Last Afternoon in Springtime

Sat on the laptop at Em's parents house. Birdsong. Sunlight instead of yesterdays rain. There is a fly buzzing about the room. Winnie the dog's footsteps clatter on the wooden floor. The fly buzzing acts as a reminder that this is the last day of Spring, and that, tomorrow, summer begins.
Head back from Worcester this afternoon - the bus to Birmingham, then the train from Birmingham down to Brighton. We get back, hopefully, about 11:00pm. Then a too short sleep and back into work for 9:00am tomorrow morning.
The light here has a cleaner bluer quality than the yellow dusty light of Brighton, and on the train journey back the landscape will reflect this shift too, from the lush green over-and-undergrowth of Worcestershire to the dusty, sparse and somehow lacking geography of Sussex.

Notes from Joe Bird's Sofa

On Joe Bird's sofa. Eva the dog beside me. Joe crouched on the floor, about to put on some music. Or not. Shows me DVDs instead. Pressure cooker in the kitchen. Radiator on full blast. Can't turn it down. Controls in the room where Joe Walmsley sleeps. Latter Joe a holiday of sleep and hangovers. A weekend long twilight triggered by his too much absinthe on Thursday night with Joe Bird. Hot grey skies. Joe Bird plays the guitar.

Cathedral Empire

To my right, a window; tall red brick wall of the swimming pool. Shouts from the alley. Bird sounds, and sparse green bush leaves in the breeze. Em in a kitchen peeling potatoes (I did offer to help...) Winnie the dog comes to say hello, click-clacking paws across the wooden floor.

A loop round the Severn, with Em, Joe and Joe, the latter half hungover. As Joe W says; 'I always drink too much on the first night'. He arrived yesterday too. Walking Eva, Joe B's dog through Diglis Park. A wondering at the fact I had never noticed this park before. A landlocked empire, still expanding inside itself.

Earlier; at the indoor market that no-one knows the name of -Market Hall?- flicking through the compact discs at the record stall, reissues of obscure hardcore punk bands from the 1980s, never heard of any of them. I buy a 1990 GBH release from one of Worcester's numerous charity shops for £1.00 instead. In the unnamed market, there is a new stall, not here last time 'Retinal Comics'. It is closed. I peer in through the windows, trying to see horror comics in the gloom.

There are no seagulls in the morning here. I woke up to the chorus of builder-song instead, a loud and raucous rendition of 'Everybody Wants to Rule the World'. I lay in bed and listened to the nostalgia-birds beyond them, and imagined the cathedral bells, somewhere in the distance.

Poem on the Eve Before A Long Weekend in Worcester

Stoking that mythic engine, seeing what serpents
and sea monsters, this time, glide in that
reservoir of mysteries.

I reserve the right, but;
I shall see London road at twilight,
from the base of the hill, past the old house at 136
to the Chinese takeaway on the Corner.
Lark Hill Service station.
The trees are gods here.

I remember the heat, a year and a week ago.
That metallic taste of trains
and tarot cards.

The madman saying everything had to change.

