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.