They come in spring time mostly, if not exclusively, and can only be summed up by disparate images rather than precise definitions. White Days, so called because of the colour of the sky and also their internal colour, are almost always remembered rather than experienced. While they are happening they are so vague and soporific they are barely even recognised.
Only later on, you realise, like in a ghost story, that you were being followed.
Let me shuffle a pack of White Days tarot cards, arcana of these disparate images, make love to random patterns of post-cognitive divination with crossed wire coat hangars over hidden rivers, a mill-stream shuffle, waking flailing in mid-dream, small hours jolt, but its only the afternoon, shuffle, shuffle, shuffle, spread the cards, here goes.
-lying on my bed, open window against the Sunday skies, breeze a few degrees too cold to be pleasant, but it was sunny yesterday, first sunny days of spring, and I'm trying to convince myself its summer, so keep the window open, and I'll turn into my room, and pretend I can get warm-
-this is my grandparents house in Stone in Worcestershire, or at least a recreated version of it, because I'm an adolescent here, and I was never a teenager when I lived here. Up the slope of the garden there is a line of dark trees, and beyond that a field, sloping up to a countryside haunted by poplars and woodland-
-there's a church on the hill. Church spire Sundays. Deep chime of the bell. Behind the church a wood, and in the wood a river, water running over bricks and stone, each sharp as something factory made. I remember taking the dogs here once. White dog for a white skies day, and Mum said, shen she was a kid she would come here, into the spinney-
Not a good hand. I can't see anything.
Remember these days from when I lived in Worcester. Essays unwritten and the sky tall and narrow and behind the white dashes of sun, more like a broken electrical circuit than a star. A cold would seem to rise from the river, and there would be a listless dreaminess about everything. Something too open and too vast and too all encompassing. Oh where shall I go? Ross stoned in his small room at the back of the house on London Road, and in the dark uncosy cavern of the basement living room, Joe and Paul and maybe Tony. Will I wonder into town, up the stairs, through the thick soup of the hallway, all dust and virus?
A better image for the white days came when I had left Worcester and was working at the petrol station.
I don't know where this image came from. I probably wrote it down before.
Here it is again anyway.
A man wakes in the cathedral gardens of Worcester Cathedral. There were benches set in alcoves in crumbling stone walls, part, perhaps of some larger structure, or maybe my memory falters at this point. A man wakes anyway, looks out onto the gardens. A small orchard, blossom on the ground, the sky broiling, and, of course, white. Though this white has all the texture of something significantly darker. There is a certain shadow about the day. The orchard is dark in the gloom of the too-tall cathedral building. The man who has just awoken knows something. That someone - at the instant he woke - has only just left the gardens and who has been watching him as he slept. The man now watches the gardens, watches the green shadow darkness of the corner where the figure -he thinks- has just departed for. There is no-one there. Just that absence.
What could be more frightening than opening a room onto a corridor at night anbd finding it empty?
Huddled on the sofa late on Sunday night. Rainy Sunday night. A room in a student house in some city where you didn't stay long. Somewhere like Southampton, or maybe Bristol. Hungover day slipping down into evening. Few drops of rain. Icy-cold rain. Darkening strips of cloud, or rather, the clouds themselves are darkening.
(Think: on the edges of woods somewhere, long grasses are blowing in a breeze that no-one hears)
Fool yourself (or yourselves, you're not alone here) with cups of tea and toast and food that requires no effort. Toast and biscuits, a dinner for tea, a desolate and somehow depressing pack of salt and vinegar crisps. An advert comes on the television at midnight (or thereabouts, and remember you don't have to up for work or school or college the next day) and the adverts sets up an echo, a resonance, in you. Something about the music and the images - shots of countryside that make you nostalgic and troubled, with background music that makes you remember odd dislocated memories; Salad cream with salad on Sunday nights, Songs of Praise on a lumpy 1970s television set and puddles on the paving stones in the garden of your grandfathers house. The next day you cannot remember what the advert was offering, and you begin to think you may have fallen asleep on that ragged sofa and dreamt it all.
The sofa is not new and you wonder where it came from.
The sound of distant cars on a hill.
At night, watching the poplars on the horizon, and the dark blurs of woodland beyond.
A track through a field pitted with rain pools.
