Saturday 27 February 2010

The Drift

Nowhere, perhaps. No-time.
I walked into town this afternoon. The light was hazy, unreal, and slightly hungover, I passed through the crowds of people as if gliding. Buildings in the distance were muted. Slight rumours of fog, or mist.
I had a coffee down on the beach, and couldn't concentrate on the paper because I kept thinking about horizons. I binned the paper afterwards because I didn't want to take it around town with me.
I could find nothing I wanted in town. No books, no albums, no magazines. It was a nice wondering though, through the North Laine, past Churchill Square, along the beach. It was twilight when I returned.
Breathe in.
This air tastes different now.

Smoking gave me the illusion of something I can't quite name. It bought me back down to earth. My thirteenth day without a cigarette. I've only really missed it on mornings like this one. Smoking made drifting more pleasanr.
Now I am adrift and unanchored. What shores shall I find myself washed up upon? I could have walked for miles this afternoon, tried to find that elusive horizon.
Not that horizons can ever be found.
They're lost forever.

Walking to the pub last night, I found myself amongs the streets where I used to live in Buckingham Street. It struck me how pleasant the buildings were (not my old house though, that was as nondescript as my current abode) how elegant and secret and almost regal. Perhaps it was the trees lining the road, the way the path sloped downhill, watched by these old buildings. I noticed a house I had passed by a thousand times before. A detached house, three storeys high, painted white and with a slight mediterrenean feel, as most houses round here have. Something struck me, an odd electricity, almost like the feeling of revelation that accompanies deja-vu. This wasn't a feeling of this present moment happening before. Did I have a memory connected with this house? No, but the house suddenly seemed so familiar, almost intimate. The waxing moon in the sea-blue sky behind it, bare bones of trees.
(the house in the small hours, opening up the building like a dolls house, lamplight in hallways and hallways walking to the ticking of grandfather clocks, sleep and-)
It felt like the memory of a dream rather than anything else, and yet not. The odd thing was I have passed this house numerous times before, and I had barely given it even a second glance.

The House of Bedsits is silent tonight. Deep rivers seem to flow through the stone, and I could close my eyes and drift in their deeps and currents.

Friday 26 February 2010

Nine Disjointed Lines

Friday morning.
The sky is covered with clouds.
It was sunny earlier, while I slept.

A strange week, full of mechanics and sleep.
Epic and exhausting dreams, none of which I remember now.
Days feeling hypnotised.

Giving up smoking occupies my mind.
Eleventh day now.
Only sleep is safe.

Sunday 21 February 2010

The 4'0'Clock End of Winter

Church-quiet of the bookshop. More like a cathedral; stretches over four floors, and even if it is only Waterstones, with a Costa Coffee on the fourth floor, there is a hush here like the kind rumoured to be found in old libraries.
Hadn't meant to end up here. Only left the bedsit because I wanted to buy the Sunday papers. A grey and gloomy day. Rain and fluid skies. Couldn't wait to get back in again, but then I thought; 2666 nearly finished, and the twilight light of my narrow room. End up here.
A headache that has been following me since Friday. Some side-effect of giving up smoking, not helped by the 95% vodka that a friend had inadvertantly smuggled back from Poland. Want something light and easy to read, even a fantasy. Transparent writing, something the polar opposite of the complex genius of 2666. End up with 'The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories' by Bruno Schulz, so have failed miserably in my quest for light reading it seems. Am sure that Ligotti recommended it in an interview somewhere. Flick through it in the bookshop, am struck by the few passages I read. I judge books I flick through in bookshops on two things; atmosphere and resonance. A nebulous means of judgment perhaps, but it never seems to fail me.

Walk back to the bedsit again, and finish 2666. I close the last page, and put it on my shelf and think; winter is over now.
The book has defined this winter. I bought it on the day of the first snow back in December, that oddly triumphant afternoon where Andy, Joe and myself tracked to Preston Manor through the novel delight of the snow. It accompanied me down to Perranporth for Christmas, read in the light of fading December afternoons. I remember reading it in the launderette, about Oscar Fate in the third part, and his trip to Mexico. It accompanied me through January, read in breaks at the call centre. Then those first uncertain coffees down the beach in the February Summer, so shortlived. The book came to represent all the darkness of that winter, and now, safely back on the shelf, that shadowy season has been done away with.
So, no matter how cold, and no matter that, for me, spring always begins on March 1st, a week away, this is no longer winter.

