibly call 'home'. Even when living in the luxury of Wilbury Crescent, I would find a day in on my own to be slightly wearing. Living here, in a small bedsit, a single room, is nearly intolerable. It has been interesting though, in a slightly masochistic sort of way. The morning's enjoyment of a day off led into an afternoon of listlessness. After the afternoon's entry, I unsurprisingly slipped into sleep. I woke up at 7:00pm, tidied my room, and made myself some cheese on toast. This seemed to take me two hours. I listened to both albums by Bat For Lashes, and one by a German electro-goth outfit with the rather unlikely name of Megadump. It was only after I had woken that what I most feared about spending a day alone in a single room happened, namely that cabin fever melancholy. This melancholy is always mixed in with an almost painful nostalgia. Usually, one of my great pleasures in life is that of remembering. I feel sorry for the new-age believers of the credo that the present is all you have. I feel that these people lack something - how can they only have one time frame to live in? No wonder their books are so vapid. Spirituality for primary school children. On days like this though, the nostalgia comes armed with warnings. Prickly memories. The past seems a very far off place. The hot summer of 1995, the warm, wet spring of 2002, when I first started working at the petrol station. All that seems to exist is the room. The four walls, and the window showing an outside world as unreal as the Doctor Who story 'The Robots of Death' that I watched this evening. Maybe it isn't nostalgia. Maybe it is the lack of nostalgia that makes days as these so melancholic. No history to explore, no past days to hide, and find yourself in. Nothing but the present, and when that present is four walls only in a bedsit that looks like some shabby hotel room... Maybe this is what it is like when there is only the present.
No matter how dreadful the day is tomorrow, I shall go for some kind of walk, even if the rain forces everyone else to stay inside. I should have gone this evening, through the twilight, down to the pier... or maybe just walked the half suburban streets on the other side of the Old Shoreham Road, and found some solace in their dreaming stillness.
The last hour of the day, and I feel insomnia on me, as if I have already laid down to sleep. I hear cars pass by in the rain, the sound of voices in the street outside. The Portugese woman in the bedsit next to mine unlocks and opens her door. I hear her footsteps on the landing.

Lost Signals Picked up on Rainy Afternoons

It is now mid-afternoon. Sat on my futon in the 3:20pm gloom. The light is softened, suffused with sleep. The sky outside the window is that blank shade of gray that seems to define January. I can hear the trickling of water, twisting woodland-brook echoes. An hour or so before twilight.
I consider going for a walk, watch the street lamps come on from the sea front. A cup of tea on the pier, listening to the sea.
Afternoon rain in the dirty late winter season reminds me of an old wireless radio. A ramshackle barely working machine that only picks up the most remote and obscure of stations. Maybe stations from the past. World War II transmissions. Families gathered round a table in a farmhouse kitchen in the country. Far from the blitz, far from the war. Fields and refugees. Blackout legends and curfew myth.
The rain is the static, and there are voices in the rain.
Rain at night always seems to hide the sound of footsteps, masking the walking of ghosts, but afternoon rain... Pleasingly melancholy. 'Bleak but meaningful' to steal a quote from Fritz Leiber's excellent short story 'Smoke Ghost'.
Listening to the album 'Through the Darkest Hour' by Solitude Aeturnus; a sobre and beautiful exercise in epic doom metal. Acoustic guitars and clean vocals dance with elegant guitar passages and slow drum beats. Music for January afternoons that are heavy with rain.
I remember Hazel last night, telling me about the haunted house she lives in in Middlesbrough, all cold spots and moving objects. Knocking on the wall, and figures glimpsed from the corners of eyes. The Basketmakers in the North Laine. Full of thirty-something people who look like they may have a veiled interest in artistic pursuits, without actually appearing to be artists themselves.
It's getting darker in here as I write. If I were to read a book I would need the light on. I remember. I wrote that line before. The December of 1985. Thirteen years old, off ill from school with a heavy cold. By this time I was feeling better. I spent the afternoon writing a short piece about the coming of night, trying to identify the different stages of a gloomy, rainy afternoon falling to night. 'If I were to read a book, I would need the light on'. I called the piece 'Invaders'. Looking out of the living room window at the upward slope of Woodstock Drive. London suburbia seeming as remote and distant as the places we had lived in Scotland. Pools of rain holding early orange lamp light. Another line comes to me, one I didn't write down, but has stayed with me nonetheless; 'nights seem more dangerous here'. The London night did seem more dangerous, industrial and full of malicious rumours hiding knives. Scottish nights were fantastic and haunted by ghosts, London nights by the fear of being attacked. Another thing I remember was that in Scotland, the sky seemed to go through ever deepening, ever more electric shades of blue before it reached full dark, whilst in London, the daylight just greyed and greyed until night came. I thought, for a long time this was just a false childhood memory, but since moving to Brighton, I have noticed the blue stages of night falling here. I think it something to do with the ocean. Sea twilight, the moon pulling at tides that pull at the light.
Transmissions from lost decades. The old wireless recieving lost signals from the rain.
Another cigarette. A half drunk cup of coffee.
Sleep.
This has been a week haunted by sleep. Vast and epic sleeps, coming home from work, and after dinner, lying down. Not even 9:00pm. Waking briefly in the small hours to turn the lights off then sleeping again till I have to get up for work. Restless dreams, none of which I can remember. Deep, luxurious exhaustion.
But if I sleep now, I will wake when it is dark.
This is January though, particularly on rainy days, and maybe there is no point fighting it, for January holds dominion over us all.

