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.