I watch a seagull on the window of one of the houses opposite, pecking at the glass, hopeful for food. I always think of them as witness to the secrets of Brighton, observers of the hidden and the unremembered; drunken kisses under streetlight, lone walks through bleak afternoons. Hidden patches of summer. Ghosts and echoes.
The sky is grey, reminds me inexplicably of Charlotte Bronte. My window is open and I can hear the sounds of the city; cars and children. Indistinct voices.
Footsteps clattering up the street.

4'0'clock in the afternoon.
Two months ago it would have been black.
Winter is over.

Saturday 20 February 2010

Twilight in the Launderette

No-one else here but some kind of repairman, and the woman behind the counter. Everything white gleaming, and somehow lost. Lost time in the launderette. Strange serenity in watching my clothes go round, interspersed with passages read from 2666 by Roberto Bolano. Notice twilight beginning to fall outside. Move to the bench next to the window. wish they had a coffee machine here. Twilight seems to rise from the ground tonight. The sky is bright with coastal dusk. The buildings down by the seafront are sunset tinged. Vague clouds suspended remind me of September. A woman passes by with her umbrella up. I hadn't noticed rain. Across the street, a shop selling groceries (boxes of fruit piled up on the street) has a sign still advertising Christmas trees for sale. December ghosts. A drunk man wonders by, a can of beer in his left hand, his face ragged and anxious.
The sky darkens, thick banks of cloud obscure the blue. The distant buildings are still touched with dying sun though. Sun and clouds. Usually a sign of a coming storm. Portentious twilight.
So serene in here. The television is turned down low, a soporific humming. The rhythmic clockwork mechanisms of the machines. A couple walk in. The woman has all manner of complicated instructions for her washing. The man looks bored. A woman comes in with her child, who picks up the flyers in the window (bands, club nights, pub quizzes, art shows). The mother threatens her child with a lack of treats if she doesn't put the flyers down; 'You can't read and I'll just throw them away'. They leave. The man and the woman leave. The quiet comes back.
My washing is ready. I pack it haphazardly into my bag. The street looks unreal, the light a dreamt-of shade of blue. Twilight side-effect. Everyone looks like they're waiting for the carnival to arrive.
I arrive home, and soon collapse into an early sleep.
The storm does not come.

Thursday 18 February 2010

An Utterly Mundane and Boring Dream

I was back at school, having a computer lesson in the sixth form block. It looked rather like the call centre, and there were many work colleagues there. At the end of the room, there was a small curtained off area that held a toilet and a television set. I sat on the toilet watching a wildlife documentary. A woman came through and asked me what I was watching, and then proceeded to get changed. Someone else came through and leant on a broom. I leant on the broom too. I don't know why.
It was time for the class to end. I left the sixth form block, and started walking toward the main area of the school. Surprisingly it had snowed. This alarmed me somewhat, particularly as I saw a gang of kids throwing snowballs at me. I made my way back into the sixth form block, realising I had forgotten my jacket and bag anyway. I had come in through the wrong entrance. I walked up a slope into what appeared to be some kind of multi-storey car park. It had snowed in here too. I looked back at my footprints in the snow, and was pleased to discover that I was the first one to traverse the steep incline. I managed to find my way back into the sixth form block, but quickly became lost. I looked out of the windows. The school had grown. I didn't remember the sixth form block being as big as this. Perhaps I had wondered into another school? Strange rooms, remniscent of libraries. Vast halls. People in the distance. Sure I was trespassing.
I finally made my way back into the computer room, but I could not find my desk. Where was I sitting? There was no-one I knew to ask where I was sitting. Then I realised I was wearing my jacket, and had my bag with me.
I could leave, and had come back in, and got lost, for nothing.

