7:00pm Sunlight

Walking into the sun tonight along the beach. Joggers and pebbles and the traffic. The sun looks like late August and I realise that I have never walked home along the beach before. By the King Alfred centre, there is a shift in the air and something changes. This is a sudden world of waste-ground and wooden boards - like blank advertising hoardings - hiding car parks. By the gym a girl waits for someone, leant against the wall, her face cast down, and about her an air melancholy. There is a sudden blast of cannabis by the steps to the car park, though I don't see anyone smoking. Across the street the hotels look scarred and slightly run down. I pass the bowling green, the shallow dip where the lawns lie, and across the grass, the low brown building that must be the clubhouse. If bowling greens have club houses. I never notice these things when I walk to work along the beach. In the mornings I am too concerned with listening to songs and the sea to note the elegant air of desolation around here. Walking into the yellowing, bloated sun, I imagine the road heading on into an industrial distance, an horizon promised by the Shoreham power station chimney I realise that I have not even noticed.