(with my apologies for Edgar Allan Poe for the last line)

Rules Concerning the Book of Deleriums

Notebooks and sketchbooks and diaries have always fascinated me. Sylvia Plath's journals have always resonated me with me more than her actual poems and novels. I am constantly buying notebooks and sketchbooks, all with the intention of actually finishing them. Usually, the 'flow' of the book in question becomes a matter of some concern to me (a less than pleasing drawing, a noticeable abscence between poems) and I will, inevitably, buy another one, and start again... Part of the reason for this is that I see these books as an end in themselves, rather than a means to producing something outside of the book.
All of my sketchbooks are given names, often prosaic 'Book of Summer' (and what happens when summer has ended, and autumn began? Off to Clarke's Stationers...). More often I prefer slightly more convoluted names 'Liber Tenebrae' or 'The Tarot of the Investigators'. When it is an art book, I have a very ritualised way of working through the book. After deciding on how many pages I need for a list of titles -the contents page, if you like, I count the remaining number of pages in the book. Then I half these pages, and take the page in the middle (if an odd number) or the page which is closest to the beginning than the end. This will be the first page I draw on. After finishing this drawing, writing the title in the contents page, along with date started and finished, I work on the second drawing. For this, I take the second half of the book, and take the middle page from there. For the third drawing, I take the first half, and use that middle page. Then, in the blank pages between the first and second drawing, I take the middle page there. After that, the middle page between the third and first drawing, then the middle page between the second drawing and the end of the book. Everything halves and halves and halves, until, finally, the last drawing of the book is the first page after the list of titles...
This method of working appeals to a slightly neurotic mind. I like the convoluted ritual aspect of it, and by using the book as a whole (backwards, forwards, flipping across the pages like some kind of paper time-traveller) the book becomes to be seen as a whole, rather than just a collection of drawings in the same place. It is rather like working on a novel than a series of short stories.
Another reason I do it is that, when the book is finished (and I have got, at least, close before...) the selection of drawings is non-linear. As you go through the book in the more traditional fashion of beginning to end, you flip from, say a drawing done in September to one in June, to one in November. There seems both a randomness and an order to it. Pictures similar to each other, by dint of one being done after another, are split. If you go through a period of bad drawings, they are scattered. Likewise with pieces you are more pleased with. A sketchbook shuffle. Randomness which is only random because it adheres to some form of order.
As I said though, I don't think I have ever finished such a book. a piece I cannot stand pops up, or some natural disaster strikes (the spilling of coffee on water-soluble ink seems to be a common one).
Ah well.
Anyway, I've started a new book, this one called 'The Book of Deleriums'. Aside from the rules dictating the order of drawings, I have introduced some new rules.
1) All drawings must be finished, no matter how terrible.
and
2) No drawings may be torn out (another bad habit of mine).
Well, we'll see how it goes. Quite pleased with my first drawing (not yet halfway through) which is a good start. However, there was a near disaster yesterday involving a pint of milk with the top badly screwed on and my bag...
So, we'll see how it goes.
66 drawings.
And each one finished and titled.
Seems a long journey for one book to survive.
Dreams, nightmares, desires, memories, fevers...
A book of deleriums...

