Thursday 30 December 2010

Last Words from 2010

Probably my last post until next year.

There were sudden bursts of sun today that I could see from the fourth floor of the call centre. Probably warm enough to sit outside at lunchtime, but that could well just be me.

The man next door seemed to be playing a flute earlier.

2010
What a strange and busy year.

Wednesday 29 December 2010

The Apocalyptic Nature of the Nowhere Days Between Christmas and the New Year

Back in Brighton now, in those strange dead days between Christmas and the New Year.
First post-Christmas day at work today. Outside of the window, the horizon vanishing into fog, buildings disappearing into the white. Made the call centre building seem like an impossibly high tower. A call centre for the apocalypse; putting money away for acid rainy days, a customer service team for Armageddon...
Strangely warm too, and this, mixed with the fog fading everything, as if the buildings have committed such grave offences against the season, that December must make the disappear, combines to give the days a dream-like feel... Ghosts of Spring, and not spoken to anyone, apart from Em, since I returned. Only got back yesterday, feels like years, a decade of yesterdays, and before Christmas seems generations back, an infinity of myths and legends ago...
(...walking the Old Shoreham Road after dark, afraid of the sea, walking by the Engineerium, listening to 69 Eyes, Destroyer 666 and Svarte Greiner, walking the freezing blackness, waiting for the snow, for the alarm in the mornings, counting the days down till Christmas...)
Time-lapsed, and oddly disorientated, I think; it is nine years next month since I started work at the petrol station, and in a fever of failed maths GCSE delirium cannot work out if nine years would be closer to a quarter or a third of my life so far...

Monday 27 December 2010

Mild and Anxious Weather

A gloomy day today. Grey, moribund skies, windy rain flung at the window. A thick and monochrome light in the spare room I've been sleeping in here. Maybe I should turn the light on, but I always find something a bit depressing about turning the light on in the day, no matter how dark it gets.
I can hear some kind of bird outside, singing away, lost in the wind.

Return back to Brighton tomorrow, and then the day after, back to work. Back to that old cycle of work, sleep, work, sleep, weekend, work, sleep ad nauseum. Not that we get a proper weekend. Working those extra four hours on a Saturday, without a corresponding four hours off in the week is a killer. I keep thinking of Philip Larkin's line about 'leading lives of quiet desperation'. On the other hand, I should be able to pay off my credit card next week, which will be good, and still have more than enough to live on for January until pay day.

The dead days of the year, between boxing day and new years day. Where do they belong? Kind of belong to Christmas, and kind of to the new year. Nowhere hours. The weather today seems to reflect the nowhere-ness of this week between. I'll take a walk this afternoon along the hopefully deserted beach. I can imagine I'm the doomed protagonist of 'Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You my Lad'.
Actually he wasn't so much doomed, as cursed to spend the rest of his days in a state of nervous agitation, jumping at the most mundane of things; a scarecrow in a field, a coat hanging on a door...

...which is kind of how I'm feeling at the moment. A kind of low-level nervous agitation. I'm not sure why. I'm not even sure there is a reason. A sense of foreboding hangs over me, a mild superstitious dread... The kind of feeling you have on the morning before a really important job interview perhaps... or maybe more like the feeling you get if you're at home and owe the landlord rent, and its been a few days late, and you know the landlord is coming around sometime, and you're trying to relax, and you just can't... I wake in the mornings when it is still dark, and lie there, half asleep, feeling purposeless adrenalin turning my stomach.
It is all rather annoying, particularly as I can't find anything (touchwood) to be really concerned about.

1:16pm now. Still seems to be raining outside, so not sure my M.R.James inspired walk along the beach will happen. Rain keeps being flung at the windowpane behind me. It sounds horrible out there. Well, unless the rain does, ease, the afternoon will be spent trying to ignore that implacable feeling of edginess that hangs over these days.
Maybe I'll just go to sleep instead.

Sunday 26 December 2010

Old Stories found in the Attic

Looking through old stuff in the attic, I came across three stories I had written a long time ago. I was quite pleased as almost none of the stories I used to write exist any more, certainly very few from the 1990s, most lost over numerous house-moves as the years have gone by.
There were three stories I found -or pieces of stories- I can't tell if two of them were part of something larger or not. As far as I can remember -there are no dates on them- these would have been written 1991 - 1992, so I would have been nineteen or twenty.
The first one 'Early Summer Evening' is undoubtedly part of some larger project I never got around to continuing.  Nothing much happens. A woman called Amelia Drummond gets off a train at a quiet station. She walks through a nearby village. That's it. Still, thinking about it, the name 'Amelia Drummond' immediately dates this story to 1991 I should think. I was studying my art A-level (which I failed) at Uxbridge College, and had an unrequited crush on a girl with the same surname.

...a white metal fence, the paint peeling with time (showing the blackened material beneath) held back the bushes that vied for the attention of passengers and staff alike. A row of houses, whose red roofs were just about visible above the green, stood silent and watchful, and for the first time, she wondered what road they were in. She had lived here all her life and this was the first time she had ever thought about it...


I wonder if I had any plans for continuing this three page vignette? I was always coming up with plans and ideas for novels, none of which were ever continued. I have some vague memory of writing 'Early Summer Evening', toward the end of my one year stint at Uxbridge College, so this would have been late spring 1991 I guess... Still, You could probably have guessed that by the title.

The second story I found was later. I can tell this by the fact that the words on the paper are more faded than the first story. I used the same printer, and the ink faded over the two or three years I used it to print stories up from the word processor on my Amstrad CPC 64. You could only write 1500 words before all the memory was used... I would date this story to somewhere in 1992.
This one was called 'What Dreams Await The Ones Who Watch?' and, despite the fact this was written over a year later, people leaving a train at another deserted station. I attempt to describe them; 'the four of them were poets, writers and artists, even a musician or two'. Which, if I'm not mistaken, may well add up to more than four people... I particularly like 'even a musician or two', which somewhat puzzles me. Why or two, and why even... As if musicians were a rare and endangered species. Well, this trip to a deserted station has two musicians. Maybe. Maybe only one, definitely a musician or two though...
There is also a mathematician it seems as well:

Victor came next, a student who was able to make maths seem like poetry, his flowing equations transmuting feeling and emotion in their base formula. His wild mind able to comprehend and gleefully use the fact that logic breaks down on the sub-atomic level.


While Victor may well have been able to 'make maths seem like poetry', I obviously had no idea what I was talking about. Where on earth that last line of the above quote came from I dread to think.
So, our four characters, two of whom may or may not be musicians, leave the station, which is set upon a hill, and look down at a deserted village...

...dark neglected places give birth to desolation. The Desolate scuttle down twilight haunted paths and celebrate in the rain of a winter day. They laugh over snowmen built in the clearings of claustrophobic woods. Only they understand the crooked smile, and the fevered stare these snowmen have.
Spiders come to deserted places. Breeding spiders, feeding on desolation, on the darkness, on the memories left in places. Memories left breeding, breeding into ghosts, playing again and again, whether there is an audience or not.
Like fungus and mould.
The decay of desolation.
Breaking things down, then building them up, so no-one can remember what they once were, so everyone can only see the Now of it. Where once was a door is now a prison...


After this strange feverish epiphany, our characters run back to the station in a state of panic, board a train and 'never see the lonely, unnamed station again'. What a strange story. I wonder what on earth I was trying to describe, back over the summer of 1992 when I was twenty years old. Why snowmen? If I had said scarecrows, I could understand, but snowmen..? Did I find snowmen partiocularly creepy in my just-post teenage years. Then I start rambling on about spiders. Snowmen and spiders. Then fungus and mould. Oh dear.
The last two lines are strange. I was obviously trying to describe some kind of idea. Unfortunately I have no idea what.

The third story I found is called 'The House Where Time Decayed'. The strangest thing about this tale is that I have no memory of writing it, nothing at all. It doesn't sound vaguely familiar. Judging by the faded ink, I would say, again, written when I was twenty...

Time seemed to drip off the bricks of the house, as if the house itself seemed to be sweating, like an overworked horse in the depths of a hot day. The drops of time seemed to gather in stagnant pools around the peculiarly old house. Some of the puddles seeped into the cracks of the paving stone, and were absorbed by the earth, which the roots of the house fed upon, consuming its own waste again and again.


Well, lets quickly skate over the dreadful line about a horse sweating... My god... and anyway, remember, this was actually 1991 or 1992, why on earth did I put in a metaphor about a work horse? Anyhow, despite the fact that what follows the overworked horse analogy isn't much better, there are a number of similarities with 'What Dreams Await The Ones Who Watch', namely that strange obsession with an almost metaphysical decay.
The unnamed narrator enters the house and encounters a number of vague phantoms. The nature of these phantoms is incomprehensible; a figure sitting in total darkness on a chair, a teenage boy on the stairs with his 'head twisted backwards' and a Victorian woman whose eyes 'were more like the eyes of a dog than a human, and I was reminded insanely of a dog I dreamt of when I was a child'.
This last spectre passes through the narrator:

...my skin stretched into tiny slivers, and I felt the fevers of the past that had killed this house run sweating through my veins, and when she had gone, I found myself shivering, crying cold tears, crouched trembling on the bare wooden floorboards.