A Daydream of Roundabouts in Slough Drizzle

Entering those weird lines that demarcate the beginning of Summer. We are late in May now. The weather is sometimes sunny, sometimes windy, sometimes sunny, sometimes even cool, but all of it has that heaviness I associate with summer. As I sat having a cup of tea before work this morning, I tasted an echo from last summer, those endless meals of tuna and noodles and Worcestershire sauce. I don't know where it came from.
Worcester this weekend again, and as these years pass, the resonance of that city seems to grow ever stronger. A mythical place whose spectral aura only heightens each time I visit there. Over these past few weeks, my thoughts of Worcester seem to centre around the base of London Road - always in a windy early-autumn shadow - and that late night stretch between 136 London Road and the Chinese takeaway on the corner.
Alistair wrote me a message on Facebook today about the black dog that I found in my room there, one autumn night in 1997.
On a similar note - kind of- I have re-watched the series 'The Office' these past few weeks. A work of genius, but it is the opening sequence that concerns us here. We are treated to three shots, a cluster of office blocks and multi-storey car parks, a yellow bus pulling out of a bus station, and, most importantly of all, an elevated shot of a roundabout. This latter shot I imagine to be filmed early on a grey and rainy morning. The road is clogged with traffic. It looks drizzly and awful and depressing. I kind of know Slough, where it was filmed. I spent my adolescence - until I was twenty one - living in the nearby Metropolitan tube station lands of Ickenham and Uxbridge.
I did a foundation course in art and design in nearby Langley - within walking distance of Slough.
That shot of the roundabout in that imagined early morning drizzle stirs up so many feelings in me... It is not the kind of nowherescape that you get down here in Brighton. Everything here is too bright and shiny and picturesque. the roundabout shot is an illustration of something mechanical.
I cannot help but have daydreams of return, of what it would be like, to find myself a job in a call centre in an industrial estate on the edges of Slough, move there on my own, knowing no-one, and having to walk over that roundabout early in the mornings in that dreadful death-cold November drizzle. I would look down on that roundabout, and wonder what the hell I had done, moving here, to this nowhere town, in a dead-end job where I knew no-one and had no reason to be. What would my weekends be like, my weeks, my years as I pushed into an obscure middle age, stranded in a blank area just outside the orbit of London? It would be a triumph of magnificent gloom, a victory of poetic desolation...

I glance around my bedsit, and over the sound of the man next door strumming a guitar, and a documentary about alcoholics trying to restore their lives, I wonder if there is a remnant of me there, some shaved off echo that didn't leave the area back in 1994 to study illustration at Southampton, but remained there, lost in the endless industrial estates and drizzle soaked mornings, endlessly walking between call centres and bus stops, like those ghosts that are said to haunt railway stations and ask for the times of trains that stopped running twenty years before.

I have my own call centre here though, and instead of roundabouts, I can see the sea from where I sit.

The House on the Corner

I left the house at about 8:30pm. I had an hour and a half before I was due to meet Em, halfway into Kemptown, and this was a new place to meet her. The day had been sunny and windy, a restless day. I had spent a few hours on the sofa in the bedsit, surfing the internet, drawing, reading. Like the outside, a restless few hours, but not necessarily unpleasant.
By the time I left the house, we were somewhat on the way to twilight. Warmth had left the day and the gray pale skies were darkening in a way that was remniscant of very late summer. Looked at from another way, so late in summer, it seems almost autumn. This resonance of early autumnnal mystery would accompany me through this walk.
I cut down onto the seafront, walked along there to the Pier. I stopped at the Pier because I needed to use the toilet, and also wanted a coffee, but the coffee shop was closed. The pier was full of too-loud fruit machines and arcade games and people from Eastern Europe on the minimum wage working in horrific conditions. The noise there would drive you mad... but I quite like the Pier anyway.
Disappointed that the coffee shop was closed I headed on, cut up onto St James Street, a place I never go to, ostensibly because I have no reason to. The street has an unpleasant, oddly corrupt atmosphere to it. It always seems to be about 2:00 in the morning here... the shops have a ramshackle decaying air about them, the supermarkets look past their use by date. I walk along the street eager to be away from it. Someone on the other side of the road screams and waves his arms about.

I am glad when St James Street vanishes behind me. Back when I lived this way, I would walk back along the parallel road of Edward Street late at night. Quieter and more shadowy, but it felt somehow safer, less mad.

I am approaching Kemptown. I know where I am going, where I shall pass by. Chesham Street and the ground floor flat I shared with Flo for two years from 2001 - 2003. These nocturnal pilgrimages into my own past are becoming a ritual of mine, a fascination whose mechanics I cannot quite understand. This pilgrimage is more poignant than others though. I have not been back since Flo took his own life back in March.

As I approach the Kemptown area I become aware of a certain quality to something. To what I am not exactly sure. Something to do with the breeze, and the shadows the full and fecund trees make on the ground? The silence of the closed Sunday night shops 'Kemptown Fish'n'chips' dark and wrong and should-be-open. I remember back in a probable autumn of 2002, the teenage girl there talking to me about Myra Hindley 'If she ever gets released, she won't last a second... She'll be murdered. She should be murdered'. I puzzled over her vindictiveness as I ate my cod and chips in my room at Flo's place.

Tomato ketchup, chips. Tobacco for roll-ups afterwards. The door to the en-suite bathroom swung open.

A pile of magazines by the toilet.

