Sometimes there were weekends where nothing happened, and I saw no-one. As these weekends were not that often, I did not mind - or told myself I did not mind - and they passed by quickly enough anyway. This was in the first half of 1994 - I was doing a foundation course in art and design at nearby (ish) Langley - a bus-ride away.
Most of my friends during that period lived in Reading and far flung villages in rural Berkshire. On most Saturday nights during that period I would catch the train to Reading, spend the night drinking in a place called The Purple Turtle, one of those indie-themed bar / clubs you don't seem to get any more.
A couple of us would usually find one Reading resident's floor to 'crash on', and on Sundays, hungover and dazed, we might go for a walk in some nameless local wood, and I would then catch the train back to Uxbridge at evening. This would often be a long train ride that necessitated an extended wait for a connecting train at Slough station, where I would smoke the last of my battered cigarettes. Oh, the relief of getting home on Sunday night.
Though, as I said, there were some weekends where nobody met up in Reading and nothing happened and I stayed alone in Uxbridge. I was living in a rented room in a house on Belmont Road, near the town centre. I knew no-one there any more. A lot of my friends had moved away (to London, to become a bus driver, to become a priest (eventually), some to just disappear) and those friends who remained I myself had moved away from. I knew (or hoped) that come autumn that I would move away too (and I did, to Southampton to do a two year course in illustration). I had lived in the area since I was 13 - when I had moved down from Scotland over summer 1985. The place where I had spent all of my adolescence and early adulthood was coming to an end and I couldn't wait to leave. I knew that Uxbridge had had it's time, and there was an air of stillness about living there, of living too much in a hollowed out space with too many echoes of the past. Even the house I was living in, where I had lived since leaving home shortly after my 21st birthday, was emptied out of the people I had come to know as almost-friends. The rooms were rented out to people who kept to themselves, foreign students, financial workers, an odd, odd office worker called Jeremy or Geoffrey. The living room was abandoned and people avoided each other as they tried to make dinner in the tiny kitchen out the back.
On the Fridays of these weekends spent alone, I would come back late from college. Friday night bus ride, and a dark room waiting. I would smoke cigarettes in my dark room, get stoned if I had any hash, listen to records, watch TV, read comics. Midnight would creep up into the small hours. Strange times of 1:00am and 2:00am, timeless hours. Seemed I would have been in that room for years, something both cosy and claustrophobic. Cups of tea and more cigarettes. Silent kitchen, boiling kettle.
Saturdays I would wake, and might walk into town, buy an album at Our Price, or if I had any money, might catch the tube to Harrow-on-the-Hill where I would go to the comic shop and buy reprints of old horror comics, and then to Jamming with Edwards, a second hand music shop, where I bought old punk singles.
Back home and Saturday evening and more cigarettes, and I might have worked on artwork, or read some bad horror novel, or re-read The Secret History again. As for those Sundays... I don't remember much about Sundays in that house. If there was any day when i would get on with artwork, I suppose it was then. Dragged out days listening to Joy Division's 'Closer' and Skyclad's 'Prince of the Poverty Line' - later on, toward the June-hot end of the course it might be X-mal Deutschland's 'Viva' or Kristin Hersh's 'Hips and Shakers'. I imagine there was relief when darkness fell and I could prepare things for college the next day, and though I told myself I didn't mind those weekends where nothing happened, I much preferred college which seemed a world away from a rented room on the ground floor of a house where everyone avoided each other.
I wish I could remember more about those weekends now, but as nothing much happened, it's not surprising I don't really.