...which is where the story ended. I certainly made no attempt to make my stories comprehensible at all. Maybe that was the point. I tell you what though, despite the cringe inducing awfulness of the writing, I quite like them, if only for the fact that back then I was writing. I can't remember the last time I tried to write a story, or whatever these pieces I found in the attic are. Ten years ago? It really could be as long as that.
At least I was trying to do something back then.
More than I can say for now.
I blame that sweating and overworked horse....

Boxing Day Christmas Message

Well, I had hoped to put up some photographs from Christmas Eve's wonder amongst the sand dunes on Perranporth beach, but my connection is so terrible, that it actually took 20 minutes to upload one photograph, so I don't think I'll bother. I would like to say I'll get around to uploading some in the new year, but I am far, far too lazy.... so I probably won't.

Was a good walk amongst the sand-dunes though - up to St Piran's Cross, a huge crucifix out in the middle of nowhere and centuries old, looking like some lost Black Sabbath album cover. Then walking through the out-of-season caravan park, which I always think should feel more eerie than it actually does - all those empty windows, and places where people can hide and all those ghosts of lost summers. It does retain a slight dream-like feel about it, but seems most serene and unfortunately not mysterious. Then along and over the sand dunes themselves, the place where I thought I saw a mysterious 'dwarf-shadow-ghost' over the autumn of 1999, the miniature cliff I scrambled down to escape the dunes when I got lost after dark there with Bracken the Yorkshire Terrier in that same autumn. Perranporth doesn't change much. Makes me almost wish for my old walkman and the tapes I was playing at the time. The tape I remember playing the most was 'Rebel Extravaganza' by Satyricon. Not listened to it in years. Probably not since then. I never particularly liked the album. At that point in black metal history where musicianship was turning too technical and un-atmospheric - almost like the caravan park, you could say. It was one of the tapes that Andy recorded for me on those late 90s trips to Middlesbrough.

Christmas Day yesterday, which was somewhat overshadowed by a dreadful headache, which meant that a) I couldn't eat very much Christmas Dinner and b) spent most of the day asleep trying not to be sick. I have no idea where this particularly ferocious headache came from - no alcohol since Saturday night, and I don't normally get headaches, certainly not as bad as this one was. It did mean that I didn't even really enjoy the Doctor Who Christmas special, as I was far too concerned with the potentiality of throwing up. After Doctor Who I retired to bed, feeling both too hot and too cold. My hypochondriac mind soberly considered the possibilities of swine flu and meningitus and other sudden life threatening illnesses. When I woke up though I felt better and went back into the living room to watch the Royle Family Christmas Special with Mum, Dad and Nan. When everyone had gone to bed I even managed to watch episode one of 'Frontier in Space', a Jon Pertwee Doctor Who story, part of the 'Dalek War' box set that was a Christmas present, which is looking very good so far. No gentle sentimental science-fantasy here, its all very serious galactic empires, martial reptile races, thuggish alien mercenaries and space ships carrying cargoes of flour...
No sign of the headache this morning happily.
Might try to take Misty out for a walk along the cliff top path later.

Well, back to Brighton on Tuesday, then back to work on Wednesday. At least it is only for three days before I have three days off for the New Year weekend.
And then.... back to normal, and whatever 2011 brings.

Friday 24 December 2010

Driving Back to Cornwall

Outside of Brighton, the snow has an edgy, grey look. Swept to the sides of the road, blanketing embankments. Bits of hedges poking through like guilty bodies. Remnants of a badly concealed murder.
Passing through nowhere towns, fascinating provincial backwaters. Hairdressers with punning names. Tiny towns that seemed full of nothing but takeaways and Indian restaurants.
The motorway. Nothing but that long perspective into the distance. Grey skies. No colour anywhere. Listening to phone-in shows on the radio. One woman complaining about her 'jag' being pelted by snowballs. A police officer talking about 'ice-assassins'. Juvenile delinquents packing stones into snowballs. Mob attacks on the streets of provincial backwaters... The regular interruption of the news, a darker tale haunting the day, an architect who has disappeared in Bristol, keys and phone found in her house, no sign of her though.
The five-legged stag on top of a gate leading into the grounds of some vast country manor. Five legs to stop it, from one vantage point, being seen as a three legged stag. Apparently. On another gate a lion. A high wall barring entry, and over that wall a click-clacking area of leafless woodland. Snow on the fields, and the hedges that cut the white a velvety almost liquid black.
Night falls about an hour before we reach Perranporth, the road cutting through country unleavened by street light.
Ten minutes past midnight now. Sat on the bed in the spare room. When I first spent a night here, I was twenty seven years old, way back in 1999.
Leaving Brighton this morning, somehow, seems even further back.

Wednesday 22 December 2010

10 Uninspired Notes Three Days before Christmas

1:  Can't reply to any posts at the moment. I have no idea why.
2.  Listening to 'Spirit Caravan'
3.  It has got considerably warmer today.
4.  Bought the short stories of Aleister Crowley today for £2:99
5.  Walked up to Preston Manor yesterday, but failed to arrive there at dusk and got there too early.
6.  Am not feeling Christmas-sy in the slightest. Even less than usual.
7.  Even though 'Christmas-sy' is not a word, the way I have spelt it still looks wrong.
8.  I have got to pack for the return to the familial home tomorrow.
9.  The creative drought is STILL continuing.
10. I suppose the days will start getting longer now that midwinter has passed. Like midsummer, I am never sure whether it is on the 20th or 21st. Maybe even the 22nd?

Saturday 18 December 2010

Saturday Ennui

It is now 12:30pm. I really must go outside. It looks sunny out there. The first Saturday I've had to myself since August at least, and I can't think of a thing to do.
Ridiculous.

Industrial Freezing Slush

The first day of the Christmas holidays for me - not back at work until the 29th December. Am sat in my bedsit, listening to the man next door move about (he seems to be making a cup of tea) andd trying tow ork out where the man in the other room next door comes from. I thought at first he sounded middle eastern, but now think he may well sound more eastern European.
A very gloomy day today. The street lamp across the road is still on. The sky is a blank slate of grey. It snowed last night -a little anyway- though it is now raining. It hasn't quite washed the snow away though, but seems to have formed some kind of industrial slush, which will no doubt freeze and make the pavements impossible to walk on.
There was snow exactly a year ago too. I was on the first day of my Christmas holiday then too. I met up with Joe and Andy at the Meeting House Cafe before wending our way to Preston Park. I bought '2166' by Robert Bolano at the charity shop at the end of London Road. We ended up in the Prestonville where I drank tea instead of pints. I can't remember why now.
I hear the rain dripping against the window.
It seems so cold out there.

Thursday 16 December 2010

December 2048

December rumbles on. Up the slope toward Christmas, an ungainly, lumbering beast. Time becomes split into lumpen blocks; work, home, sleep, Western Road. Waking in the ice-blue gloom of pre 7am. Dread at the thought of the alarm going off.
I dreamt last night of an unsafe bridge over a sunny canal. Walking over the steep slope of the bridge, being afraid I would fall.
A year ago today I was writing about the eeriest part of a winters day a title I had surreptitiously stolen from a line in Suzannah Clarke's 'Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell'.
A year ago.
I am finding the constant acceleration of time to be an increasingly disturbing concept. I was still working at Telegen, and had just moved in here. I can't believe I've been living in the bedsit a year now... though it seems far too long ago I was living anywhere else.
I haven't been very inspired lately to write these tales from bridge 39. The creative drought continues it seems, though I'm sure all get back into it in the new year. Well, I hope so anyway. tides and cycles, patterns and rhythms. I wonder what I'll think of these less than imaginative posts in years to come? this question leads to other thoughts; when will the last post in Bridge 39 be?
I have no intention of stopping, but, at some point, inevitably, Bridge 39 will cease... Will it just fade out like a television series past its glory seasons - like Doctor Who in the late 1980s or will there be some grand finale that ties up all the loose ends and various plot threads, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer?
Hmm.
I've never thought about this before.
Another certainty in life.
Death, taxes and the end of blogs.
Anyhow, I shall end this cyber-maudlinity - I have absolutely no intention of ending Bridge 39 until I retire - I am quite intrigued by the thought of blogs that span a lifetime.
Imagine, I might be writing this when I am 76.
You know, now I've just written that, I now know (I have every intention of being) exactly what I'll be doing at 7:30pm on the 16th December 2048.
I'll be reading this, well, if access to 38 year old posts are still available.
Twice my lifetime so far.
Brr... Given myself the chills now.
I wonder if I'll leave myself a comment?