I am hungry.

I swing past Chesham Street, but only glance up there to the old flat. I need food first, and it is still too early to go up Chesham Street and meet Em. I drop down into streets I am unfamiliar with. A rich area, but oddly shadowy and quiet. Trees and street lamps. I am pleased to see a local shop open. In the dark road, I am pleased to see the light-spill on the pavement, a nocturnal archetype. Often in these coastal towns the night-dark is blue. In London the night goes through various shades of grey until full-night is reached.

Not here though. or in Worcestershire.

(I shall be back there next weekend)

I am putting off walking past Flo's flat. I head up onto the road whose name I can't recall, and that turns into Edward Street. I come up somewhere near the petrol station that is there. I remember the knobbly brick wall, those late night excursions for cigarettes and cans of coke, crisps and chocolate.

There is Flo's place. On the corner.

I am not sure what I feel. There are no lights on. I presume that it is still empty. The curtains seem to be open, and a big patch of darkness obscures the details of anything that may be inside. The window seems watchful and empty, as if something else has swelled up to fill the absence there. I think of the silence inside; the hallway into the living room, those two steps I always tripped up, my room with those wooden floorboards, the living room with the door out onto the garden, the tiny kitchen at the back. Flo's square frying pan, the television perched on top of a sideboard. The garden. The bench that collapsed when I sat on it one summer.

I imagine the house producing silence, kneading a velvet honey-thick substance over the air and the wall, through the darkness which is now unlit by light bulb. There is no sign of Flo here, but the place feels haunted anyway. I don't know how anyone could come and live here, but they will of course. They will come in with their objects and their belongings and their lives and their memories and their routines, and they'll cover up what the house is now, this brooding space, between one occupant and the next, and this is how it should be, of course. The people who move in there will not have known him, and won't even know what happened. The years will pass, and those who did know him will grow old, and still remember him, and I shall probably return one night, sometime in the future.

Some other pilgrimage pencilled in.

Perhaps I shall be in my 40s then.

Time passes.

A short while later I sit on an uncomfortable fence waiting for Em. I have just passed by two teenage boys. One of them was on a bike, the other sitting on the steps of a house. Some girls across the street were jeering at them about 'the nice mobile phone you've got there... do yoiu want it back?'. One of the teenage boys jeered back. I can't remember what he said. An old woman turned up and glared at him. 'What's your name?' she ordered, then repeated myself. 'You know my name', he said back. He seemed mildly unsure of himself. 'You're still here then?' the old woman asked him.

'Yeah. I'm still here'.

I am glad when Em turns up and we walk slowly back to her flat along the seafront. The ocean is black and restless, and beyond the reach of the lamps.

There is a boat on the horizon though, brightly lit and shining. I think of it moving, cruising over the dreamy and unmeasured depths of an unimaginable sea.

I sleep well that night.

A Year Ago this Weekend

A year ago yesterday that Telegen, the old call centre, went into administration and we lost our jobs. It barely feels like six months ago, never mind a year. May felt somehow later in the year than it does this year. I really can't understand the surprise that I constantly feel at the ever accelerating passage of time. I really would have thought that I might have groiwn used to it. In a year's time, I'm going to be 40. If the last year has passed by like 6 months, then the next year might pass like 5 months, which means that I will turn 40 at the end of summer, rather than next March, as I should...
A year ago exactly was a Saturday afternoon, and I was in Worcester with Joe Walmsley. We had spent the day walking through our old haunts, old houses we lived, the college, old parks... I think we were sat on top of Fort Royal Hill smoking cigarettes, about to return to Joe Bird's house (he was playing cricket in Malvern all day) to watch Doctor Who, before the final leg of our memory tour up London Road... I was in total shock from the job-loss, and the stroll around the city I had once lived in was both surreal and pleasantly distracting. I remember the summer-hot air, a sense of panic at having about £30, and rent to pay the next week, bills going out... As I sat on Fort Royal Hill, I seriously considered the potentiality of moving back to Worcester at some point.
The two Joes went out that night to The Cardinal's Hat, but that sense of panic I had almost been fending off had descended in full, and after one pint I headed back to Joe Bird's house, where I spent the evening in the company of his dog, Eva, playing the guitar, drinking his cans of beer, and chain smoking in the garden. I remember the deep, velvety black of the Worcestershire night, more intense and starry than these somehow pale nights in Sussex.
I slept badly in the spare room, knowing that I was to return home the next day to whatever chaos was waiting for me... the future, for once, truly unknown. I slumbered, rather than slept. I was aware of the two Joes coming in at some point. I remember the early dawn outside, and as it got lighter and lighter, my own dread at having to return came over me.
After I had fully awoken, and was waiting to leave for the train, I remember the bells of the cathedral, strange and nostalgic, summer-chimes, for a season that had had such an unexpected start.
Unbelievable that it is all a year ago.