Wednesday 17 February 2010

A Strangely Resonant Dream

I was back in Scotland, on some kind of temporary visit. I was on the edge of a vast wood. It was, perhaps, late summer. The ground of the woods was covered with sand, and I think the time was early morning. I was leaving Scotland to return back to England, but I was thinking that this is my true home, and that one day I would return. I was referring to this dream-Scotland; the woods, the sand, the sky. I had to go back and get something (I can't remember what though) and this necessitated running barefoot through the edges of the wood. I remember the brightness of the sun, but also a heavy morning mist. This seemed to be experienced simultaneously. The wood had something primeval about it. The trees seemed elemental beings. In fact the whole wood did. Though I was aware of this, I was also aware that I was not frightened, more kind of respectful. There was a cottage on the edge of the woods. I had to run because the transport to take me back to England was waiting for me. When I reached this unseen and unremembered form of transport I woke up.

I lay under my covers thinking about the dream. Nothing particularly amazing actually happened in it, but it seemed to resonate with a sense of power, a sense of ancient-ness, a hyper-reality if you will.

Some dreams seem to hold, if not a meaning, then an importance, though exactly what is important about them is impossible to define. It is rather like that feeling that accompanies deja-vu, that sense of revelation, that everything is about to make some kind of sense, that you are about to see the underlying pattern of things.
It slips away though, before this secret reveals itself, leaving only an echo of mystery, a puzzling ghost that seems to follow you throughout the day.

Well, the sun is bright out there this morning. It seems that spring might, at last, be on the way.

Tuesday 16 February 2010

The Narrow Time

These days that drift like dust.
The window rattles against the frame, but I don't remember any wind when I was walking home. More incessant now. Cathy perhaps? A poor Heathcliff I would make though. I'll jam the knife between window frame and window, stop these ghosts from getting in.
Pass like dreams. Strange hours. Not winter and not spring. Some days freezing cold, but with an air as fluid as March, and others bright and shining, but kept with the chill of January. Adrift on seas, on this ocean of a fifth season. Twilight time. Dawn time.
Wake up before the alarm in mornings still dripping with dreams. Last night, Barack Obama as the call centre manager. We went out for a coffee to Costas. Put off getting out of bed for as long as possible. A shower in the freezing, unfriendly bathroom.
Walk to work listening to songs I can't remember come nightfall, pass by the early morning newsagents, the dog walkers. A man lighting a tiny cigarette, hunched over, nursing his tobacco wound. Winding down the hill, past the churchyard and the road that runs to Brighton Station. Pass Jen's House. Marley's News, dark and foreboding, nameless now the sign has gone, workmen carrying out display cases and newspaper bundles.
Through the empty atrium at the call centre. Look up at those strips of sky however many storeys above. Listen to my footsteps clicking out time as I walk past the giant chessboard no-one uses, the coffee machines that no longer accept coppers.
Walk home through night-dark, everything orange and black. Pass by windows whose curtains are undrawn. Look up at one second storey room. A painting hanging on a wall of a street scene. Perfect light in an empty room. No-one passes, nothing breaks this perfect frame.
Up the stairs in this house of bedsits. The smell of bubblebath as comforting as half lost childhood memories. Cooking. Lamb and mint. A Sunday dinner on a Tuesday night. Old Sunday nights. The gloom before returning to school, that heavy heart, reluctant and terminal switching off weekend lights.
Fall asleep before midnight, forget to turn the lamp off, until I wake in the small hours.
Nowhere time.
The end of winter; February a narrow room made of wood and the light of grey afternoons heavy with rain.

