The White-Out Days, Beginning to Fade

That curious curving into spring; the lengthening days, the bright gloom of the skies, and midwinter, now seeming decades ago.
I walk a new way back from work now, down a shadowy street between a car park and the backs of the buildings along the seafront. A forgotten, half-industrial place. Glimpses of stairs and iron railing, street lights embedded in to the wall leading to a locked door.
Then pass the Regency Tavern, and that nameless square that leads down to the seafront, then up, onto Preston Street with all its restaurants and fast food joints. Come out opposite the Aberdeen Angus Steakhouse. Up onto Western Road, and it's still light.
I watch two homeless men argue outside the newsagents.
And here in the bedsit, watching the 6:00pm sunset on the houses opposite, a colour like spring, and the blood of childhood grazes, and cartoons, and the warning lanterns left on railway tracks on the covers of 1970s paperback books of train disasters.

I went down the beach today at lunchtime, continued drawing a small A6 picture of a man walking down a set of steps under street lamps and through woodcut-like woods. It was only later I realised I was drawing the entrance to the woods back in Burnside in Scotland.
People scattered over the stones.
I talked with the man on the seafront stall where I bought a cup of tea.
I watched a dog play in the water.