Saturday 11 December 2010

Midwinter Days

There is no colour in these days.
The sea is flat and barely seems to move.
A cold grey rhythm.

I slept this afternoon, after work, and when I woke, in the last of twilight, the odd shape of the street light on my wall seemed an eye. Some sentinel sent to watch me. A watchman for the night; I am here again, and in these winter days I will not sleep for long.

The dark is full of foreboding.
4:37pm and it is night-time in Brighton.
If this was summer, night would be five hours away.

Friday 10 December 2010

Lethal and Lucid Witnesses

Lately I have been thinking of a book I have not thought about for a long time. I read it over the Christmas / New Year of 2001/2002. I bought it on a return trip from Cornwall back to Brighton. I couldn't quite remember what it was called, but I remember it affected me quite deeply. Held me mesmerised if you like. Which is strange because (until today) I couldn't remember a thing about it, even the title. Nearly. This morning, half asleep, half lost in dreams and waiting for the alarm to go off it came to me, The School of Night. Despite the fact that the book affected me quite deeply, I couldn't remember very much about it at all. A murder? A university town.
I could remember the finals sentence though.
Lethal and lucid witnesses.
It was those four words that had stayed with me over the years. Meaningless in themselves, but still they haunted me, as certain words do sometimes.
Over a cold lunchtime today, I wondered into one of the numerous second hand shops down the North Laine, and there - I recognised it straight away. The School of Night.
An odd coincidence. I flicked to the last page and read that last paragraph, those haunting words lethal and lucid witnesses.
And I put the book back on the shelf and walked back out into the cold midday hour of Sydney Street.

Tuesday 7 December 2010

Under Siege by Ghosts with Unknown Histories

The equation is desolation.
The bedsit feels wrong; an unsafe haunted feel. I should tidy up, but every time I am here, I take refuge on my bed and the television (bad reception, Coronation Street lost in snow) and wait till I can fall asleep. I wake in the dawn, waiting for the alarm, in that cruel beguiling winter light. A white harsh kiss.
Footsteps on the street sound cold.
The taxis passing by sound cold.
Outside the bedsit, the landing falls away from me like a corridor from The Overlook. A Brighton Shining. This House of Bedsits does not feel restful.
I sit cross legged on my bed now, a sheet wrapped around my shoulders. Some pretence at warmth, but I am not in the habit of switching heaters on.
There is some recompense in the desolation of December, and it is this; that there is nothing but December. No past (except in daydreams) no future... no time.
The walk to work and back, Em's flat, sleep, the coffee machine at work.
But this bedsit feels haunted.
Or rather, the landing, the stairways, the bathrooms, the toilets, everything inside this building but outside this bedsit seems haunted.
I am under siege by ghosts whose histories are not known.

(last night I dreamt of dark spaces in the street, and these spaces were portals to places that were lightless. In these lightless places, occult forces would react and merge, a chemical arcana, a non-chemical alchemy...Outside of these lightless places, layers of runes and sigils, symbols from an infinity of oppositing cultures to keep the occult forces trapped harmlessly inside)

10:05pm
We are falling clumsily toward midnight, and from the summit of that valley, the dawn is an eternal cliffs fall away.

Monday 6 December 2010

Vaguely Famous Soap Opera Actors and the Unimpeachable Hours of December

Winter is absolute, a perfect, untangleable equation. There is the call centre (that now well-known view out of the window, the church tower in Ship Street, the distant hill) the walk home ('Urban Outfitters' the shop that replaced Borders is one I shall never enter) the bedsit (a haunted desolate cold). These are the days of my 39th December, and it seems that this has all there been forever, and all there will be.
Winter is absolute.
December is forever.

I spoke to a vaguely famous soap opera actor today at the call centre. I can't tell you who he is due to confidentiality regulations, but his resume was long and fairly impressive. I had hoped he would have appeared in Doctor Who, but not to be. We talked about the 'disgraceful' funding of the arts in this country. I suppose it is disgraceful, but I only said that because I thought it was the kind of thing that one should say to vaguely famous soap opera actors.

Sunday 5 December 2010

Night by the Engineerium

The Engineerium, clinging to the edge of Hove Park. Locked gates at night, but the lights in the grounds seem as searchlights. We skirt the esges of the park also, past the old petrol station, the dog track, the supermarket. All closed now, apart from the petrol station I used to work in.
Lone men in Hove Park. A jogger, a dog walker, and a rather more sinister figure sat on a bench on the path lit by green lamps.
Walking through the darkness. A fog rolls in from somewhere. Lights from the Legal and General building make shafts of film-cliche effects in the thickening white. The windows of the said building are empty. Blank rooms that define devoid. Joe used to work here before before he left for Poland.
Icy roads, though the snow is gone.
Back up past Wilbury Crescent. I have spent as long not living there as I did living there. Playing with these kind of equations in my mind. Almost two years to the week that, via a solicitors letter, we were informed that the owner had died and we had unril the end of February to leave.
Dark old December nights.
Makes me want to sleep for days.

Saturday 4 December 2010

Rain

Kept awake by the rain last night. The sound of snow falling from the roof. Slush-falls sounding like some kind of earthquake. Thought at one point the bedsit was collapsing.
Woke this morning to find the snow all gone. A wonderful December gloom hanging over everything. Walking to work for my four hour Saturday shift this morning, the air smelt particularly ocean-like. A deep marine smell, as if to remind us the sea is still there.
I haven't been down to the sea for weeks.
When I left work at 1:00pm, the rain had become somewhat torrential. Little floods racing down pavements, washing away the ghosts of the snow. I think I much prefer the bleakness of the rain to the snow. There was some kind of student demonstration on. I saw about ten students shouting nonsensical statements being surrounded by about forty policement. Everybody seemed to be having a good time. I had heard that some students have been supergluing themselves to Burtons shop windows. This sounds like a very new urban legend to me. I hope not.
I thought all the Burtons had closed down years ago.

Friday 3 December 2010

Minimal Report


Three days into December.
Snow.
Cold.
Icy pavements are difficult to walk on.
Amusing websites about stupid comics.
'Best New Horror Volume 4'
Watching Jeremy Kyle because I have been on late shifts all week.
Watching 'The Armageddon Factor' at night (episode three now)
Kind of doing a drawing (see above).
Watching the crown of street lights on the distant hill from work as it gets dark.
The whiteness of everything.
(now fading, slush and rain pools, everything smelling kind of clean and dirty simultaenously)

Monday 29 November 2010

Days set to a Permanent Sunset

Days set to a permanent sunset, horizon of the icy sky always reddened, as if the atmosphere itself is freezing.
Days set to a permanent rush of one kind or another. Quick toast at lunch before rushing back to work for the last three late-shift hours.
Days sent to a permanent daydream, always on the horizon, on the edges of these call centre days...

Saturday 27 November 2010

This Could Have Been Black Shuck Country

A year ago today, outside the old call centre, smoking with Pam and Tom. Afternoon dragging down to evening. Trying to come up with a name for a blog I was thinking of starting. Looking for some coincidence, some piece of synchronicity to guide me.
I wanted something to do with Black Shuck, that English folklore legend. Black Shuck country? Hmm. Maybe. Alistair came up the hill where we stood. He had just finished his days work at American Express and was heading home. I asked him what he thought I should call my blog - without mentioning anything to do with Black Shuck.
Without missing a beat he replied 'Oh definetely something to do with Black Shuck'.
...which should have been the coincidence I was looking for.
Back in the office at work, I found that 'Black Shuck' had been used for someone else's URL. I quickly jettisoned the Black Shuck idea, and somehow settled on 'Tales from Bridge 39', referring to a notoriously haunted bridge on the Shropshire Union canal. Not my favourite haunting by any stretch of the imagination - a phantom, monstrous monkey is alleged to attack people. Well, at least back in the 1800s... though there have been reports of it being seen as recently as this -or last- decade.
Anyway. The name would do, I thought, and I can change it around later on.
Everybody left the office early. Or had I stayed late? I can't remember now. I wrote my first first tale from bridge 39.
By the time I had left the office, it was full dark outside.
I can't remember anything else about that evening.

Friday 26 November 2010

A Smell of Winter

That strange folded smell of autumn grows stronger, and I realise what it is now. Not the smell of autumn, but the smell of winter.
It tastes of cold playgrounds under grey skies, of streetlamps glimpsed on a distant hill as night falls, perhaps from a call centre, of the icy taste of the bones of leafless trees click-clacking together, of long afternoons, and a certain kind of woodsmoke smell, of coffeeshops in the early morning, entered before a long train journey, of attics holding fragments of your own past, of nights that sweep above you, vast and elongated as the sleep you wish you could fall into, and of course, of snow.