Saturday 13 February 2010

Bracken Under Late Summer Skies

The summer of 1995 was the hottest I have known. It seemed to start in May and lasted well until October. I had finished the first year of my illustration course in Southampton, and over that summer I had returned to my parents then-bungalow At Bretforton in Worcestershire.
Bretforton was a picturesque village, all greens and manors, overhanging trees, a church that was close on a thousand years old. There were two pubs, one, The Fleece, had witchmarks in one of the rooms. It was alleged to be the second most haunted village in England, a thing that pleased me no end, though I never experienced anything untoward.
I spent three months there that summer, a quarter of a year. I knew no-one in the village, and so isolated, I felt a little lost. I would spend my days reading Thomas Ligotti and Emily Bronte, sneaking out for cigarettes with Bracken our yorkshire terrier.
We had had Bracken since 1988. He was a nervous dog, terrified of everything; loud noises, other dogs, people... but I loved him. Despite the fact he was so nervous, he was quite a hardy dog, and would accompany me on long rambles into the surrounding countryside for hours. One time, lost over the fields, with a thunderstorm fast approaching from the Malvern Hills, Bracken determinedly pulled me over a small bridge I couldn't find in the twilight gloom. He would sleep on my parents bed, but in the morning (I slept late) he would scratch on the door to let him in. He would then sleep on my bed till I got up, hours later.
The isolation in Bretforton got to me that summer, but now looking back on that time I hold a fondness for it. Rose-tinted glasses? Perhaps. I think the sun had blinded me then though.
One evening, late in August of the year, I took Bracken for a walk after dinner. Often I would take him around the Back Lane. This would give me ample chance to smoke cigarettes, and generally find some peace from myself. That evening was so beautiful though, I thought I would go on a bit of a longer walk. Swinging over weed-covered stile into a field of sheep, skirting a field of asparagus, and passing the clump of trees where I would sometimes sit and stare into the distance.
I came to a field I had never seen before. I don't know what kind of crops were growing there, but they were far taller than me. I noticed there was a path through these monstrous crops.
Twilight was falling, one of those hot, unreal twilights lost summers bring. I felt far from the village here. I let Bracken off the lead and raced him along the path. He was a fast dog, and we both ran at full speed, racing each other to some unknown destination, until I finally collapsed, exhausted, still not having reached the end of the path.
I walked slowly back with Bracken. I could see the lights of the village in the distance, the odd lamp, the solitary window. They flickered at me through the branches of trees. The sky was blue-steeled, an electric sea-shade, and as I walked back, the church bell began to chime. Sonorous tones announcing some twilight hour.
There was a wood-pigeon calling somewhere.
I don't know why that moment stays with me. Just a fragment I didn't think much of at the time, but it stays with me as such things do, an unnamed tarot card that keeps recurring. A divination of remembering. Arcane recall.
Bracken passed away over ten years ago now, and I still miss him.
He was my friend, and in that moment we raced each other through a field in dusk, I knew that I was alive.

Friday 12 February 2010

The Girl who was Autumn

I never talked to her, never even knew her name. The most we exchanged were a few glances as I passed by in the call centre. She reminded me of Frida Kahlo, an echo of Mexico I've never known. Small, dark eyes, dark skin, hair night-black, in the way that nobody whose forebears are English can ever have.
She worked there for a few months. I said thanks to her once when she opened the door for me, and that was all. The odd thing about her was that she reminded me of autumn, as if a quiet afternoon in October had wrapped itself in the form of a woman. This was accompanied by a curiously well realised image, a kind of involuntary daydream. We were in a house, a kitchen to be precise. The kitchen was on the ground floor at the back of the house, and contained a spacious seating area. Comfy armchairs, a wooden breakfast table. Outside the windows, across a kitchen top landscape of a sink, a draining board holding drying dishes and cutlery, was a garden. The garden was in an 'L' shape, running parallel to the kitchen, and pooling round the back of the house into a rough square. The garden was lined with trees, creating a pleasantly shadowed, hidden feeling.
It was unclear, in this image, whether we were lovers of sharing a house together, but in this daydream, which rapidly adopted a feeling of a memory, it was morning. We were getting ready to go to work, that rushed-morning feeling; cups of coffee and the radio turned on low, skin still drying from showers and minds filing away dream memories and sleep ghosts.
It was undeniably October, one of those warm and mysterious October days where the sky never seems still, shifting clouds showing pale blue skies, comforting rays of sunlight through flickering branches. Falling on discarded leaves in the garden.
The feeling in this dream was accompanied by a quiet happiness, I don't know why.
Every time she passed me, this image came to mind. It seemed very clear, very lucid, and as I have said, had the quality of a memory, of something experienced.
As is the way in the call-centre, sales agents never stay for long. It is badly paid and tiring work, and when I returned after the Christmas break, she did not. I didn't notice her absence at first, but a week or two in, I realised that I hadn't seen her for a while, and that she had probably left.
I hold it like a memory, this strange resonance, a flash of a morning sharing a coffee with a girl who was autumn.

