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.