A Breach Detected in Summer 39/3; Cycles 22 and 23

First week done at work, head full of interest rates, ISAs and early mornings. Walking to work in the rain, watching the grey sea from the training room windows. The complicacies of using the lift, getting off at wrong floors, forgetting to press the button for the correct level. Old call centre ghosts, Telegen survivors, swapping tales of redundancy dramas and lucky escapes, -for those people who left only weeks before anyway.
Summer dying. Light now permanently changed. Sky all tumultuous and unsure. Nights creeping in earlier and earlier. 8:30, creeping back to 8:00. Fallng asleep before midnight. Half fragments of dreams and waking up in the half-light of dawn, waiting for the alarm to go off.

A painting nearly fnished. Play with titles in my head 'A Breach Detected in Summer 39/3; Cycles 22 and 23'. Wordless journal freezing echoes of the last of August, an abstract diary entry. First time I've written the probable title. Hanging on my wall now, a fragment from this passing summer. Walks to the job centre, charity shop albums, drifting in the churchyard on the way back.
Memories becoming ghosts.
Last Sunday a rainy evening. Took a pre-work nerves walk through the twilight. Across London Road and along Upper Lewes Road to Lewes Road. I hardly ever come here any more, but when I first moved down to Brighton, over ten years ago now, most of the people I knew lived here. Jim's room full of paintings and Leonard Cohen albums, Dave's house at the tp of a hill, Mick's house full of students from Italy and Portugal and Germany. The place is full of ghosts and seems so old now, seems to resonate with dream-like memories. An ancient geography. On the Lewes Road, and my old wak back into Moulscombe where I first lived, curving away into the edges of Brighton. The grubby shops and fast food joints, Doner Kebab winds and Burger air. The cracked facades of slightly decaying houses spilling evening light out onto the pavements. Orange street lamp halos glittering and reflected in the roadside streams.
Only the rain rememers, only the rain knows.

The rain passed now though, sunny all day yesterday, but the light was softer, a swansong summer. The blue of the sky was deep as dreams and pools and sleep. Summer is over. Bank holiday weekend ritual, last ceremony of the summer, and now the long and luxurious curve to winter.

And last week, the wind. I remember sitting on the pier and watching the waves come in. Spindrift frenzy and foam horses gallopng and falling, and between the frothy tumbling, the gray of the sea, deep as the sky and full of serpents clutching autumn in their jaws.

Outside the window, the song of seagulls, and in their harsh charm, echoes of bleak and dreamy Sunday shores where September stretches into October, and October seems forever.