Wednesday 10 February 2010

An Ickenham Haunting: The House on Woodstock Drive

We lived at my grandfather's house over the summer of 1985, a hot summer full of isolation, computer games and comics. In early September we moved to Northwood, where the air base my Dad was posted to was located. We were only there for a month or so (they were demolishing the house) and in October (the 8th if I remember correctly - I don't know why I would remember though) we moved to 33 Woodstock Drive in the leafy London suburbia of Ickenham.
It was another air force owned house, fairly large, as it had four bedrooms, and a not inconsiderable garden. I was pleased with my room, at the front of the house, the largest room I had had for a while.
We settled in, started school (Forres Academy was paradise compared to Abbotsfield Comprehensive), made friends, found new interests, most notably music with myself, noisy thrash metal and the then burgeoning hardcore punk crossover scene. My adolescence, those hallowed teenage years had began in earnest.
My interest in the paranormnal had not subsided though. I think by this time I knew that my fascination with ghost stories would be with me for life. I even roped in a new friend to go ghost hunting with me over Ickenham Marsh one October day, so some things never changed.
I can't remember when I first realised that there was something, well, wrong, with Woodstock Drive, or our house there anyway. Perhaps I was so used to the fantasy world that I had created in childhood, that, at first, I didn't really notice very much out of the ordinary. It is hard to remember how Woodstock's Drive narrative started. possibly because it seemed to increase in intensity over the years. I certainly remember the first year or so there. Objects vanishing and appearing where I hadn't put them. A comb I had put on the windowsill then dissappearing only to turn up days later by the door. Of course, it was probably me, those ramshackle and forgetful teenage years. As for the noises in the attic? Well, even I put them down to the house settling. A very noisy house settling though. Sounded like someone was flinging boxes around up there. My sister used to complain of hearing sounds in the walls. My parents said they were probably spiders, which, rather than reassuring my sister, led her into a new domestic arachnophobia. The footsteps we heard upstairs at night, when all the family were in the living room, had to be next door of course.
Gradually though, I became aware of a certain presence the house seemed to have. It always seemed full of gloomy shadows, and far too large. All that weight of emptiness. Sometimes I would become irrationally afraid of my room. I would hate being upstairs on my own. I didn't like being in the house on my own even during the day. One week, when I was off ill from school, I kept hearing noises - bangs, the sounds of things being thrown.
Of course, all of this is subjective, as most ghost stories are. Scientists are, if in any way interested at all, eager to disprove hauntings, and parapsychologists are obsessed with evidence; electromagnetic fluctuations, temperature drops, cold spots, but no one seems that interested in the subjective viewpoint in haunted locales. This is what fascinates me the most, that part of a ghost story that is universal in human experience, cutting across time, culture, histories, wars...
Both my sister and myself frequently experienced a curious phenomena, that of being alone in a room with our backs to the door, then 'feeling' someone walk in. I would think it was a family member, and turn around, only to find there was no-one there.
There were things that were less subjective though. Our dog barking up the stairs at the same time every day (about 11 in the morning) for no discernable reason. One time, going through that teenage phase of eating my dinner in my room, I heard somebody run across the landing from outside my door, clatter noisily down the stairs, open the front door and run up the garden path. I looked out of my window. No-one there. I shrugged and continued eating my dinner. My Mum opened my door. She seemed shocked that I was there. The rest of the family, eating their dinner in the living room, had heard the same as me. It was never explained. My mum is still convinced it was me to this day.
Of course, there were other things to occupy my time as well as these mysterious events; puberty, girls, bullying at school, music, GCSEs, A-Levels, and the strangeness of the house tended to fade a little into the background.
When I was 18, there was a night I shall never forget as long as I live. It was April of 1990, and my family were away. I had three friends over this night, who, because I am still in contact with two of them, I shall refer to as A, B and C. It started when we were in the living room that evening. For some reason, we were all engaged in quite a heated debate about war and conscription. I began to shiver uncontrollably. I remember my teeth chattering, as if I was back in the freezing winters of Kinloss. A. noticed this, asked me what was wrong. I told him I didn't know. I kept getting a strange image in my head, of the garden, and in the garden, a figure. I have a very vague image of this figure, of a cloak wrapped around an emaciated body. Approaching the house. 'It feels like somethings coming' I said. I was expecting ridicule, but A. said that the other night, he had a feeling of overwhelming evil coming from the hallway, (he had stayed over on and off during the week). I had been asleep, and he had felt the urge to protect himself, with a cross I think. (A. was, and still is, a Christian, and ended up becoming a priest).
