Quick as Lunchtimes, Slow like Gargoyles

When I leave for work in the mornings, the mid-to-last traces of sunrise can still be seen. Walking down New Church Road, the spiky branches silhouetted against the lurid dawn are like trees from a horror comic. There is something surreal and off-kilter about it all, as if sunrise has been pushed back - or forward - but at entirely a different time to what it ought to be. The oddly translucent light gives everything a hyper-real sheen, a lucidity more common in dreams than morning walks to work. Sometimes I wonder if I have awoken at all, and am in fact still asleep.
Which of course is never the case. An hour after leaving home I am taking the first calls of the day and sleep seems far, far away.

Blinds down at work, and through the slats, slices of the shaded sea. The twilight tinge to the glass (to stop it getting so hot in summer) gives the segments of sea the feel of an anatomy lesson conducted, perhaps, by Salvador Dali or Rene Magritte. The sun still gets in my eyes during the calls ('and can I just take your Junior ISA account number please?') and I should just get up and close the blinds, but I look out the other windows instead.
Smudgy-brown roofs of Brighton. The tops of buildings you only see when you're as high up as we are, an invisible landscape. I watch the shiny new planes of the American Express building across the other side of the Steine, and above this a huge crane, like some childhood joy, moving slowly and putting the (probably) final pieces into place.
There is also the glimpse of a giant ferris wheel ('The Brighton Eye') by the hidden pier. Slow moving capsules I only catch the uppermost swing of.
The church next door. The hidden gargoyles halfway up the spire. Something old and comforting and unchanging about them. Been there for, what, centuries before I was born, and will probably be there long centuries after I'm dead and gone.

Leaving work at 5:00pm tonight and last night, and for the first time I notice vague traces of light left in the sky. The day creeping forward, the year moving on, and no matter how slow the days move toward spring, the years seem as fast as lunchtimes do on particularly busy and stressful days you can't wait to end.