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)