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.