Stream

Exhausted.
The sun.
Anniversaries of journeys into chaos.
Half-familiar people.
A drawing of a man holding a cigarette. I couldn't get the hand
right till I looked at mine in the mirror.
Dreams I can't remember.
Autumn (the walk from London Road in Worcester to the Chinese,
nights black and disordered by winds)
---from the November petrol station, Lark Hill Road, the temporary
fireworks shop -Black Cat Fireworks- had a sign bright and ghostly
as a moon---
(cloistered)
I have never watched the rain from a narrow slit of a window of
a mansion that is grey and centuries old, but I have watched the
wind move through the branches of a clustered and disturbing wood
from an 18th century farmhouse.
The alarm in the mornings.
St Nicholas Churchyard.
Watching the the trees of Queens Park from the call centre.
Someone moving furniture about.

11pm is the New Midnight

11pm is the new midnight. Sat on my sofa against the window. The curtains are broken, somehow, and through the now-uneven material, the sound of cars and voices, already half-drunk on a Wednesday night. Seagulls too, an echo from the small hours of last summer.
The night feels wet and black. A day of white drizzle and white clouds. The edges of everything fading away, an attic-entropy. The lofty heights of buildings decapitated, the end of the sea softened and tideless and boatless. Struck by the silence of the waves. That double-glazing silence again.
I dreamt last night of 136 London Road in Worcester. Corin was living in the basement living room. A cosy windowless place of cushions and sofas. In the dream I couldn't believe that I had returned and was allowed back in the house. The entrance to an adjoining room boarded up. Rumours of something there that no-one talked about.
I slipped in the rain on the way to work this morning. That dizzying moment of panic as balance falls away. Then that curious resignation, those seconds stretched to hours. Landing with some grace and little injury but no dignity. A middle-aged woman asks if I am okay before disappearing into a building where she works. It looked like she was fleeing me.
At my feet are scattered old horror comics from the 1970s, paintbrushes, erasers, a mobile phone and a bottle of ink.
A page torn out of a new sketchbook because I could not wait for the ink to dry and smudged the face irreparably of a 1950s style woman. Her eyes glance away, do not meet mine. The first drawing I had attempted in a while. The new sketchbook, already harmed. A guilty object, bad omen.
It all used to flow so freely but the ink just seems to clog these days.

London, Royston and Halfway Between Everywhere

A busy weekend. After I finish work on Saturday, I catch the train to London. I was on my way to see my sister, recently a mother to Charlotte, in the town of Royston, halfway between London and Cambridge. I elected to spend a few hours in London first, finally making it to '30th Century Comics' in a surprisingly leafy and pleasant Putney. I leave 30th century Comics £51 lighter, but my bag is now heavy with horror comics. Vintage echoes, cheap artwork. I buy a couple I used to own but have lost.

I flick through them. Back to the summer of 1985. Horror comics are time machine. I wonder where the originals went? Lost in some eternal attic, some hungry threshold spaces that swallows up bits of our lives when we're not looking.

Only later when we realise what we've lost.
I like Putney, the vast swathe of the Thames cutting through it. A church hidden behind voluminous trees, and somewhere, a wedding, I keep seeing wedding guests popping out of some unknown hotel for cigarettes.

Notting Hill Gate afterwards, then Oxford Street. A strange glee comes over me. A mixture of euphoria and exhaustion. This could have be any time. Oxford Street never changes. The dark record shops of Berwick Street, then through Soho to Picadilly Circus. This might once have been a threatening place.
There are theatres everywhere. And alleyways. Accidental spaces that grow between buildings. Grey shadowy areas, an interzone for the obscure.
I like London.

