It was strange seeing Perranporth so crowded, swelled by summer holidaymakers. I usually see Perranporth over Christmas when the population is necessarily thinned. It didn't really strike me before exactly how much of a holiday town Perranporth is, in a very different way to Brighton. Brighton is full of foreign students and drunks. Perranporth is full of families and dogs. There were any number of souvenir shops open selling the kind of souvenirs I thought had stopped sometime in the 1980s. It was kind of nice though, being a time traveller into an era of buckets and spades and toys for the beach. They have these shops for Brighton too, but I am not a holiday maker here so, unlike Perranporth, am blind to these strangely charming shops.
On the last day there, Em and myself took a walk along the sand dunes, and then back along the beach. I looked out toward the distant sea -the tide was out- and those layers of blue sky, blue-green sea, and yellow sand were suddenly evocative of the autumn of 1999, which I spent living here before I moved to Brighton. I remember that time with fondness -the wideness, the cleanness, and the emptiness of the sand dunes once the tourists had vanished (almost overnight). I don't quite know what it was about that Sunday that bought me back to the autumn of 1999. Perhaps the light of mid-August is beginning to resemble the sharp, haze-free air of autumn. I don't know, but looking at that distant sea, I was reminded again of the wideness of those days, of a curious and pleasing feeling of being at the beginning of things.
Back in Brighton now though. Arrived back at just before 8:00pm last night. The toilet lid in the toilet is broken and the rim was covered with piss. The woman next door had a few friends over last night - dull boom-boom-boom of music and London-tinged voices, rioters accent. Anytime anyone left the room they let the door slam, sending reverberations round my room. She and her boyfriend kept me awake last night until the small hours, talking, listening to music, eventually having sex. Finally, about 3:00am it went quiet and I could go to sleep. I wish the previous tenant were here with his guitar, coughing, snoring and bongos. I hate living here.
I shall be moving from here though.
September must be my last month in the bedsit.
