After the work do (a company wide quiz) held in some seafront hotel whose name I can't recall (The Metropole? The Travelodge?) I walked back home along the seafront road. Whisky, wine, beer.
Didn't listen to music. Not drunk, just not sober enough to.
Something strange about walking home along the seafront road late at night. It's busy and impersonal, and the Shoreham power station industrial zone in the distance glimmers in it's dark roads and floodlit geographies, something full of both warning and desolate invitation.
You can almost hear the silence there. Red-eye on the chimney. Something peaceful about it - that red light shining through every sleep, and everything is right with the world.
The seafront road is empty - well, of walkers - but there are always plenty of cars, though these seem empty, machines without drivers. Something escaped from that industrial zone.
Pass by the Neptune, pass by the petrol station, and in the beige light of the street lamps, everything is too bright and heightened, an overwhelming colour that only increases the slight nausea of walking home when not drunk, just not sober.
Past the other side of the petrol station, the buildings serve no obvious purpose. If they are hotels, they are ragged decaying ones - who would stay here? - and if they are private buildings they seem too large and too full of imagined corridors that would swallow you up. Blank windows give no indication of occupants or interiors.
You could vanish here, I always think, and at this point I cast a look to the sea, out beyond the hunched over roofs of the beach huts, across the dark lawns of bowling greens. The sky above the hidden water is black, and would be full of stars but I don't remember seeing anyway.
Short walk back home, fall into bed, and am glad I didn't have work today.