Obviously we began to talk excitedly about what was occurring. It started off as something quite fun, but the mood quickly darkened. This was helped along by the electricity failing for a few seconds, then coming on again. Plunged suddenly into darkness, we were dizzied and lost. Was something actually happening? This continued through the night.
Uneasiness turned to terror, and we began to feel imprisoned in the living room. A. suggested that we bless the house. We improvised with some tap water, and under A's direction, blessed the water, and moved into the rest of the house (for the record, I am no Christian, though might have considered myself one back then. A perfectly valid spiritual choice, but one that is certainly not for me).
Anyway, we moved through each room, flicking 'holy water' as we went. A. said a few quick prayers in each room. Downstairs wasn't too bad, though I remember the dining room feeling cold and desolate. A deep spiritual vacuum, an unfriendly emptiness, seemingly watchful.
We moved upstairs. A's idea of blessing the house no doubt increased our hysteria. It probably would have been better if we had turned the television on and watched a film. We were caught in it though, lulled into an hysteric compliance with our own imaginations. Almost hypnotic. Perhaps this explains why upstairs felt so dreadfully wrong, an experience which I can only liken to a low dosage tab of LSD, the feeling that things were about to tip off into something rreally strange (though how strange do you want though? - Four 18 year olds blessing a house they thought was under attack by a malevolent force!) We went through all the rooms - my bedroom was bad. I thought, for some reason, that because it was so untidy, that whatever was in the house with us would use the chaos there to make itself stronger. The spare room was awful too (images of a grey child, crumbling away in the bed) but this was nothing compared to the bathroom.
It seemed immense, as if it wasn't a small bathroom in a suburban semi-detached, but something vast and impersonal, a nightmare bathroom. When I think back to what we all felt in there, I find that even trying to put it into words nullifies it. Reading Danielewski's masterpiece 'House of Leaves', a ghost story (perhaps) of a house with an internally, impossibly shifting architecture, captures the feeling far better than I do.
We all fought down panic, and returned to the living room, where we all elected to stay for the night. The lights kept failing on us.
B. and C. fell asleep, leaving A. and myself awake until dawn, talking about school, girls, anything really. There was an odd crackling noise outside the living room window, the sound of static on an untuned television set. At some point, A said 'do you hear that?'. I said yes, and we continued talking.
Sleep was a long time coming that night.
The next day we swapped swapped thoughts. It was interesting to note the parallels; none of us could stand the thought of mirrors, and we had all, independently of each other, refused to look in any around the house. As we had all fell asleep, we all experienced unsettling images. I can't remember what A's was, but B. said he kept getting images of a 'dark man' and would say no more, C. said that he had images of a 'woman with evil eyes'. For myself, I kept seeing images of stereotyped demons, no doubt informed by my interest in horror films and Doctor Who.
Looking back on those events from a distance of 20 years is interesting. I am almost certain that this was some exercise in mass hysteria, and that if we had put the television on, the night would have been far less eventful than it was. We hypnotised ourselves with the use of ritual and ceremony, let our imaginations run riot, fed by our then anxieties; school ending, a difficult adolesence. Fertile ingredients for a feast of hysteria. A similar thing occurred with Derren Brown's seance on Channel 4 a few years ago, if I remember rightly. A shared hallucination, an infectious and fortunateky temporary psychosis perhaps. I think a similar thing happens with the use of Ouija boards - a device that Derren Brown used in his show.
The next night A. and B. stayed over. We watched the television, -nothing happened- We probably should have done this on the previous night. We were careful not to talk about anything even vaguely related to the supernatural though.
The day afterwards, A. had gone to work. It was early afternoon, one of those grey, fecund spring days. B. and myself were preparing to leave, to walk into the nearby town of Uxbridge. 'Look' said B. He showed me his hand. There seemed to be the imprints of two teeth marks in the skin between his thumb and forefinger. Probably scratches, but we still fairly tight with tension from the events of that week.
We hurriedly left the house, panic clawing at us, and all those seeming thousands of empty rooms and landings and bathrooms, with their layers and layers of silence, and deep brooding shadows, seeming to darken ever deeper.

