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 chainA 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'
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.
