Leaving Brighton by train. Grey November skies over this early Saturday afternoon. The city looking tattered and tired, as all cities do, when seen by train on under a grey November sky.
Our room in the Sami Hotel, somewhere in Shepherds Bush. Em pointed out that this room would probably be advertised as a 'studio flat' in Brighton. A basement room, where, in the bathroom, a high up window looked out into another room we couldn't see. The hotel was on the Uxbridge Road. I could walk back to my adolescent years from here, I thought, back through Hayes and Hillingdon to Ickenham and Uxbridge. Buses came back with 'Uxbridge' as their destination. I wonder what it would be like to return there in November.
The banks of the River Thames, some time on Saturday night.
There was some kind of Christmas market on the banks of the Thames. Merry-go-rounds and stalls selling mulled wine and roasted chestnuts. In a graffiti covered underpass, skateboarders with serious faces gathered. The presence of the nearby market turned a threatening environment into one that seemed safe and cosy. I wish I had taken a photograph of them.
Sunday morning and the view from our room. I like these strangely nondescript places 'dreary but meaningful' to quote Fritz Leiber. Forgotten angles, obscure courtyard. A London shadow. No-one thinks about these places. If I hadn't taken a photograph of it I probably would have forgotten it by tomorrow morning.
I seem to be looking quite guilty, as if I have been caught in some conspiratorial conversation with the lamp. Why I would be looking guilty or even suspicious I don't know as it was me who took the photo.
There was a painting in one of the twisting corridors of the hotel. A Chinese looking ship (is it called a 'Junk') under a green sky floating in a green sea. These photographs remind me of the 1970s. In my memory they seem somewhat ubiquitous. A childhood fragment. Perhaps this was why I found the painting so eerie and enthralling. A timeless dreamlike atmosphere. A sinister serenity. These paintings would be considered, at best, to be a piece of 1970s kitsch, and at worst, talentless trash, and it was actually a real painting, and not a reproduction. Lost on an obscure wall in a cheap hotel in Shepherds Bush, the painting had all the quality of a haunting, hanging there in the permanent twilight of a short flight of cramped stairs. I wonder who the artist was?
Looking back as we left the hotel.
When I first saw this on the Saturday going to the hotel I was quite excited, and entertained many ideas about what a 'Shepherds Bush Medieval Centre' might contain - some exciting museum full of displays about the plague in West London? Exhibits of torture instruments from the middle ages? The next day I saw that I had been sadly mistaken. It was not the 'Shephered Bush Medieval Centre' but the 'Shepherds Bush
Medical Centre'. What was the designer / sign writer thinking of with that gothic lettering against a black background? Not the kind of thing to inspire confidence when visiting the Doctors... This curious choice of typography and design was not without precedent however. There was a dentist across the road whose logo appeared to be a severed tooth.
Tube train view. One of the commonest views in London, but one which never seems to lose a sense of power. This
is London.
We walked from Camden Lock to Kings Cross by Regents Canal. These buildings were strange, as if made in an old factory in some remote region of the Soviet Union in the 1970s. What would it be like to live there, looking out over the water of an oddly boatless stretch of canal?
I find sights like this strangely appealing. A set of ramshackle steps leading down from a nowhere road, scattered with the last of the autumns leaves. I like the
forgotteness of it all.
Across the canal, two discarded office chairs by a street lamp. Who had put them here? Why did they need a street lamp here? The whole place seemed so
abandoned. I wonder what it would have looked like at dusk, when the lamp had just come on and night had begun to fall?
'...it seemed unusually bleak and suggestive; almost beautifully ugly though in no sense picturesque; dreary but meaningful'.
Smoke Ghost, Fritz Leiber
Canal water in November seems hypnotically cold.
The pipe looked like a tentacle of some Lovecraftian monstrosity, stretched through this brackish, industrial water...
The basement of a bookshop, somewhere between Kings Cross and Oxford Street. All bookshops should be like this. Didn't find any Thomas Ligotti, though did pick up two copies of a small press magazine called 'One Eye Grey' which 'retells traditional folktales and ghost stories in a modern London context'. One of the magazines even has a story about Brighton in it. I also found a copy of 'Zap Comix' from 1975 or something.
London as twilight falls.
From the train at Gatwick Airport.
Back in Brighton, about two and a half hours ago.