Inevitable really that this sudden icy-snap will soon visit Brighton. Bright light of the snow-silence, slipping to work on ill-salted pavements down gentle slopes that now seem steep inclines.
I remember the ssnow of last December.
The silence of the streets after dark, deserted as a city in a warzone.

I must go into that night outside soon, leave the gloomy comfort of the bedsit for that sharp and waiting air.
This morning, when I walked to worked, there were patches of ice.
Dull mirrors that soon melted, leaving only a ghost -a smell of winter- through these ever shortening days.

Wednesday 24 November 2010

Typical Bedsit Evening

The evenings fly by. It seems I am eternally at the poiny of going to bed. This time now. Another day at work hanging over me, or, rather, I hang over it. Floating above the valley of cold mornings.
When I left work tonight - just over five hours ago now - there were numerous police about Churchill Square shopping centre. Many of the shops were closed. A helicopter in the sky. I could see no cause for the presence of all these police. Expecting some threat that never materialised. Only later when watching the 10'o'clock news that I heard about the fear of another student riot.
When I got back home... what did I do? I may have watched the news. I wanted to hear about the North / South Korea incident. Islands bombed, threats of war.
Reminded me of the book I'm reading at the moment, about the 1950s horror comics, of how the (then) war in Korea influenced such titles as Horrific, Weird Terror, Haunted Thrills...
I didn't hear Korea mentioned once.
I listened to some music for a while 69 Eyes and Spiritual Front, and read a couple of short stories from Best New Horror Volume Five, first published in 1994, which I found in London on Saturday for £3.00.
I watched the rest of the Doctor Who story The Stones of Blood, and then I watched some of the extras on the disc. One of the extras 'looking at the making of the programme' had a familiar face turning up. A journalist for some science fiction magazine I've never read. He used to go out with one of my housemates. Autumn 1996, my first term in Worcester. The house I lived in was so cold that one day when he had stayed the night we went down the pub at lunchtime just to escape from the icy inevitability of the afternoon... I remember his first article he had published in the magazine. His girlfriend showing me. Some newsagent in Birmingham? Worcester? Can't remember now.
The time between then and now is the age of an adolescent.
After I watched Doctor Who, I watched The Apprentice, and drew in my sketchbook, covering myself in ink.
And now the evening is done, I must set the alarm and go to sleep.

The Churchyard Summer is Another Country

A rare lunchtime missive, as I have had to pop home to recharge my mp3 player...
A bright and cold day.
Exhausted with a strange kind of euphoria.
Walking back here, the day smelt kind of crumpled; old attics, firesmoke, dust. Something gamiliar, yet knew. This smell has been haunting this autumn - well, now turning into winter.
Summer is another land now.
I remember lying in the churchyard along the Old Shoreham Road on too hot summer days after signing on, listening to the wind through the trees.
Another fifteen minutes and then I must head back to work.

Tuesday 23 November 2010

Someone Dreams of This

I think I might choose to walk forever, if I could, through endless autumn landscapes on the verge of dusk. Sleep in hedgerows and fields and eat food stolen from half-abandoned cottages, tangled wood and lost gardens.
And dream, perhaps, of working on the fourth floor of a call centre, where the sea outside the window is always grey and seems so very very far away.

Monday 22 November 2010

The Morning after a Nightmare

The view from my window, about ten minutes ago, just after 8:00am.

Woke from a nightmare last night at about 1:30am. The nightmare so affected me that I lay there in the dark convinced that something supernatural was going to occur. Perhaps the curtain over my kitchen area would suddenly spring up of its own accord. Maybe I would glimpse a shadowy figure sitting on the darkened sofa. What would happen if someone knocked on my door, standing out there under the creepy green light of the landing..?

I was in a room (possibly at my Nan's old house in Wolverhampton) with Em, the Doctor (as played by Matt Smith) and two other people, I am not sure who. I think one of them was a woman. The Doctor was comforting Em. She was rather frightened as we had accompanied the Doctor on a few adventures and had already had a few terrifying encounters with alien races. Probably. She was asking the Doctor how he coped with being in such close proximity to death. I came into the room as he was telling her something about the Daleks. I interjected at this point and asked him what was the most frightening thing he had ever faced. I immediately knew this was the wrong time to aske this as he was comforting Em.
Later. Mysterious messages began appearing on windows and mirrors. One appeared to be part of the contract. Written in condensation, and signed by myself, and also Richard Motley, who I used to work with at Telegen. I observed that they looked like contracts with the devil. I warned everyone else about them but they had vanished. The Doctor pulled back the curtain drawn against one of the living room patio-style windows. There was a large message here. As this message here mentioned David Tennant, this would seem directly aimed at him. I was glad that other people had seen it. I postulated the theory that the writer of these messages might be p---, an old friend of ours. A sudden glimpse of a terrifying face in the darkness outside. Pale skin, staring eyes, glimpsed through the letters of the message. No-one else can see him.
The atmosphere in the room by now is one of utter dread. I miserably wonder how any of us are going to sleep this night.
Someone comes up with the idea of turning the light off, God knows why. We do so and the room is plunged into utter darkness. A sudden realisation that something outside the house is trying to get in. We must turn the light back on. We cannopt find the light switch or it does not work. Rising panic and anger at the Doctor who is unable to get the light switch working.
Something is in the house with us.
I wake up.

Nothing particularly terrifying about the dream, but there was just something so weird about it all...

There were other dreams last night, but none as terrifying as that, nor as dismally appealing as the winter dawn creeping over Brighton I saw as I pulled back the curtains to the outside world (see above).
I was a little nervous in case there were words written on the windowpane...

Sunday 21 November 2010

London in November

 Leaving Brighton by train. Grey November skies over this early Saturday afternoon. The city looking tattered and tired, as all cities do, when seen by train on under a grey November sky.

 Our room in the Sami Hotel, somewhere in Shepherds Bush. Em pointed out that this room would probably be advertised as a 'studio flat' in Brighton. A basement room, where, in the bathroom, a high up window looked out into another room we couldn't see. The hotel was on the Uxbridge Road. I could walk back to my adolescent years from here, I thought, back through Hayes and Hillingdon to Ickenham and Uxbridge. Buses came back with 'Uxbridge' as their destination. I wonder what it would be like to return there in November.

 The banks of the River Thames, some time on Saturday night.

 There was some kind of Christmas market on the banks of the Thames. Merry-go-rounds and stalls selling mulled wine and roasted chestnuts. In a graffiti covered underpass, skateboarders with serious faces gathered. The presence of the nearby market turned a threatening environment into one that seemed safe and cosy. I wish I had taken a photograph of them.

 Sunday morning and the view from our room. I like these strangely nondescript places 'dreary but meaningful' to quote Fritz Leiber. Forgotten angles, obscure courtyard. A London shadow. No-one thinks about these places. If I hadn't taken a photograph of it I probably would have forgotten it by tomorrow morning.

 I seem to be looking quite guilty, as if I have been caught in some conspiratorial conversation with the lamp. Why I would be looking guilty or even suspicious I don't know as it was me who took the photo.

 There was a painting in one of the twisting corridors of the hotel. A Chinese looking ship (is it called a 'Junk') under a green sky floating in a green sea. These photographs remind me of the 1970s. In my memory they seem somewhat ubiquitous. A childhood fragment. Perhaps this was why I found the painting so eerie and enthralling. A timeless dreamlike atmosphere. A sinister serenity. These paintings would be considered, at best, to be a piece of 1970s kitsch, and at worst, talentless trash, and it was actually a real painting, and not a reproduction. Lost on an obscure wall in a cheap hotel in Shepherds Bush, the painting had all the quality of a haunting, hanging there in the permanent twilight of a short flight of cramped stairs. I wonder who the artist was?

 Looking back as we left the hotel.

When I first saw this on the Saturday going to the hotel I was quite excited, and entertained many ideas about what a 'Shepherds Bush Medieval Centre' might contain - some exciting museum full of displays about the plague in West London? Exhibits of torture instruments from the middle ages? The next day I saw that I had been sadly mistaken. It was not the 'Shephered Bush Medieval Centre' but the 'Shepherds Bush Medical Centre'. What was the designer / sign writer thinking of with that gothic lettering against a black background? Not the kind of thing to inspire confidence when visiting the Doctors... This curious choice of typography and design was not without precedent however. There was a dentist across the road whose logo appeared to be a severed tooth.

 Tube train view. One of the commonest views in London, but one which never seems to lose a sense of power. This is London.

