A Bell Chiming in the Distance

Seems so high up in the fourth floor of the call centre, an astral building, a tower looking down on Brighton, almost from the clouds.
It rained most of the day today, only clearing up when I left work not yet an hour ago. The kind of day that always seems to about to descend into twilight. Grey, heavy clouds, unbroken by change or glimpse of sun or sky.
Looking out of the window, I could see one light left on somewhere _I can't remember where now- and it put me in mind of being back at school, on days as similarly dreary as this one. Headaches used to always threaten those days. the lowness of the clouds bringing an odd pressure into the interior om skull.
Grey drizzly weather always seems to be accompanied by a sound, or at least an imagined sound, and that is of a huge bell chiming somewhere in the distance. A low almost unheard frequency, it seems to steal concentration, sends my mind over dream-like, imagined landscapes; scrubby fields, dead meadows, through bare tree, boughs click-clacking together like bones.
The low wind, the vastness of the closing skies.

(and school. Back at Abbeylands Primary School in Kinloss. Maths, or some other lesson that I could never get. Yellow fluorescent lights humming, and the silence that hangs over an absorbing, difficult, yet boring task. Outside so dark, the reflection of hundreds of schoolkids, ghosts in the drizzle. Beyond the playground, and the playing fields, beyond the farmers fields to that solitary clump of trees by the railway line. Always taken there. The chiming of the bell. The call of a distance cloaked in sleep and headaches and heaviness)

A quick walk to the council tax payments office at London Road. 'Closed for Lunch. Open at 1:45.' Not helpful to me as I had to be back at work by then. Back through London road. Clusters of people and umbrellas at bus-stops, the charity shops full of pensioners and books without interest.

The chiming of the distance is stilled now. The air outside has lightened, twilight still an hour away.
Longer than an hour away, the length of a country away, I think of that wood, that solitary clump of trees by the railway line from Forres to Inverness and wonder if there is a bell chiming there.