Woman Lying in a Field

I never usually have much of an idea where a drawing is going to go before I've started it. A lot of this is due to the fact that I often draw at the call centre, and don't have the time to plan. I think that's an excuse though. The idea of planning a drawing, or a piece of writing, is anathema to me. I often think that perhaps it could be improved if I did have some design before I set pen to paper, but when I try, the inspiration just vanishes.
It was in January last year that I did this drawing. I worked on it at the call centre. I was still on the phones at the time, and drew between the very rare calls we got, (I think I went for a week without taking a call). All I knew when I started it was that I wanted to draw a woman lying down. After I had drawn the, presumably sleeping figure, it came to me that she was lying in a field of corn. Obviously summer. Then I wanted a line of winter poplars in the background. A lightning blasted tree. Then the figure of, maybe, a farmer. Why is he walking away? What is that strange rose-bush plant, and what liquid is it dripping? Is it night or an overcast day? Why is the woman sleeping anyway?
I can give myself no answers to any of the questions. It represents nothing. There was little in the way of conscious direction as I worked on the piece. I have always felt that there is something occult about artwork, for myself anyway. By the use of the term 'occult' I am not necessarily ruling out the possibility of external influence (I read the tarot cards after all), but I use it to mean a power whose source I cannot consciously identify.
I have a problem with artists who label their work as coming from the subconscious. The subconscious, I tend to think, is like the plumbing in a building; hidden, necessary, but ultimately functional. Art seems to come from a place that is not strictly functional, not a higher-conscious, but an other-consciousness.
Like tarot cards, I find meanings -or resonances- as I prefer to call them, only after the picture is finished. These resonances change over time, and seem to reflect my mood. In this, they tend to resemble tarot cards - one can read into the image whatever one feels at the time - a kind of mirror. Perhaps. This pleases me, for Pamela Coleman Smith, artist for the famour Rider-Waite pack of tarot cards, painted her enigmatic and timeless images from a series of visions that came to her whilst listening to music.
I suppose any art always poses questions, but really, I don't want that question answered.
I just want the question mark to resonate.