 We walked from Camden Lock to Kings Cross by Regents Canal. These buildings were strange, as if made in an old factory in some remote region of the Soviet Union in the 1970s. What would it be like to live there, looking out over the water of an oddly boatless stretch of canal?

 I find sights like this strangely appealing. A set of ramshackle steps leading down from a nowhere road, scattered with the last of the autumns leaves. I like the forgotteness of it all.

 Across the canal, two discarded office chairs by a street lamp. Who had put them here? Why did they need a street lamp here? The whole place seemed so abandoned. I wonder what it would have looked like at dusk, when the lamp had just come on and night had begun to fall?

 '...it seemed unusually bleak and suggestive; almost beautifully ugly though in no sense picturesque; dreary but meaningful'. Smoke Ghost, Fritz Leiber

 Canal water in November seems hypnotically cold.

 The pipe looked like a tentacle of some Lovecraftian monstrosity, stretched through this brackish, industrial water...

 The basement of a bookshop, somewhere between Kings Cross and Oxford Street. All bookshops should be like this. Didn't find any Thomas Ligotti, though did pick up two copies of a small press magazine called 'One Eye Grey' which 'retells traditional folktales and ghost stories in a modern London context'. One of the magazines even has a story about Brighton in it. I also found a copy of 'Zap Comix' from 1975 or something.

 London as twilight falls.

 From the train at Gatwick Airport.

Back in Brighton, about two and a half hours ago.

Friday 19 November 2010

The Glittering on the Hill

The streetlamps on the hill glitter when darkness falls. What would it be like to stand under their twilight and watch the call centre from miles away?

Thursday 18 November 2010

Things Which I Thought About at Work Today

1: (A doodle amongst my work notes. The back of a man. Another man dressed as a clown with a top hat on stopping him, laying a placating hand on his shoulder. A crooked streetlamp to the left. A smoky cloudy sky. Bare branches of winter trees).

This doodle led me to thinking about...

...a Welsh mining village. The village adheres to strict rituals descended from the ancient art of Clowning. Rituals and ceremonies involving various clowning exploits keep the balance of the village. Inside the mine, miners are dressed as clowns. Something bad might happen if the clowning rituals are not adhered to. The clowning regulations dictate every aspect of village life, even as far as how many children families may have. A man wants to leave the village. He is stopped by an elder clown, who implores him not to betray the clowning rituals.

2: Another doodle, abstract and cramped. I called it 'Junkyard Moon',  This doodle made me think about an industrial dockland / harbour. Of approaching this dockland / harbour by boat. Detritus in the water. Something to do with Malta, 1976. A similar feel.

3. On a distant hill seen out of the window at the call centre, I noticed three or four very early street lamps. This was about 3:30pm. It got me to thinking about where these lamps were, some distant road, next to rain-sodden woods. A strange serenity in these thoughts of bleak distances at twilight.

4. A new art form. This would be based upon the concept of smells. Certain smells bring back memories - almost our strongest link to the past. Would it not be possible to arrange for a narrative of smells? One smell might bring to mind a distant forest, another might bring to mind the image of a murder, another the image of a summers day. It would be up to the viewer (or listener) to decide upon the connection, if any. Kind of like an  instrumental album.

Wednesday 17 November 2010

A Creative Droubt

Rain all day, as if flung at the windows of the call centre. No distance anywhere, just a void where the horizons used to be.
Cold rain too, the wet on my skin strangely reminds me I have bones buried there.

(in the earth, those drifting churchyard summer days, and the ghost-tides through the trees by the railway line
i never heard a train there)

There seems to be no inspiration these days for anything creative or artistic. Another void. Frustration wells up here. I get my sketchbook out when I get back home from work and feel like never picking up a paintbrush or pen again. I doodle at work. Cramped things I throw away at the end of the day. I haven't taken my guitar out of its case for months. Not since the summer. The thought of loading up my word processor overwhelms me with an almost narcotic lethargy.
A terminal indolence.

There is always that fear though, and we've all had it; what if this is it, what if this is it forever?
Do creative blocks last forever though? Can they? In the middle of this one here it feels they can, and do, but I would say that wouldn't I?
Everything passes. Everything turns to dust.
Even the blocks that house this creative drought.

My god, its quiet outside tonight.

(i remember those last weeks of summer, walking to work in the bright novelty of mornings, hot already, feeling as if someone was flinging down buckets of summer onto the pavements)

Tuesday 16 November 2010

November Fragment

November is absolute.
Daylight is seen mostly out o the window at work. By the time I leave, night has fallen.
These are not the soft, romantic days of October, nor the summer-touched glades of September.
November begins winter.
First of the factory months.
All orange and black. When I go for evening walks now these are the only colours I see. An autumnal monochromatic vortex.
Stars up in the sky seem cold, and the window in the window frame rattles at night.
Night never seems long enough, and as the mornings darken again, it becomes increasingly difficult to pull myself out of bed.
I avoid the sea like a superstition.

Sunday 14 November 2010

Path of Green Lamps

White pre-winter days. Only ventured outside briefly during daylight hours; a few charity shops, CEX, Replay, Sainsburys. That special kind of rain that nowhere late-autumn days have. Thick yet sparse. Chills you to the bone.
That white sky.
That emptiness about us.

Night falls so quickly now, dropped from that white void like concrete.
When I left Em's house it was full-dark. Only a few hours of pale washed out daylight now. Only five or six weeks away from mid-winter now.
Warmer than the afternoon.
Even the pavements had dried.

Went for a walk after dinner, out onto the Old Shoreham Road. Went up the side of Hove park, near the petrol station. A row of green street lamps lighting a path through the darkness. Spectral halos, sinister pools.
Street lamps are there to provide atmosphere, not illumination.
The green lamps made the darkness thicker, more palpable.
More full of ghosts.

Lost my direction in the suburban labyrinth beyond Hove Park.
New roads walked at night.

Back in the bedsit now.
That strange and heavy dread that precedes Monday.

Sleep and then the week begins.
Again.

Wednesday 10 November 2010

A Mysterious Super-Villain with Special Laser Rays

The man next door continued playing his guitar all night, and only stopped for bouts of protracted coughing.
Glad of the peace and silence, and unnaccountably tired, I went to bed at 10:30pm. I woke up shortly before midnight. The man next door had started snoring. The walls are so thin that the sound reverberated around my roo, and kept me awake until the small hours. I almost wished for the guitar playing to come back again. He sounded like some great, grumbling legend of a hellhound. I eventually conceded defeat and went to sleep on the sofa on the other side of my (tiny) room. I could still hear him, but somehow fell into a very cramped sleep.
He eventually stopped snoring, but only when he woke himself up with such a violent fit of coughing that the room next door began to sound like some sinister World War I tuberculosis ward.

There are further house of bedsit-mysteries.
When I returned from work this evening, there was a card on the post table in the hallway. This was from the police, and informed us there had been 'reports' of 'residents' in the street parallel to mine having a laser pen shone 'in their eyes'.
A laser pen shone in peoples eyes? This is all very strange. What could be achieved by this. It sounds almost like the stranger reports of Spring Heeled Jack from Victorian London. I presume that the laser is shone into peoples eyes from a distance, which I imagine is why the police had dropped a card around here. At least I think so. Is there a possibility that this mysterious wielder of a laser pen is situated in this very building? A super villain in this gloomy bedsit house? Does he (or she) sit in their room at the back of the house and shine lasers in the eyes of passers by in the road below?
This actually seems unlikely. The road in question is at the back of this house, and across the gardens are another line of houses before this now laser-haunted road. This would seem to require a great deal of accuracy (and luck) for this to be possible.
Perhaps the police have had reports of the 'Laser Wielder' running into here? Might he (or she) be connected to the mysterious crack that has made the second floor bathroom a prohibited area? Could it be the snoring man next door with his cheerful and annoying guitar playing?
Might I be the next victim if I continue to use the first floor bathroom? If you open the window in there, there is a good view across to the street beyond...

Tuesday 9 November 2010

A Tuesday Night of a Slow Week

A night of interrupted sleep, bad dreams and rain. Half-nightmares of some kind of apocalypse. The air and land being infected. Walking on the ground causing people to melt. Ambulancemen turning up, unimpressed that I was not infected. In a house with people I work with. The owners are away - something to do with the apocalypse. We are barred from going upstairs by a barrier of polythene. I suggest removing this, but no-one think this will be a good idea but me. I say that if the owners survive and return we could return to them their house.

Waking up in the dark, and I remember the curtains of my room shining as if some fragment of the moon had become caught on it. Then the alarm, then getting dressed for work, then out into a landscape of bleak rain and flood rumours.

A grey day.
Nothing happened.

My window rattles in the frame. I'm going to have to stick my knife in it like I had to last winter.
I really wish the man next door would stop playing the guitar.

The bathroom is still not fixed.