The train to Royston.

Flat countryside and something strange about the landscape. Remniscent of some other time. The summery fields and clustered trees on the horizon. Little stations for towns I can't remember now. What would it be like to live here, in this maze of garden cities and commuter colonies?

The blue of the sky, fading to dusk.
A nostalgia for train journeys.

I meet my niece, four weeks old. She looks constantly surprised at everything, and when she sleeps, she looks as if she has put a lot of effort into it. I wonder what she dreams of in her dream-life not yet a month old?

After my sister and Mum have gone to bed, I make a cup of tea and open the window in the spare room where I am to sleep on an air-mattress. My sister lives on a street next to a railway station. There is some noise in a pub near the station. My sister's road is lit by bright white lamps, and this makes it seem an airport, some 24 hour environment which is devoid of people.

An airport for voices.

On Sunday morning I go to the newsagent. I can't get used to the silent streets, the lack of people. Royston seems abandoned, as if some great disaster has occurred and the residents have all fled. A post-apocalyptic suburbia, an armageddon under grey and leaden English skies. Another liminal place, generating an aura of desolation. An emptiness that is almost palpable. It tastes of gloomy spring drizzle and slight headaches on school day Sunday afternoons. Everyone here belongs either to London or Cambridge.

Back at my sister's house, I look at the garden. At the leaves rustling in the wind. Double-glazing silence. Oddly hypnotic, their fluttering and silent movements. Woodstock Drive memories. Adolescence and staring out of the window at similarly silent leaves under grey and unfriendly skies. I read in the local paper about a cave in Royston that was discovered in the 17th century. It is covered with religous iconography, not all of which is identifiable. No-one knows the purpose of this mysterious chapel, this nameless grotto. I read about an ongoing project called 'The Royston Tapestry, which 'when finished will rival The Bayeux Tapestry in its skill and originality.'

I nearly fall about laughing, but I am left quite quite speechless.

On Sunday afternoon, catching the train back to London, I nearly fall asleep. Train rhythm nudging me to dream and nostalgia. A nearly deja-vu. The hypnotic passage of the fields, and as the train slows round a curve, I see a path run through a field and vanish into a thick and clustered wood, and I nearly remember something.

But it is gone.

I am glad to see Emily at Brighton Station, but I am sad the weekend away is over.

I sleep well and before I know it it is Monday morning.

The alarms startles me from a dream I can't remember.

17:53

The Bedsit.
The lamp is on because I left it on all day. Accidentally of course. I really should turn it off now.
I sit on my bed with a copy of the Guardian and the sleeve of Manilla Road's 'The Deluge' album, from 1986.
On the floor, DVD covers for The Office, Curb Your Enthusiasm and Metroland.
I must look at train times to Royston, but this is not fun, so I stare instead at the lamp I really must switch off, but can't be bothered to do.
17:55 now.

Brief memory of a Very Strange Television Show -Solved!

Last summer I wrote a description of a sceme from a television show I remembered as a child. All I remember, really, is one scene, and that it was a childrens television programme, and broadcast sometime in the late 1970s. Much as I would like to link to that post now, my laptop seems to be emulating the computers of the 1990s and is not allowing me to do anything exciting. So, I'll settle with quoting from my own post...

'A group of people are in an underground cavern, searching for something. A dark and shadowy labyrinth, rock walls and sandy floor. Someone disturbs a rock, and there glides from behind the rock, a snake, only this snake has a human skull for it's head... This was the cliffhanger at the end of an episode'.

I had reluctantly come to the conclusion that I had probably dreamt the whole thing. I could find no referemce to anything like it anywhere, in the shows I had watched and those I had only read about; Sky, King of the Castle, Children of the Stones, Shadows, The Owl Service, The Tomorrow People, The Omega Factor...
The scene seemed too nightmarish for it to be a childrens television show anyway, and I had ascribed it to some vague memory, mixed up with some nightmare... until, of course the other day, I found out what it was much to my total astonishment.
I think I was looking at Amazon at Sapphire and Steel box sets, and looking at what other people had bought. One of the DVDs that someone else had bought after buying a Sapphire and Steel box set was a programme called 'Raven' from 1977, and a description saying that it was 'little seen'. Hmm, I thought. I had never heard of it. This in itself quite excited me. Thought probably not surprising. Just when you think you've discovered the limit of 1970s childrens supernatural/science fiction dramas, along comes another one. Moving on quickly to Youtube, I discovered that someone had, helpfully, uploaded the entire series.
There it was. The end of episode 4.

