Icy air - still (there had been flurries of snow in the morning) - made it feel like winter - the light - bright anf still light at 7:00pm - and this felt like spring - and I couldn't tell what season it was and it felt like some kind of chronopocalypse. Fragmenting moments - I watch a flock of birds - pigeons I think- land on the roof of a shop down Western Road, and I think this is their spring. Do they know the light, the change, or do they just feel the cold, their juust survived winter? Their movements as they landed reminded me of spring-times of twenty years ago and more - Swakeleys Park in Ickenham - buying Anathema's first album Serenades - about to leave home - watching the willow in the back garden of Woodstock Drive deepen to green - and in Swakeley's Park, a line of cut-back, coppiced trees, jagged branches against the sunset-skies of London Suburbia. Horror comic trees, and I wasn't yet 21 years old, and the future was so vast it was frightening.
41 years old now, and walking down Western Road, and that same sunset sky is behind different trees. Bare branches against the impossible red of sunset, and these were horror comic trees too. I could look beyond the building that blocked my way, back, back, back, beyond Shoreham Power Station, beyond the sea, and here, oh yes... and it's 30 years ago, and I'm 11. Up in Scotland, living in Forres, and thanks to a chapter in a book called the Encyclopedia of Horror, I am aware of something amazing which I never knew existed called a horror comic. The idea fascinates me, and Forres, where we live in Scotland becomes some kind of horror comic playground, I imagine vampires in the Black Woods, and the living dead rising from the tiny churchyards on the outskirts of town, and vampires under the street lamps of Drumduan Park. Not an urban gothic but a late-winter gothic.
There were plenty of trees here that were horror comic trees, plenty of those deep sunset skies that promised so much mystery, and I can always taste it; rain, earth, Sunday afternoons, and drawing horror comic trees in HB pencil on whatever scraps of paper I could find.
