Tip my Hat to Spring Twilight

A long weekend off work, not back till Tuesday.

Drifting on the sofa this morning reading Stephen King, worrying at the greyness of the skies, lulled into a kind of reverie by the sound of the drills and the lathes and the sanders from the workshops downstairs.

A long meandering walk round town with Andy. Dave's Comics, Resident Records, that nameless coffee shop I only ever go in with Andy. Large Americano in the empty North Laine space, looking at my purchases (Seventh Star and The Eternal Idol by Black Sabbath, the 1973 reprint of The Crypt of Terror #1, and a French compendium of The Mighty Thor, the latter all actually in French, but this pleased me as well as its cheap printing, pulpy paper and general elegant shoddiness.
Afterwards Andy walks by the beach home, and I buy another sketchbook and catch the long bus home.

The 49 to Portslade. I feel it swing upon onto Portland Road. Counting the stops, trying to figure out which stop would be the nearest to come here. Guessing it right for once.
That old building like some Crumbling New York church in August. Portland Road is August, will always drip with heat and sweat and the rumours of unseen gangs and crimes behind closed doors when I am not there. Even in the fag end of winter it is August, that dark and bright flipside of summer. Sun sunset-bloated and deep streetlight red, hanging over the streets and watching, observing, mapping everything.
Even here, on this gloomy March evening.

Slip down the side streets to here, walk those odd roads between Portland road and New Church Road. Thin sliver of lost suburbia, slice of some memory. Something wakes here and it suddenly feels like spring. Not the bright and optimistic spring of falling in love and bright blue summery days, but that other spring, all rain damp air and lead skies, and this gloom laced with something electric and quiet and theatrical. Some stillness, a deep and mysterious serenity. Could feel it in the empty street, in the front gardens of houses I passed by, in the two school children who passed me by laughing about something, in the street lamps and that endless expanse of odd grey sky. Thinking this has happened before and will happen always. Not so much taken out of time, but being plunged even deeper into it.

Sat cross-legged on the floor of my room. The curtains are open and I watch the grey skies begin to purple. The streets out beyond the roofs, the tips of branches, the angles I see, seem vast and beguiling and ultimately unmappable.