My memory was remarkably accurate.
A group of people are in a cave. They are looking through a hole in the wall. We see five heads from within the hole in the wall. They call for one of their friends. Somethin rises at the bottom of the screen. We cut to a shot of the one woman, screaming. We cut to another shot. We are looking into the hole, from the outside. Something emerges from the hole. We see it for a split second before the credits kick in. A human skull, on what seems to be the body of a snake.

I, of course had to check the beginning of episode 5 to see what happens next.
We have a reprise. The human skull, on what seems to be the body of a snake emerges once more, and the body of the snake is in fact an arm, the hand of which is holding the snake... and the arm belongs to a man, who climbs through the hole. 'Well' he says 'he needed rescuing too, but its a bit late for him!'.

I am reminded of that old adage of 'never meeting your heroes'. A slight disappointment that there is not an actual skull-headed snake..? Oh well...

I have only flicked through the episodes on Youtube. Apparently the entire series is released on DVD. I've read a few reviews of it online. Despite the skull-headed snake not being a skull-headed snake, the programme looks, to be frank, absolutely incredible. It seems to concern a plan to build a nuclear power station over a series of ancient caves, freeing ancient elemental forces. It seems to base a lot of its ideas on Celtic myth and astrology. One clip I saw sees one character explaining why tunneling from one cave system to another was asking for trouble; 'the cave system forms a zodiac... capricorn and cancer are negative female signs in direct opposition; there had to be fireworks'. Another clip I saw sees a white-eyed figure of a man, translucent against a swirling chaotic void. A magical symbol is overlaid on the screen as it cuts between scenes of the man vanishing into the psychedelic void and the people attempting to call him back.

This is almost like occult programming aimed at children. One modern day reviewer has called the programme 'deeply unsettling'.

And despite the fact that there is no skull-headed snake, the end of episode 4 is still looks fairly nightmarish to me...

AND ALSO THE TREES III: On the Cliff Edge Wind, in Limbo

and After the long summer of 1996 I started at Worcester University College (all summers, despite their length remaining exactly the same must always be described as 'long', in a way that autumn and spring never are.) I lived in a shared house in the St John's area - a tidy little building that had a cellar (carpeted) a garden and three floors, noit counting the cellar. My room was large and pleasant and caught the sun all day. As I look round this sickly bedsit, I can barely imagine such luxury now.
I met the people in my house whom I all got along with, and their friends, whom I all got along with too. One of them turned out to be an acquaintance I had not seen since before Southampton, at leaat two years before. Quite a coincidence.
The trouble was, as nice as my home life was, all the people in the house had already finished their degrees, and were ex-students. As such, for that first term, I knew very few people I was actually at college with, and most of those were people who lived off campus for some reason. I remember talking to one of them, and how difficult she was finding it to socialise with the people she was on the course with.

The people I lived withg were working and mostly coupled up. A drunken and riotous first term at university this was not proving to be. A sense of dread would sometimes envelop me as I made my way to another lecture where I would know no-one and smoke cigarettes in silence at breaktime, and return home sometimes having not spoken for hours.

And Also The Trees crept into my consciousness. Long hours spent in my room, watching autumn deepen and cool into winter. The 'Virus Meadow' album opened up to me. The opening track 'Slow Pulse Boy' a spoken word narrative set to music. A man stands at a window as 'somewhere the blast furnace explodes...' A creepy, haunted track, the tempo slow enough to create a growing sense of tension, then a kind of release, where the shouted words 'Fire burns in our jack boots' become a kind of plea, whether of triumph or despair it is difficult to tell. Then the last line; 'tomorrow the sun shines' - and the message is obvious.

The sun doesn't shine tonight.

'Gone Like The Swallows' too, another spoken word track. A near arcane litany of words toward the end of the track, like the ingredients for a post-modern spell...