Monday 8 November 2010

The Mysterious Bathroom on the First Floor

The curious phase of renovation, that feels more like some kind of decay, continues in this house of bedsits. After the introduction of the Creepy Green Light a month or so back, and the recent painting of my ceiling -which left my room covered in a mysterious white dust - there is now a addition to all this architectural strangeness.
Upon coming home from work on Saturday afternoon, I saw that there was a notice on the bathroom door which read 'The ceiling in the bathroom is cracked and dangerous. Do not use. Please use the shower on the landing downstairs'.
A dangerous crack in the ceiling? What kind of danger might this pose, and how will the use of the shower increase this unnamed danger? I have visions of the shower somehow pulling the ceiling down on me. An explosion of dust and brick. Surely there would be more danger posed by those who use the landing on the third floor - maybe the crack might cause them to plunge a floor below? Perhaps there is a similar notice on the foor of the bathroom on the third floor? I do not know as the thought of travelling to the upper floors of the building fill me with a strange kind of fear. I have no reason to go up there, and the door that is closed against the entrance of the stairs heading upwards is always closed. A strange air of exclusivity. The ground and first floor do not have a door, why does the stairwell from the second to third need a door?
Perhaps everyone is using the bathroom on the first floor landing.
I used the first floor bathroom for a while over the summer, when the shower-head in my bathroom mysteriously disappeared for a while. It was quite a pleasant bathroom, large, and luxurious in a kind of sub-industrial way. I did feel like I was trespassing though, but as I was unemployed at the time, I could use the bathroom during the day when I hoped that everyone else might be working.
I didn't use the first floor bathroom this morning, afraid that there might be a clog of people -from the first, second, and possibly third or higher floors- all queuing to use it. As I left for work this morning I discovered this was not the case, though did discover on the ground floor, any number of manual labourers engaged in some mysterious errand which involved carrying large tools in and out of the front door. As I hurried out, I also heard Mr Ahmed, the landlord, in conversation with an unseen woman, possibly one of the mysterious residents of the grouynd floor.
I hurried out into the rain and got soaked.
So I had to use the first floor bathroom tonight. When I thought all was quiet (and there was no light on in the landings apart from the Creepy Green Light) I fled down the stairs to the first floor bathroom. It felt very strange -and quite wrong- to be on the first floor with my shampoo and towel. I hurriedly locked the bathroom door, and then realised that there was someone in the toilet next door. Were they hoping to use the bathroom after they had finished on the toilet? Did they flush that chain in a slightly annoyed way? As I stepped into the shower, I felt quite sure that the toilet user was gathering other residents of the first floor to organise some kind of bathroom-orientated lynching.
Casting such paranoid thoughts aside, I looked around the incredibly large and Victorian looking bathroom I was in.
Which now seemed very different from the time I had used it over summer.
First of all, there was something different about the windows. The windows, some kind of monochrome stained glass affair, seemed larger... More alarming were the windows (of a similar stained-glass type) that looked out onto the landing. At the top of these windows (the room is very very tall remember) there is now a foot high gap running the width of the windows. Can anyone see in if they are coming down the stairs? They would certainly be able to hear shower-sounds. I had never noticed the gap when I had been coming down the stairs before, but had certainly noticed the blurred and naked forms of bathers through the frosted glass.
But where had the gap came from?
It certainly wasn't there over the summer.
Even stranger, there is now some mysterious gap in the wall between the bathroom and the toilet, again too high (fortunately) to see through, but where did it come from? Who removed it and why? Do the people who use that toilet feel self conscious if there is someone in the bathroom (as I was)?
Perhaps they all come upstairs to use the bathroom on the second floor.
Some kind of bathroom based peace treaty to stop war breaking out between the first and second floors.
I wonder what the people on the ground floor think?

Sunday 7 November 2010

A Sudden Dread of the Sea

In a strange epilogue to my tale of the fire-extinguisher man yesterday morning, Em came across him too. She was heading to work at the same time as me (from her place) and said that she saw him on the other side of the street waving his fire extinguisher about, looking drunk and aggressive. She quickly got away from him, finding him quite intimidating, by walking up one of those roads that lead away from Western Road. While traversing this unnamed road, she heard the sound of the fire extinguisher hitting the ground behind her. This was, of course, when the fire-extinguisher had been thrown at me.

My dreams last night were full of reprints of old 'planetarey romance' comic strips I have never read, names I just vaguely recognise 'Adam Strange' 'Mystery in Space'... I kept waking up every now and again, then plunging back into these dreams of old comic strips I have never read. Odd really, I was never much into science-fiction in comics, so am not sure where these dreams came from. I may well have to visit Dave's Comics to see if there are any Adam Strange or Mystery in Space reprints....

The dreams did inspire the soundtrack to my twilight walk to be Alan Moore's 'Unearthing', in which the protagonist, as an adolescent, becomes immersed in planetary romance comics. Adam Strange himself is mentioned even.
It was a long looping walk, up across Dyke Road, and past Preston Manor, up near where Susie used to live. Quite lost my sense of direction. When it came time to head back, I cut back up to the Old Shoreham Road, because the thought of walking on the beach caused me a sense of apprehension. I don't know why, but it seems this past week has been accompanied by a strange dread of the sea...

Upon heading home I passed by a group of four trees guarding a pedestrian entrance to a cul-de-sac. The ground below them was pleasingly covered with leaves. A couple of people walked under the trees, and I thought, the trees, they just stay still. Watch us walk underneath and away, pass by, and always walking. Are the trees jealous or are they content -superior even- to be rooted to one spot, to know one place intimately, whilst everybody walking by might know a thousand places superficially.
Those four or so trees know that road when it is completely empty of people. Deep in the small hours. No-one passing by.
I will never know the road so empty because at least I will always be there.

Saturday 6 November 2010

The Fire-Extinguisher Man

Walking to work this morning, with my headphones on, and still half asleep, I passed by some kind of commotion. A person very near me. I continued walking, but curiosity got the better of me and I turned around, only to be confronted by a ragged looking fellow brandishing, of all things, a fire extinguisher at me. He looked to be your typical Brighton mid-thirty something; longish hair, vaguely alternative, with that special expression common to certain types of thirty something that denotes something along the lines of 'missed the boat'.
He had a look of attention seeking aggression im his eyes. Usually I would have walked on, but after a vaguely unpleasant week I had to curb a sudden instinct to ask him what the fuck he thought he was doing. I stared back at him instead, which led to an expression of imbecilic surprise on his face. He looked away.
I carried on walking, still seething inwardly at such characters having to live in the same city as me. After a short while of walking, I heard a metallic sound and turned back.
He had actually thrown the fire extinguisher at me.
Which made me even more angry.
The man by this time had, of course, disappeared, though I could hear him shouting nonsensical obscenities somewhere nearby.
I continued walking.
I imagine that it must be undeniably horrible to be a homeless drug addict / alcoholic -which I presume he must be- but its also fairly horrible to have a fire extinguishwer thrown at you before 9'0'clock in the morning, so excuse me if I don't have any sympathy this time.
With the incident of the heroin-man last Monday morning, I have a growing feeling of dissatisfaction with Brighton at the moment.
It just seems to be a bit of an immature place sometimes.
Still whats a city you live in if you can't dislike it occasionally?

Friday 5 November 2010

Traces of the Zero-Point Carnivore

A grey fog, just down from the hills. A wolverine void. A zero-point carnivore.
They're like ghosts now, those buildings, and their vanishing precedes the night. Their fading is a premonition.
(and I hear the ghost of Emily Bronte's voice; forerunners of a sterner power, heralds of me? It only makes sense with the question mark. Different editions. Different time)
Time is different now.
17:00. The yellow numbers on the call centre display screens. The breaking of the headphones; removing the headset from the phone itself, breaking the day like a ritual.
Then past the lifts. Can't be bothered to wait with so many other people.
Down the cool sigh of the stairs. Glimpses of the church next down.
Out into the night, up the hill, walk by the homeless man with the dog, and the Regency Leisure Centre. Pink neon lights the only alive thing in the November night.
Ashen eyes, and grey movements. Everyone I pass by bears traces of that wolverine void.
If I saw my eyes in the mirror, I would bear traces of that zero-point carnivore too.
We all do when autumn heads into the November deeps.
...but I tend to avoid mirrors after nightfall.

Thursday 4 November 2010

Attempting to Defeat the Dead-Light

One of those days where you don't feel connected to anything, just drifting along, daydreaming about nothing. Work, then lunchtime suddenly, and at lunch a long meandering walk around town because I felt like expending some energy, then the quick fall down the afternoon to the valley of 4:30pm. Waiting then in the call-centre for night to come. Seems to come so quickly now, like some daily armageddon. A great concrete thing dropped from the skies, in what seems seconds.
My desk is in the middle of the call centre. I can see a few street lights on distant hills, and after night, the sea becomes nothing but a great void between buildings.
Watching the clock creep to 5:00pm.
Exiled from it all.

