Walk toward Portslade, then cut up onto the Old Shoreham Road. Walk past the graveyard - the old midsummer paths. Here, where I used to spend a few hours after signing on over the summer of 2010. Em and me had just started seeing each other then. Pine cones and energy drinks. Listening to the Swans in the heatwave months... Then in 2012 (Em and me had split up by then) I would walk along here at twilight. Reddened sky behind the trees. Always odd and quiet and one night so panicky I never walked along here at midsummer twilights again.
School children. Teenage children always make me nervous. Mistimed my walk, and I walk past dozens of children heading home. I think school finished earlier these days. It was only about 3:00pm. wend my way down Sackville Road, pass by the model shop, dark under the shadow of the bridge. I see a man inside. Sometimes I think I would like to work in a place like this, in a secret day-dreamy job with few customers and little in the way of status. A job you can forget life in.
End up down at Hove beach. Cup of tea from the stall. No-one on my section of beach. Down by the wall that provides a little shelter from the wind. Drift and dream. Flick through the prog rock magazine I bought from Smiths. Begin to shift toward sleep. Something autumnal here, some September shift in the skies, where it's still summer, but there's that cooler thread of something. Light gets deeper, shadows more velvety. Something like that.
In Brighton, it's only in the sky that you can tell autumn's here.
Even if it is only just June.