The Ox-Hour Lots

I should really get some sleep. It's now 1:14am, and I have work tomorrow. Unfortunately, due to last night's intake of alcohol, I somehow contrived to remain in bed until 7:30 yesterday evening. Disgraceful, particularly as I had originally awoke at 1:15pm, made myself a sausage sandwich, and promptly went back to sleep. I remember waking up occasionally, watching it get darker and darker outside, until, finally, my room was pitch black and I had to get up.
Joe was online. He said that he had finally got out of bed at 5:00pm. We met up for a Sunday evening coffee, hoping desperately to get something from the disgracefully wasted day, particularly as, over the early afternoon sausage sandwich it had been sunny and pleasant looking outside.
We decided on the pier, walked down to the dark seafront. Lone dog walkers. A group of people playing basketball in the court by the old, broken down pier. Sunday evening quiet. Hushed.
The pier wss quiet also, and after buying cups of tea from a booth selling fried doughnuts (the strange hypnotic working of the machines, doughnuts on a conveyor belt, plunged helplessly in hot fat) we found out usual spot on the benches on the pier facing westwards.
I have always had a soft spot for the pier. I usually come down with Joe, sometimes Andy, but more often Joe. Despite the sometimes busyness, I find something quiet relaxing and serene about the pier; the noise of the starlings (often at dusk, there is their amazing roosting displays to watch), the invisible sea lapping against the rust and seaweed covered struts. The sound of the arcades seems to lull, even the 1980s songs of the pier radio have an oddly calming effect.
After we had finished we wondered down to the end of the pier. All the rollercoasters and rides had closed. The Horror Hotel shut up for the night. No more vacancies. A pleasing eeriness. The still stares of the horses on the merry-go-round. The ceaseless twisting sea.
We walked back along the seafront, discussing the calming effects of going for a walk, lamenting how much we had both drunk last night (8% ales at the Evening Star beer festival, vodka at Andy's afterwards). After Joe had headed home, I called around Andy's house for a cup of tea. Andy had only got out of bed at 6pm, and was feeling similarily guilty too. Ben and Rachel had stayed the night, while he slept on the sofa.
I only meant to have one cup of tea, and then head homne, but the television conspired to provide rivetting entertainment; an old episode of Cracker and The IT Crowd, a film called The Beach, and a documentary on America's Toughest prisons. It was about an hour ago when I left Andy's house. Opening the door onto Cromwell Road, I was pleased to discover that a sea-fog had come down, the strongest I havce seen for years, everything hidden and softened by luminous grey, even the headlights of passing taxis possessing a night-time glamour.
My footsteps were still on the streets, the odd lone walker passed me by, looming up out of the white with startling speed. I paused momentarily at the entrance to St Ann's Well Park, a place which is occurring more and more often in my imagination. This is probably due to me always passing by at night, wondering about the secrecies held inside, the lamp lined paths, the empty tennis courts and boarded up cafe. It seems almost like it's own country, a strange interior region in the borderland between Brighton and Hove.
All quiet now in this house of bedsits. The whirring of the laptop, and the sound of footsteps somewhere else in the house. I have always had a fondness for the small hours, away from the petty noises of the day. Our waking hours are crammed so full of trivial distractions, that sometimes it is hard to find the peace that you can find as the clock edges slowly from 1:00am to 2:00am. In Japanese mythology, the small hours are known as the Hour of the Ox. This is the time of day that ghosts and spirits are most likely to appear. This is interesting, as people who work in hospitals say that this is the time people are most likely to die, and I have heard it said that the emergency services know this period as a busy one, where things tend to happen.
Anecdotal evidence from various message boards correspond with this. Ghost stories and weird yarns congregate around this hour, an ambiguous congregation around an enigmatic altar. The Night Church. The Small Hours Service.
Hymns sung to the dark space of gods.
1:36am now.
Another coffee, another cigarette, and then a drift into sleep and the dreams of the Ox Hours.