I had intended to spend the evening relaxing, maybe drawing, but after I had returned to the bedsit and switched on my lamp, I quickly realised this was not to be - for there was that familiar and dreaded -clink!- of the lightbulb going. Looking at the lamp, bought from Argos a a couple of months ago, I soon realised that replacing the bulb was not to be a convenient option. For one thing, the bulb is of a type I have never seen before, and for another, it requires a screwdriver to unscrew something holding in the bulb.
Easier to buy another lamp.
The thought of spending the evening under the awful dead-light of the single bulb was not in any way appealing. My first thought was to try and go to sleep, despite the fact that it was only 5:30pm, and wake up later on when, perhaps, I could watch the television and forget about the dead-light. This, unsurprisingly, proved impossible, and at 6:00pm, I leapt out of bed to head down Argos to buy another cheap lamp.
Argos was, of course, closed by the time I got there, even though it is late night shopping night. I headed to Churchill Square. British Home Stores. They would have lamps surely? Yes, they did have lamps, but very expensive ones for £40. I still wasn't in the mood for returning to the bedsit and the dead-light, but nor was I in the mood for spending the price of the 'Doctor Who and the Key to Time' box set DVD on a lamp.
Maybe I should go for a walk to avoid coming back home?
I caught the bus to the Marina instead. There is a big Asda there. They must have some cheap lamps there. I had some vague suspicion that I had gone to an Asda before looking for lamps and not finding any... but was that the Asda in Hove? This was the big Asda. They would have lamps. It might cost me £4 to get there and back, but I would still be back by 7-ish. I could still have a few hours without the dead-light.
Asda didn't have any lamps.
In utter desperation I bought two big candles instead and caught the bus back.
They're burning in my room now, on a plate on top of the television.
They, of course, make no difference to the horrible dullness of the dead-light.
Its been one of those days.
The dead-light is victorious.

Wednesday 3 November 2010

Out of the Night #12

In a previous post I wrote of how, over the Christmas of 1983, when I was ten years old, I became fascinated by horror comics, after reading a small section about them in a book called 'The Encyclopedia of Horror'. In the book were reproductions of eighteen of these comics, one of which is shown above. These images fascinated and enthralled me, became a kind of personal arcana for me as childhood turned into adolescence.
Yesterday, after twenty eight years, I finally obtained one of the original comics whose covers were reproduced and so fascinated me.
It is the comic above of course, Out of the Night # 12 dating from 1953. The latter thought is cause to pause in itself. 1953. The comic now by the side of me on the sofa is 57 years old. The imagined child who once owned it, originally bought it, will now be in his mid - late sixties.

It only cost me £5:00,  ordered from 30th Century Comics in London. It isn't in very good condtion, as the front cover isn't attached to the rest of the comic. The condition of the comic isn't important to me though as long as it is intact (which it is) it is the mere fact of owning the original of an image which fascinated me in childhood.
Like finally seeing a landscape you have only previously seen in a photograph.
I remember this cover well, of thinking about it when I was with Mum, visiting someone who I can't remember, in the back roads of Forres. I found a correlation between the ramshackle graveyard pictured and its bright red sky and the air of old mystery around Forres. I remember being ill, some minor-childhood ailment,m and being off school, and poring over this cover, trying to decode the tiny reproduced words.... The eerie piping waiol of a strange old flute... and ancient graves yawned wide beneath a pallid moon! Thrill to a truly breathtaking story "Music for the Dead!"

...and where did this particular issue begin its life? At what store was it bought? How did it survive being thrown away? Was it lost in attics for years... decades even?
I'll never know of course.
Yellow, papery mysteries happily never to be solved.

Monday 1 November 2010

Gloomy Monday

Last nights sense of strange melancholy slipped into the day, a gloomy fog that would not lift. Everything laid over with a light miasma, like cobwebs, of a strange sadness, a disconnectedness I could not quite place.
Disorientated too by the shift in the clocks. Home now. Emmerdale is on the television, and it all feels the wrong time somehow.
The painter seems to have been today, but I don't think the painting job is finished. Instead, the ceiling of my room seems to have been sanded. A motley skin of some pale disease, all white with beige patches. I imagine the painter will be back tomorrow. I do not like the thought of a stranger being in my private space when I am not here.

On the way to work this morning, I passed by a stumbling man. He was walking the same way as myself. He was forties I suppose, dressed in rough clothes and with an accent I couldn't place somewhere from the North of England or Scotland. I couldn't really tell. 'Has anyone got some heroin?' he yelled, still stumbling 'Has anyone got any heroin you bastards... I hate Mondays... What are you doing up you stupid, stupid people? I need some heroin...'
I gradually lost him as I speeded up my walk.

When I left work tonight it was full dark. I walked past what used to be Borders, stepping over the lights embedded in the ground. As I did so I was suddenly struck by an eerie thought.
Ten years ago tonight, at the very same time, I was at the very same place.
I remember. 6:00pm. I was meeting Jim and Susie for when they finished work at Spoils. A Post-Hallowe'en comedown drink. I was waiting for Jim, walking through these very same lights embedded on the ground.

The evening trips and stumbles on.
Everyone on Emmerdale sounds cheerful.

I think I might have another cup of tea.

Sunday 31 October 2010

Lost Without Maps on an All-Hallows Sea

The last post of October.

Feel that time has both stopped tonight, and also rushing forward to the inevitability of work tomorrow morning.
The evening feels still though, as if the manic forward momentum of the past year or so has temporarily been stilled. I'm not entirely sure why. Everything beyond tonight suddenly seems a long time ago, probably because the last few hours (spent reading blogs about comics) is the first time in a long time where I've not felt that pressure of doing something productive.
Can hear the first of fireworks out on the streets. Can't believe it's Hallowe'en night. Doesn't even feel remotely Hallowe'en-ish.
When I wake up tomorrow it will be November.
Waste time scattering these words before sleep as my cup of tea is still too hot to drink...

After I had sorted my room out, ready for the landlord and painter's visit tomorrow, I felt sorely tempted to go for a walk. It was about 9:00pm, and suddenly the thought of strolling along the Old Shoreham Road seemed immensely appealing. I don't know why. I was still quite weary from the walk I had with Em up along St James Street and the beach from earlier.

I hope I wake before it gets light, with the wind blowing outside, and feeling all comfortable and dreamy in bed, before falling back to sleep again.

A lone car passes by, a firework like a gunshot.
Night in Ciudad Huaraz.
Too cold here to pretend its there.

23:15

An aircraft.

A can of air freshener on the sideboard, where my television usually is.
The painting I did over summer looks ancient, a thing from years ago. One day it will be years old, unless it is destroyed first.

Footsteps, heading up the street.

I must remember my headphones are in my pot of paintbrushes.

This time last night, it would have been 20 minutes past midnight.

Last few mouthfuls of tea, still too hot, another firework-gunshot, and then a drifting into sleep, and when the first alarm call of November goes off it will still feel far, far too early.
It always does.

Samhain Night Melancholy

Things are shifted and strange now.
My room is odd. Because the ceiling is being painted tomorrow, I have had to move my furniture around to allow access. The bedsit has that strangely melancholy feeling of leaving. Also, the clocks were turned back by an hour today, so though it it a quarter to nine, it actually feels a quarter to ten. I also now have a bed. The bed is much more comfortable than the futon and I am pleased by it, but my bedsit feels new and unfamiliar.
It is also Hallowe'en night as well. A year ago today was the last night I spent living at the nightmare flat. I remember being woken from a dream I was having by the doorbell ringing. The dream was about something called a 'Mexican Moon'. This was some kind of lunar phenomena, involving the moon splitting into ghost-moons that circled the true moon, before rejoining again. I woke from this dream to the doorbell, and the events that would lead me to handing my notice in and moving in here at the end of last November. This sounds all like it was a dramatic night. It certainly was traumatic, but more in a dismal and depressing way than anything. I am glad I am out of there.
A Samhain night melancholy.
I don't know why.

Specific Hallowe'ens I Recall.

1982:
Ten years old. Out ghost hunting with Martin and Craig. Up in the small woods behind Burnside in Kinloss, Scotland. The sun just over the tips of the trees. Running away from the Burn because Craig had heard the sound of 'mutoids' in the water. Looking back along the path, and seeing Craig and Martin starting to run. running as well. Craig later informs us that the 'Mutoids', a family of monsters, has grown in number  since the last time he has encountered them.

1984:
Twelve years old. Trick or treating around Southside, Kinloss with John Kelly. Probably stay the night at his house before school the next day.

