Later in January, a Strange and Drifting Coast

Moving further away from Christmas and the New Year now. That strange and drifting coast between January and early summer. Do we call it spring? No - spring is part of it though, but just a fraction.
This uninvestigated season is far larger than that.

I felt it today during a brief trip down the seafront. Warm sun. Sat on the pebbles reading Wolf Solent by John Cowper Powys. Air all clear and... well, not wintry, but not spring-like either. Hypnotic rhythms of the waves.
The pebbles felt wet beneath my fingers. - perhaps the retreating tides, but I remember rain last night too.

Ecstatic sleep last night. Unremembered dreams. Woke sometime in the small hours thinking about a play set for some kind of generic 'space' action figures. Echoes of a childhood toy that never existed. A labyrinthine space station moulded in plastic, with all manner of corridors, pulleys, spacecraft loading bays, and a detachable 'control-room' where the dark villain would plot to take over the universe.
All made sense at 2:00am.

Things do when you wake at night. Over the summer of 1996, waking at dawn with that strange feeling of euphoria, an implacable feeling of things making sense. When I woke, whatever made sense had vanished, though on one of these mornings I woke with the lines we make friends with the grass running through my head, and a dream-image, perhaps of a grassy field by a canal during a red sunset. More like a memory than a dream, though dreams are far more real than life of course.

'18th January 2011'.
I let the words roll around my mouth like bones, or dice.
They taste of something old and ancient, and not new at all. Something tall and narrow. An edifice constructed by some lost suburban civilisation.
(twenty years ago, walking with Edward round Hillingdon, obsessed with Samhain's 'Initium' album, the curly-wurly bridge over the A-40, lost in the orange street lamp light and the London skies behind, the bridge somehow representing January, always has been January since, suburban monolith, call up later January, call up the bridge)
But tonight, walking home and breathing in, I could smell, could taste the December just gone. That curiously burnt smell of winter 2010.
Something not more than seven or eight weeks old, but it seemed so very, very far away in my memory.