Things calmed down after that. We left school and got on with our lives. C. moved away, and we gradually lost contact with A. (I have only renewed contact with them over the last year). B. and myself remained friends until I left the area in 1994, to head down to Southampton to study illustration when I was 22, and I gradually lost contact with him too.
I wonder where he is, and if he remembers that hysterical, fascinating night?

I find myself dreaming of that house more and more often recently. Sometimes it is haunted, and sometimes not. I find that I am to be living there again, or that I have found a key to go back in again. It is often early autumn, and, for some reason, always seems to be sunset. The streets are full of apple trees and bushes, and when I wake, I find these dreams oddly comforting.

I am almost done with Woodstock Drive now, the only place I have lived in to consider haunted. I have far too much of a sceptical nature to ever claim that any of what I have written above is anything other than my own extremely overactive imagination. I like that uncertainty though. Everything can be explained away. Electricity does fail, and people do get hysterical, and humanity is well known for believing in absurd things. The noises in the attic were probably the house settling, distorted by memory, the dogs were probably barking at a passing lorry, and the footsteps down the landing. Just one of those things.
But.
There was one other thing. It was a small thing, mundane really, almost boring. It is the only thing in my life that I cannot explain away. The one thing that means I can never, ever entirely give in to materialism.
It was a couple of years later. I think I must have been 20 or so. I was sat in my room on a chair, playing the guitar, It was evening, I remember this. I was quite happy playing my guitar. I happened to look up, and my eyes rested on a box of paints across the other side of the room. It lifted into the air, only a few inches, flipped itself over -a somersault- and landed back down again with a clatter.
I looked at this impossible movement, shrugged and thought 'that's interesting' and continued playing the guitar. My nonchalant reaction was probably the strangest thing of all.

Sometimes, when the world seems a mundane, bleak place, and behind every mystery, an explanation that takes away that mystery, I think of that impossibly flipping box of paints.
Sometimes, I find that's enough to remind me that the world is a far, far stranger place than we sometimes give it credence for.
And maybe not everything can be explained away.

Orion over St Anne's Well Park

White-cold air of a February night. Listening to Current 93's 'Of Ruin or Some Blazing Starr'. Watching the trees down Cromwell Road huddled in the orange street lamp glow. Pretending I was staying still, and the trees were walking past me. The dark geometery of houses, blank windows allowing no light to spill. Closed curtains like eyelids hiding sleeping eyes. Turn right down Somerfield Road. A flickering lamp stops me. Pink hues, a stillborn sentinel. Fluttering morsecode message in this sudden pool of darkness. Look up. Notice the stars, so cold they're almost blue. So many of them. A clear night, no clouds ('no wind, no rain' - words found in a journal kept by the Reverand Densham, a Cornish Priest who vanished shortly after). The constellation of Orion, hanging over St Anne's Well Park, an impossible equation for a formula never to be decoded, and Current 93 'I remember walking in the fields around York...'
By the time I reached home, midnight had turned.