The White Lamp in The Lost Streets

After a walk with Joe along the Undercliff path to Rottingdean yesterday, the thought of spending the evening alone in my bedsit was not one which held any particular allure. Thanks to the constraints of finance and an absinthe hangover from the night before, the pub was not a viable option, so I decided to visit Andy for a coffee instead. Surprisingly, given it was a Friday night, no alcohol was consumed, and by the time the night had wound up, it had, incredibly, turned into 4:00am. I elected instead to spend the night on his sofa, and after a night of vaguely disquieting dreams, managed to rouse myself at about 2:30 this afternoon. I have written before about the Capsule, that curious condition of Andy's flat, where a hangover and sleeping in late leads to an edgy and hysterical, often superstitious, paranoia. To our surprise (neither of us had drank the previous night) we discovered the Capsule had somehow been activated.
We sat and drank cups of tea, and Andy made himself fried eggs on toast for breakfast. Yes, that feeling of supernatural presence was there; the unmistakeable conviction that disembodied forces were gathering. Being watched. The empty bathroom not seeming empty. The stairs leading down to his flat feeling noisy when the steps only exuded silence.
Andy decided to go to Tescos, while I went back home. A few hours of peace before the beer festival at the Evening Star this evening. We opened the door of the flat, looked out onto Cromwell Road. Wet, grey skies, glistening pavements. It felt like one of those secret spring days, not the optimistic kind, but the March and April days, full of rain and untraceable mystery. Before I pointed out this to Andy, he said 'it feels like a bleak Spring day in January'.
Andy headed off to Tescos, and I proceeded to walk the ten minutes back to the bedsit.
There was an air of unreality about the day, an aura remniscent of half remembered dreams and childhood memories. The air felt fluid, that fecund spirit of spring. The grey skies seemed to both be incredibly dark, and hold a muted glow. Worcestershire. Scotland. The January day flinging down whispers of memory. I had never seen the trees looking so bare, so naked. Tall as pillars, they seemed almost monolithic. The first street lamps had come on, luminous eyes hanging in the twilight haze. I walked past houses spilling yellow kitchen light onto glistening pavements. In the gloom there was a strange serenity, a surprising peace, as mysterious as it was unexpected. I passed by St Anns Well park, feeling the shadows gather and grow, blooming night-scented stock and the first flowing of small hours rivers.
At the top of my road, I noted a single street lamp. A hazy white glow, muted and watchful (most street lamps are either orange or beige it seems these days).
An ambiguous memory. Back in Scotland, when I lived at Southside in Kinloss. I was walking an unfamiliar route home from school. A curved street. A grey afternoon, much like this one, either late winter and early spring. Along this curved street, was a lamp that had come on too early. A white bulb, mute and seeming blind in the bad light of a day that was either late winter or early spring. I watched the lamp as I passed by. Maybe I was already feeling ill, but I always associate the white lamp with a period of cgildhood illness that followed.
Strange, the things we remember, those odd fragments we barely notice at the time, but somehow, stay with us for decades.

10:56am - 11:17am, Monday Morning.