'A green teapot, a pair of boots

A broken pocket, watch and chain
A born dead baby pig
Lying, pure white... bloodless
Soft and smooth as a gloved lady's hand
A spinning wheel, a bill hook
An umbrella, empty bottles, a tin bath
A hat stand and a slate grey pill box hat
Sailed past his grabbing hands

And were gone... like the swallows'

The song is sweet and nostalgic, and like a day in summer building up to a storm. (I have no idea why the font has changed itself by the way):

'Trying to cling to the summer cotton
Light threadbare patterned sleeveless
Flowered dirty carnation sunflower
Sweatstained primrose threadbare
Dirty disappearing decaying flowered
Fading cotton forgotten fucking summer dress'

I would mesmerise the words, and yet, I still had no idea that the band were existing.

Autumn moved into winter, and I began to feel cut-off from college life to the extent that I considered leaving my course. To do what I didn't know. I would set 'Virus Meadow' on the alarm on my stereo. Woken to the sounds of 'Slow Pulse Boy'. Fall asleep to vague memories of strange dreams. The songs working their way into my mind. One dream I remember was about choirs lost in the second world war, returning as ghosts in darkened chapels... 'we could tear up the floor, and find all the things we'd ever lost'.

On empty Sundays by the window, I would watch it get dark, study the post box across the street, bright red against some hedge-lined alley I never walked.

The darkness of midwinter, and lectures had finished. Only a few essays to deliver, and my body clock, helpfully, had managed to rearrange itself. Every night I would stay up until 5:00am then wake in the afternoon as it was getting dark. An awful cold had descended on the house. Icicles stretched in the black night from the lip of the roof to the garden. Some days it was so cold when I got up, we would immediately remove ourselves to the local pub to warm up. Coats became indoor wear.

A few days before Christmas Eve, there was a phonecall from the landlady.

She wanted the house back, and we had to leave by the end of January.

Song for the Liminal Season

Joe down for the day, arrived late last night from London. Walking from Andy's house down Cromwell Road. Breeze up, and the spectral white of the street light through the leaves, casting shadows. Ghost moths rushing across the silence between the cars. Shadows looking strange, Joe; 'What's going on with those shadows?'

An anxiety dream last night of the new campaign at work (I start tomorrow). I am fifteen minutes late. Other people are already taking calls. I cannot get my computer to work. My headset has tuned into another conversation. Someone else's phone call coming through the headphones.

Meet Joe at midday at Waterstones, like something from that mid-period of Brighton (2004 - 2007 approx). Wonder up to Queens Park to meet Al, who is not there. The strange streets of Hanover. An empty building all boarded up and intriguing. A Meditterenean looking church, denomination unknown. A slightly frightening statue of Christ next to a mural of an eagle. The Eagle reminds me of something Teutonic and fascistic. An old Roman echo, a cryptographers icon.
Queens Park is strangely sloped, full of trees and curving paths and a clock tower and the call of wood pigeons. Nostalgia birds whose only purpose is to make you long for a past you can't quite recall.

Half pint in a pub on the hill with Al, Claire and Joe. A street lamp in the garden (does it work?) and the drunk and giggling middle aged women next to us. The blue of the skies, and the dusty incessant wind, full of deserts and sand. Strange ghosts of the end of summer here - and where are we here? This is not summer and not spring. A liminal season, and as haunted as these halfway times -and places- are rumoured to be. Felt on the verge to day of slipping back into the past. Some memory I can't recall.
The nostalgia-birds would know.

Half pint at the Evening Star. Not been here for months. Half familiar faces and cartoons in my notebook of Al and Claire ('That's awful... I look like a man!') Claire eats crisps and reads the newspaper. The toilets at the Evening Star are the same as ever, the puddled floor looking as if it is about to crack open. Al talks about a man he once knew; 'He always complained he had bad luck with tenants because they always died'.

After Joe leaves, I have a cup of tea at Em's house, and when we leave to go to Sainsbury's I am startled by how cool it has got. I am reminded of the beginnings of autumns, of London Hill road in Worcester (the rain, Harry's Wines, the warm serenity of the Chinese takeaway on the corner.
Back in the bedsit now. A couple of hours to myself before sleep.
The halo of the lamp, a quarter loaf of bread.
The man next door turns on the tap just for a second or too.