A Blueprint for Nocturnea

4:00pm exactly, and I am sat in an internet cafe on Western Road, near the Sainsburys where I used to buy my dinner from when I lived in my old flat on The Drive. Some pleasant, indian / oriental music is playing in the background. A low murmer of conversation at the counter. Everything seems pleasant and peaceful and uncrowded in here.
And, oh, the joy of writing without the various curses of the laptop. The keys pick up every letter, Internet Explorer won't shut down every three minutes or so. Writing becomes less an exercise of semi-literary, semi-literate endurance, and more something that happens as if by magic. I think something and it appears on screen. I'm no longer aware of having to check to make sure that every key stroke is accompanied by the letter on screen any more. Not even aware of the motions of my two fingers typing. An unconscious motion. mind and word and texts drifting into cyberspace.
Someone else has just walkd in, is at the counter. The woman says 'what one would you like to use?' The man replies 'any', 'four , seven?'.
I am sat at number 10.
I really should have chosen 39.

Autumn seems to have come down now. No traces of summer left. Walking to the Evening Star last night, I luxuriated in the novelty of the cold. Its interesting the way that autumn - or any seasonal change really - makes you more aware of the usually taken-for-granted space around you. As I tried to write in the curtailed post of this morning, the darkness between the lamps seemed very different, as if the texture of the darkness was palpable. A soft and velvety thing, a fabric that rumoured of deep water. Falling into pools on summer days and finding the current dragging you down into the cathedral-like depths below. The fall of the street light created little islands in the darkness. Looking down a long road whose name I can never remember, these ordered islands seemed almost like an equation, a night structure perhaps. A blueprint for Nocturnea, an umbra, a region of shadows.
Up above, the sky was mostly cloudless. Even the darkness there seemed different. Less shallow than summer night. Deeper. Everything in autumn seems deeper. A newly waning moon that really did seem to be a sphere, hanging there in space, and the few stars I could see seemed so cold. A desolate and yet somehow comforting presence.

Brighton seems quieter now that October is on the horizon. The tourists have thinned, and the influx of new students have mostly not yet arrived. the beach has begun to attain that rather more abandoned feel which is far more conducive to walk-dreaming (like daydreaming, but while walking) than over summer.
A slightly unreal dream-like atmosphere seems to suffuse everything. A layer of silver, a shiver of gold, and a feeling that the afternoon skies are watching you. My small bedsit window increasingly begins to show a street that seems ever more distant. There are less cries now in the night, and those seagulls... why are they so silent now? Their racket would invariably keep me awake over the summer, but now... I can't remember the last time I heard them.
Maybe some great disaster is coming, and the seagulls, like that myth about the ravens at the Tower of London, will leave when the city is in danger. An easy get-out clause for the Tower though, the ravens wings are clipped. Throw them from the Tower and they sink to the ground. Birds exiled from the air.
The seagulls in Brighton are free to leave when they will.

Maybe the current lack of seagulls is due to some secret seagull rendesvous out on the Sussex Downs. A mysterious cabal of gulls reciting the arcana of seas and herrings and fishing boats and storms. It is rumoured that cats hold their own mysterious conventions (back-alley tom cat myths, feline gangsters drawing up plans to run the forgotten wastegrounds of suburbia for their own mouse-hungry ends) and I can imagine seagulls doing the same. Actually, thinking about it, there are well documented tales of bird-parliaments, vast gatherings glimpsed on roadsides. circles of rooks and crows, and the largest in the centre of this circle, holding court as it were. A 'court' maybe a well chosen word. There are also tales of birds being 'tried', as if for avian crimes. Magpies held down by rooks, attacked by other birds, and the silent circle outside watching the proceedings with equanimity.
And if birds have their own laws, their own parliaments, their own justice, then what of their ghost stories? The ghost-stories of seagulls, what would they be like?

Rambling now, drifting from tangent to tangent, luxuriating in the comfort of writing on a computer that works, as I luxuriated in the novelty of cold last night.
We are still distant from twilight here, but outside the light has begun to adopt that flat-white look of Sunday afternoons. Premonitions of dusk, both of the day and the year.
Home at last.