In the office at work. M. and D. arguing over D. not drinking enough water. Tom sat next to me, looking at a Superdubpressure flyer. 'You're falling apart, you're going to die of a skin disorder. Ever hear of leprosy?'. 25 calls to mark. Still annoyed I couldn't download itunes. Tried three times. Got to 70% then it just freezes. have to buy a new power lead for my old lap top which has itunes on it. Hope it works. Jagged January annoyances. Unimportant but irritating. Left my cartridge pen at home so can't draw. Even more annoying when I remember I started a drawing on Friday I was quite pleased with (a gloomy looking man smoking a cigarette, ignoring a plate of chicken and apples).
10:56am.
Hastings Direct Recorder Client not working. Well, not the call I want to mark. facebook? No. Keep writing here. Halfway through a mug of chocolate. Look out the window; grey skies, brick wall, everything flat and lifeless. Winter. We're adrift on the nowhere seas of January now, away from the comfy Christmas islands, the consolation of New Years Eve waters, left the television specials behind now, the Boxing Day sales. Nothing but sea and choppy water. Drift and dream on these currents until the March waters herald the Spring coast.
These are the orphan seas.
Check the QA syastem again. Still not working, and no new sales to mark. Tom stretches, half yawns next to me. M. leaves the office. Hear a car outside, struggling through the air that tastes of slush and coldness that brings exhaustion.
Lost expeditions on ice floes. Arctic waters. Ice-cap dramas. Don't fall asleep or you'll sleep forever. Hypothermia dreams.
An explosion of birthday drinks at the weekend. One on friday night, two on Saturday night. Why does everyone seem to be born in January? Tom's birthday also, though he was laid low with some kind of jaw infection. Joe's birthday in a weeks time. My sister's soon as well.
Paced around town on Friday with Andy, joined latterly by Joe. Andy looking for a birthday present for Claire. Bookshops and record shops. Comic shops, charity shops and cafes. Buy old horror comics from the 1970s. 'House of Secrets', 'Ghosts' ('If you don't believe in the supernatural, we dare you to read these haunting tales'). Cheap cds in a sale. Neo-anarcho punk bands whose names I have forgotten. Spitting out a slightly false cockney defiance. Bat for Lashes first album, not as good as the second. Absess. Raw death metal. More pleasing than I thought. A band called Debase, I only bought because it was a pound. Not very good. Sub-Soundgarden style thrash. Nurse with Wound. 99pence. 75 minutes. Industrial jazz sound loops.
D's phone goes off. A nightmare cartoon music. He doesn't answer it. Maybe it is M.s.
Saturday hungover. Drifted through the cold day in my bedsit. Single room cabin fever. Watched 'The Reader' on DVD. Quite good, but not as resonant as the book by Bernard... Damn, what was his second name? Scheyrink? Schrink? Ventured out to buy food and The Guardian. Slushy ice. Light all unreal and hangover tainted.
Tidied my room. Slept until it was time to go out again.
Can hear people in the office next door. Talking about their training induction groups. The ghost sounds of opening doors, closing doors. Shuffling in the call centre. Go and check the QA system again. Finally have some calls to mark.
11:11am.
Woke up at just before midday yesterday. Wrote a piece about dreams. ventured out for more food and Sunday papers. Came back. Read more of '2666' by Robert Bolano. A masterpiece, though I am only a quarter of the way through. Slept. Strange dreams I can't remember. Joe comes round for a coffee in the eveni9ng. he woke up at 5pm. Outside and into The Temple Bar for a pint. Dark interior, and wood panelled walls covered with a random collection of paintings. Hypnotised by one, a sub-impressionist scene of a pale field, grasses frozen in their wind movement, a bare tree in the background. Then hungry. Fast food joint. Finally settle on Turkish House. The melancholy comfort of fast food places on a Sunday night. The friendly Turkish man tells us to 'come again, we are always open!'. Full up after my chicken fillet meal, I drink my coke and watch a silent Turkish soap opera on the television. After the Turkish soap opera, silent rappers seeming somewhat old fashioned come on. A display of break dancers and trainers with shining lights on the heel.
Go home, try to download itunes, sleep.
A dream of night-horses in my room. All I can remember.
Weekend done.
Lost now on the orphan seas of January.
11:17am.