1986:
Fourteen years old. Had spent the week at Nan's house in Wolverhampton. Stay the night at my aunt and uncle's place in Cheltenham. Listening to the Friday Rock Show on the radio. Hear two tracks from Slayer's 'Reign in Blood' album for the first time.

1989:
Seventeen years old. At home in Ickenham alone. The doorbell rings. I ignore it thinking it may be trick or treaters. When I finally open the door I discover it is friends of mine.

1991:
Nineteen years old. An attempt at a 'haunted tour' of Hillingdon. I drive my parents car, accompanied by Edward. I remember we went to Court Park, and the cemetery near Abbotsfield. We end the 'Haunted Tour' on the field between Ickenham and Uxbridge. On the edge of a small pond. I tell Edward to take a few steps backwards. Edward steps into the shallow pond. Wet feet. Angry Edward.
(As an aside, there weren't actually any truly haunted places in Hillingdon, so we just ended up going to places that may have been vaguely creepy... but weren't).

1992:
Twenty years old. Watching 'Ghostwatch' on BBC1, and being quite terrified by it.

2000:
Twenty eeight years old. First Hallowe'en in Brighton. Get dressed up (well, wear white face paint) and end up in the Ocean Rooms. Gatecrashing a wedding party. Meet Valerie for the first time Not getting home until 5 am.

2005:
Thirty three years old. Working a late-shift at the petrol station. Watching the sunset tinged sky outside getting dark, and thinking 'this is Hallowe'en.

2007:
Thirty five years old. Going ghost hunting with Joe in Preston Manor churchyard. All is serene and peaceful. Lying on a tombstone, I give a fright to two passers-by, possibly ghost hunting as well. Rising up, all dressed in black, they look at me and run away.

2008:
Thirty six years old. End up with Claire in St Nicks Churchyard. I attempt to tell her ghost stories. We are both drunk.
Claire falls over a lot.

2009:
Thirty seven years old. I stay in and watch a programme on ghosts of the Isle of Skye. The programme is excellent and I draw as I watch. I feel quite contented. Later that night I am woken by the doorbell ringing at 4am. What followed were the events that propelled me to hand in my notice to leave.

There are other Hallowe'ens I remember, but because I cannot nail them down to a specific year, I have not allowed them an appearance here. I have not included the 'Shantell' (a song by And Also The Trees) incident of 1997, because though this occured datewise on the 31st October, it was actually the night of 30th October... if you see what I mean.

Saturday 30 October 2010

Helping Flood the Launderette

After I had finished my four hours at work this morning, I headed home, then went straight down the launderette. This was really the last place I wanted to be in the world, and really wanted to be drifting back into sleep on my bed...
The launderette is quite busy on a Saturday, but I was pleased to find a spare washer. I put my clothes in and had just settled back on my seat by the window to continue reading the book of true ghost stories I hadn't had time to read when I noticed that something was wrong.
I looked again.
There seemed to be quite a copious amount of water coming out of my washing machine. I jumped up and tried to close the door properly, to no avail. The water spread in a pool around my feet.
'I think there may be something wrong with the machine' I said to the woman behind the counter, who looked like she had wondered in from a 1960s episode of Coronation Street.
'You can't do anything now once its started. You've got your clothes stuck in the door'.
This did indeed seem to be the case. The water continued spreading about me. No-one else in the launderette seemed remotely concerned about this.
The woman bought out two towels, and I attempted vainly to mop up the spreading water.
'You can't do anything, it will just keep coming out'.
I looked at my book of true ghost stories on the side. I had been looking forward to reading that.
She bought out a mop. I tried to mop up the water.
The sock, or whatever it was that had become lodged in the machine had now disentangled itself. At least no more water was coming out. Strangely I was quite happy mopping up the water, and felt strangely sad when I had done all I could.
I returned the mop and sodden towels to their rightful place beside the counter, apologising to the woman once again for the 'lodged sock' incident.
'You won't be the first and you won't be the last' she said.
She spoke not only with the voice of experience, but the voice of precognition too.
I had finished reading one report (about a house haunted by the ghost of an unfriendly woman on the stairs) when I heard the rough tones of the launderette assistant again. I looked up to discover that the washing machine next to the one I was using was now disgorging a high volume of water in the sane way that mine had been.
'You've got your clothes stuck in the door!' the woman railed 'First him and now you!'
I felt quite tempted to point out to her how prescient her last words to me had been, that she had been right in ascertaining that I wouldn't indeed be the last person to leave a sock, or some other item of clothing, lodged in the door of the washer creating a miniatiure and entertaining flood.
I thought it would be best not to though, and resumed reading.

Friday 29 October 2010

House of Bedsit Mysteries

There seems to be lots of mysterious activity in this House of Bedsits of late.
After the manically painting Polish man of late August / early September had finished his work (who I nearly knocked of his ladder coming out of my room one night), the next thing that occurred was the installation of the Creepy Green Lights.
I assume that this was to circumvent the problems caused by the timer switches, which always seemed to pulunge you into darkness when you were halfways up or down a flight of stairs. I imagine that the continual leaving-on-of-the-toilet-lights-at-night may also have been an influencing factor also. Though this quite annoyed me at first, I discovered that creeping along in a darkened landing in the small hours, still half asleep and fumbling for your own door was not an advisable or enjoyable reality.
The Creepy Green Lights are kept on all of the time. During the day you don't notice them. If the landing lights are on you don't notice them. If you leave the bedsit in the middle of the night you do. You are immediately plunged into a world of dim-green nightmare. Everything looks like it belongs to the interior of a nastily haunted house. Woe betide anyone who actually runs into anyone else when using the Creepy Green Lights as navigation, for then, previously normal people adopt the features of some childhood-nightmare come to life.
Or, with the Creepy Green Lights on, you can pretend that you are in some futuristic but decaying space-craft, creeping about endless corridors, hunting down malevolent extra-terrestrial forces.
What the Creepy Green Lights don't do is actually illuminate anything. Visibility is no better, really, than when everything was total darkness, except now you have the conviction that the house is in fact nastily haunted.
Other bedsit mysteries have made themselves apparent recently too, namely my landlord's strange obvsession with my furniture. 'Is the futon yours?' he asked me back in August when I last saw him. I told him that it came with the room. 'I do not remember it' he puzzled 'would you like a proper bed?'. I said I was fine with the futon because I did not want to give my landlord any trouble after him being quite okay with waiting two months for the rent whilst I was waiting for Housing Benefit over the summer. 'Is the sofa tours?'. I agreed with him on this point. I found the sofa on a fogbound night back in March. Shortly before seeing the Swans on Wednesday night I heard from him too. After having a yearly inspection, he discovered that my ceiling was in a 'very bad state' and was going to hire someone, possibly the manically-painting Polish man, to re-paint it. I talked to the landlord today too, organising when the painter was going to come around. 'I have never had a ceiling look like that before. It is a mystery'. A mystery indeed, this curious brown stain in the corner of my room. It grew over a couple of days and then stopped. Some water leakage possibly. I do not know. 'Is the furon yours?' he asked again. 'No, no, it came with the room,' I reassured him again. 'That is strange. Perhaps somebody left it'. There was a silence. 'Would you like a bed instead? It will take up much less room.' I said I would very much like a bed, which seemed to please my kindly landlord.
The last mystery of the bedsit is a note I found pushed under my door a couple of days ago. 'If you have my clothes airer please bring it back upstairs as I need to use it!! No:14'. I imagine that this same note was pushed under all the doors in this house of bedsits as I also found a couple of these notes where the post usually sits in the hallway.
The note brings up a number of questions. Why was the said airer not kept in the bedsit itself (well I can see why the bedsits, or my bedsit anyway, is very small) and where was it kept? I have not seen any airers on the ground, first or second floors of this building. Why does the mysterious no:14 think that people from the ground, first and second floors would creep up to the higher floors in search of airers that would happen to be left randomly about?
The number in no:14 refers, presumably to the bedsit number. There are 3 bedsits per floor, and I am on the second floor, so if my calculations are right, then there would be 3 bedsits on the floor above me (10,11 and 12) which would mean that no:14 would be on an ever higher floor, possibly an attic level, shared with no 13 and maybe even a no 15.
What would it be like on these mysterious upper floors? Why have I not thought about them before, just looked at the door that leads up the third floor and thought nothing of it? What might be up there?
Perhaps the greatest mystery to the note is that he or she does not give her name, but refers to themselves as the number of the flat they live in. I imagine going up there and knocking on their door; 'hello no:14, I am no:7, I have come about the mystery of the airer'.
I would not be able to offer any solution to the mystery though, but really, I am afraid that if there is any sighting -let alone conversation- between anyone who lives in this house of bedsits, the universe may well very end.
If everyone else thinks the same, I think the airer may well be lost forever.
Sorry no: 14.