Sat alone in my parents living room at Cleobury Mortimer. Windy out there. I watch an odd leaf blown about - the last of autumn - look at the grey dreamy skies (dull sun dazed and electric behind clouds). Branches. A child's slide (for when my niece comes to visit). Then there is the sound of the distance. A sound you don't get in Brighton. It sounds like silence.
This isn't Worcestershire, but Staffordshire - though really we're just over the border. I can still feel the ghost of my twenties coming back though, the dark resonance of all that countryside. University days. Visiting my parents when they lived in Bretforton. I remember driving through the landscape in Ruth's car, a passenger watching the dusky pink lanes, a lost landscape even then. Poplars and copses and dark shadowy trees. Semi-industrial Midlands towns. Petrol stations with unfamiliar names. Picturesque villages and damp churches open to the public for a few hours on a Sunday.
I left Brighton early yesterday afternoon. Train to Victoria, tube to Paddington. Too-strong coffees from station stalls. The train to Worcester was busy and I was lucky to get a seat. I spent most of the few hours drawing. By the time I got to Worcester Shrub Hill, it was night.
Stepping out of the station to my parents waiting car. That old refrain; only Worcester is real. I can't believe I lived here, that this city was once home. Three years. Seemed so long when I was here.
The car clips the outskirts of Worcester, and before we know it, we're in the lampless countryside, passing by a sign that points to Whitley Court (a dilapidated manor house that was the basis for the And Also The Trees song 'House of the Heart'. The road takes us through deep woods (but really, what wood doesn't look deep at night?). Then here. Cleobury Mortimer. Where my parents have lived since leaving Perranporth last year.
I stay up after my parents have gone to bed, find myself reading about the Canadian Royal Cross Memorial Hospital in Taplow. I had been thinking about that place on the train ride up. I never got to go there back when I was at Langley College. I can't remember why. Everyone else went. It was like a rite of passage for everybody on that course. They came back with x-rays and bottles of dried plasma. I had some of those x-rays for years. Creepy things that made me a bit superstitious. The site was set up by a group of 'urban explorers' who had had a number of odd experiences there. The oddest of all being the way that the hospital has haunted them ever since. Melancholy and nostalgia. I am slightly perturbed to find that one of the people who set up the website was one of the people I went to college with back then. I was thinking about him the other day, wondered what had happened to him.
The website's about 10 years old, so I can still continue wondering really. I peer at his photograph, but don't recognise his features.
2:51pm.
The distance.
It sounds like pylons and lost lanes, grey afternoons in childhood falling to sleep in cool and comforting rooms, walking the dog in tangled fields. The sound of a small stream in a wood when you are the only one there.
The sound of being up late at night in a room surrounded by dark countryside.
You don't get it down in Brighton.