Of the Lacquer of Angles and Other Dream Revelations

I've been trying to keep a dream diary for this decade, which is to say the least, somewhat over ambitious, as previous attempts at keeping a dream diary usually falter after a month. One of the principal reasons for this failure is that I usually have a fairly good dream recall anyway, and when keeping a dream diary, dream recall seems to expand beyond all expectations. During one dream diary phase, one morning I managed to write 2000 words. This involved a dream about notorious occultist Aleister Crowley leading a Hells Angel biker gang, who seemed to consist of members of the punk band The Ramones. I was at university at the time studying English Literature, and when I realised I was spending far more time on writing my dreams down than deconstructionist theories applied to late 19th century realist works in Europe, I quickly gave this in.
Dreams have always fascinated me, a whole other world, or worlds, we experience every night. Often, as in the dream of Aleister Crowley above, they seem to be nonsense. Other dreams are fragments of that days experiences - someone you spoke to in passing, a television programme seen. Then there are the other dreams, dreams that resonate on a far deeper level.
I'm not sure I have recurring dreams, but I certainly do have recurring themes and ideas. Over the last few years, I regularly visit Southside - one of the places I lived in Kinloss, Scotland, when I was a child. The dreams are quite similar; it is the first hour of night, and the street lamps have just come on. I am aware that I am revisiting this place, and am unsure if I am allowed. There is an air, indescribable really, of magic about the dream. I am delighted to be here at night, in my childhood home, at night. There is something ritualistic about the walk, and though I am walking to my old house, 66 Abbey crescent, I never reach it. The landscape of Southside is changed, sometimes subtly (there is a cafe in the heart of the estate of houses), sometimes quite dramatically (Southside now belongs in the desert, and there are great sand dunes between the houses).
Dreams which have a similarity to the Abbey Crescent are those I term the 'spinney dreams'. A spinney is a small wood, but somebody told me years ago (erroneously as it turns out) that a spinney is specifically a small wood in the middle of a field. In the Spinney Dreams it is almost always a bright summer day. I am at the edge of a field, which is often surrounded by a fence, and am entranced by the sight of, in the middle of a field, a tiny hill, covered in trees; a spinney. There is usually something paranormal about the spinney; ley lines converge here, a graveyard has grown from the earth, the spinney is haunted by the ghost of a woman who disappeared here decades ago. Despite this, the dreams are never sinister, there is, instead, a feeling of longing and fascination, a desire for visiting the spinney. Often I don't make it to the spinney for whatever dream-reason, sometimes I do. One time I was accompanied by Bracken, our old Yorkshire Terrier. In the dream Bracken could talk and was encouraging me in my exploration of the spinney. That was a nice dream.
Then there are the darker dreams. I hesitate to call them nightmares though, as they are enjoyable as, I suppose, ghost stories (my very rare nightmares - dreams which I do not enjoy - involve friends and family dying, or being diagnosed with some terminal illness). Often the darker dreams are to do with the interiors of buildings. I went through a long phase of dreaming of some kind of institutional building, a university, or more frequently, a hospital. A floor of the building is disused, and more importantly, is haunted by some indefinable and invisible force. Inevitably, I find myself exploring this deserted level (open rooms full of sinks, sinister medical equipment, rows of baths with an unknown fearful purpose) feeling a mixture of terror, and also of fascination.
Lately these dreams of abandoned floors in building have transformed themselves into dreams of attics containing secret stairways, always locked, where something terrible has once taken place, the site of a murder, or there is a body still there. The secret stairways are cluttered with junk, and are usually locked. The stairways themselves evoke in me an emotion that I don't really have a waking-life name for. The closest I can describe it is a mixture of terror, fascination and nausea, with fascination being the strongest component.
Sometimes dreams have a narrative attached to them. In one dream, a professor had worked out the reason for the feeling of being watched in empty rooms. The reason was that this is due to the stare of insects, the untold thousands of tiny miscroscopic insects in every room. The stare of these insects is because they hate us, for something that the human race had done to insects in another dimension, before the creation of the universe. One time I had a dream where I was investigating a haunted house that was on a road called Lost Hope Square. I was with a friend, and we eventually found the house. She pointed out to me that the house was haunted because the trees had grown to close to the house, and all houses are haunted that have trees growing to close to them. We returned home, but discovered that the map we had used to locate the house had become infected by the haunting and had to be burnt. Another dream involving a map took place in an attic. It concerned the location of a cursed river, named the Noxis-Nibris. The Noxis-Nibris could only be seen in maps of old Mexico, and then only by the light of a 40 watt bulb, in the small hours in tiny attics.
Things being named in dreams is interesting. The other night is a good example. The dream is far too long and complicated to describe fully, involving, as it did, dreams within dreams, and thinking about these dreams in the dream, and trying to explain the dream in other dreams. Anyway. I shall try and make this as simple as possible. I was in a field. Grey skies. Windy. The field was lined by houses, empty in a curious was; they were built never to be used. I met a man in the field; shaggy hair, dark and intense eyes. In the dream it struck me that he was dressed like a clown, but a clown without any comedic elements. He lived in some sort of cavern, and I accompanied him there for a cup of tea. In the cavern, he told me that 'this degenerate little town was collapsing, and that the angles of this town would affect... (me) ...too'. He had a bookcase in the room, one of the books was a collection of ghost stories called 'Across the Fields', (As an aside 'Across the Fields' was the name of a book I had invented when still trying to write the unwriteable novel 'The Followers'. In 'The Followers' 'Across the Fields' was written by a character called Vincent James, who vanished over the summer of 1956).
In the dream, 'Across the Fields' was written by no-one. When each story was finished, the author responsible was taken out of reality, so he existed in no times, either present, future, or past. This gave the stories in the book, a malevolent life of their own, so the stories themselves became conscious. Another section of the dream involved myself reading a university essay studying 'Across the Fields' by an unknown student. It became apparent upon reading the essay, that studying 'Across the Fields' had driven him insane, and had turned the essay into a ghost story, similar to the stories in 'Across the Fields', in that it too was alive, the writer of the essay having been removed from reality upon finishing. There was another book on his shelf too, a book with a French title callked 'Des Lacque des Angle'. In the dream, this was translated as 'Beyond the Angle'. Anyhow, the dream involved other such disparate elements such as Bugs Bunny cartoons, a haunting in a churchyard, a prison like the interior of a ship, and groups of 18th century women.
The most important part of the whole dream, or the dreams of dreams, was a section where I was thinking about the dreams. In this dream, or section of the dream, I was thinking of how certain elements of the dream would make fantastic stories, or drawings, or songs. A real source of inspiration. Then I doubted this, asked myself 'but aren't I just writing (or drawing etc) about the same old things?' The answer was very clear, that every artist has his or her own personal obsessions and themes, and that my role as an artist was this; to investigate the interior landscapes of my imagination.
This strange revelation has stayed with me since the dream. For all my life I have felt that my own artistic endeavours have been, somehow, inferior, not good enough, that there is no point or purpose to them. I am not interested in making a comment on society, or the human condition. The idea of writing an artist statement leaves me cold. This has always made me feel that, as an artist, I was doing no more than metaphoric (and sometimes literal) doodling. The dream made it clear what I was doing as an artist (of whatever medium, drawing mostly in the last decade, writing and making music in the 1990s) and that was this; I was investigating and mapping a peculiar and very individual interior territory.
Exploring my imagination, to put it simply, and this, I have discovered, is enough.

As an appendix to this long ramble on dreams and revelations, I put 'des lacque des angle' into a French / English Google translator. I don't know any French. The last French lesson I had was in 1986 when I was 15. I was expecting it to come up with nothing.
Apparently, it translated as 'of lacquer of the angle'.
Now this gave me pause to think, that maybe dreams hold a knowledge all of their own, and makes me look forward to meeting Bracken on the edge of a field on a bright summers day, ready to explore that ever elusive spinney on a small hill.

Songs Written in Empty Rooms

Snow falling again, but this time there is no novelty to it, as there was before Christmas. This is January snow; different, altered. I watched the white pool of light from a street lamp on the snow, bright, yet somehow darkening the night. Old roads stretching off into unseen distances, black hills surrounding town.

I have always had a fondness for January. There is a strange freedom away from the inelegant, vulgarities of summer, even from the easy, though beguiling, mysteries of autumn. January is everything stripped down, and naked, finally truthful, robbed of any complacent poetry. Last years masks are discarded and our neonate faces are raw, not quite hopeful, but the expelled histories of the last year, the last decade have left a cleanness.

The new notebook of January, waiting for that first mark, that first line, that first setting of the future.

The snow, now rid of the novelty, and because it has been mixed with rain, has formed a kind of slush, rather than the ice of December. It strikes me as both somehow antique, yet industrial, January produced in factories, mined in seams beneath nostalgic Earth; prison camp memories, bleak mornings in borstals, woke by guards before dawn, another day in the factories, a world in monochrome, stripped of colour.
Personal memories too, released by this bleak snow; of visiting Grandad Mole in hospital in 1981 with my Nan. Wolverhampton. Struggling through the snow to get back to my Nan's house. Nine years old, and loving the Pan Books of Horror Stories and Adam and the Ants; of 2002 (even though there was no snow that year), starting work at the petrol station, the long walk back after the late shift, along the black and empty Old Shoreham Road.

Still snowing out there.

I suppose we're all alone in January, left with ourselves and our dreams and nightmares. Not necessarily a bad thing. Like writing songs in empty rooms in abandoned houses, no-one else can hear us, but in that silence, we have, at least, the freedom to be ourselves.