Monday 8 February 2010

The Wardrobe Clock

The wardrobe in the corner of my room, behind me, for I sit facing the closed curtains of the window, reminds me of a grandfather clock. Over my right shoulder, it ticks this bedsit-time. I glimpse it over my right shoulder, as if salt I have thrown to ward off bad luck has taken form. Victorian echo. A genus-loci of a house of bedsits.

The February Summer of Friday and Saturday had all but vanished yesterday. Andy and myself went on an excursion into the Industrial Zone of Shoreham. For some reason a lot bleaker than the pre-Christmas walk I had taken with Joe.
We made it to the cafe in the heart of this place, and whilst sitting outside drinking coffees, someone asked me for a roll-up. I capitulated, despite not believing her tale of having lost her tobacco on the beach. She expressed surprise that I was English. I asked where she thought I was from, and said she had assumed I was Puerto Rican or Italian.
She was a nice girl, 24 years old, and just moved down to Brighton from the unseen (by me anyway) wastes of Northampton. We talked for a while, about nothing in particular. She was full of that naive, though pleasing optimism that always comes with just arriving in a new place you have chosen to arrive at. A lesbian buddhist - she showed me her tattoo of interlinked female symbols on her stomach, she was a little concerned at her neighbours in Southwick. They were all baptists, she commented, who wished to convert her.
Mistaken for a Puerto Rican by a Lesbian Buddhist.
These kind of things only happen in Brighton.
As she said goodbye to us, she said that we had made her day.
I wonder why.

Watched the marvellous French film 'Innocence' last night, at Andy's. A bewitching and haunting evocation of childhood, it's fairy tale ambience tempered by dark undercurrents. Filled with images of lamplit forest paths, underground tunnels, secret theatre stages, and stairways hidden inside grandfather clocks, the film casts a hypnotic thrall. Memories of things never experienced, except perhaps in dreams; swimming in wood-shadowed pools, silent cups of tea drunk in the kitchens of twilight-restful farmhouse kitchens. Lying in bed at night, listening to the wind through trees. Implacable snow. Timeless autumn.
No grandfather clock to mark the times of these memories.

Bitterly cold today, and snowing again. A day at work spent reading about outsider artists on the internet and working on the fourth drawing in the Book of Deleriums. Walked up to Seven Dials after work, ostensibly to go to the supermarket, but really to see how cold it was. 3 degrees only, according to the temperature guage, and not even 8'0'clock.

Since changing my room around, the bedsit feels a little more welcoming. Perhaps the wardrobe feels more at home in the corner, thinking of things, memories never experienced. A dark wooden reverie. Perhaps of grandfather clocks, marking the time in the hallways of old houses, where the light is soft and never far from the temptations of sleep.

Saturday 6 February 2010

Confessions of a Childhood Ghost Hunter IV: Forres and The Black Woods

Shortly after Craig had left Kinloss, in the November of 1982, my family moved to Forres. It was only about three miles away from Kinloss, but it felt like a lifetime. I knew no-one in Forres, so ghost hunting expeditions were less a part of everyday life, and more a special occasion.
Our house, a newly built three bedroomed semi-detached house was in a new estate, consisting of one road; Drumduan Park. It was pleasant enough I suppose, but Forres seemed a much more dangerous place than Kinloss. For one thing, there weren't only air force families around us now, and Forres was larger and unknown, a fact that caused great consternation to my 10 year old self.
Our House, number 89, was built at the bottom of a hill. The garden sloped upwards steeply. Over the other side of the garden fence, there was a small lane, then a low wall, and then, The Black Woods.
The Black Woods, if you remember, was where Craig had told us that the Dark Force, that all powerful malevolent spirit, originated. Looking from my bedroom window up at the Black Woods, I was impressed, and not a little frightened by how powerful the trees seemed; ancient, inscrutable, and timelessly deep. I would sit on my bed, and watch it get dark, and be convinced that the woods did indeed hold something dark.
They fascinated me as much as the small wood by the railway line in Kinloss. When it snowed, the white showed more of the interior of the Black Woods. Over the winter of 1982 I would stare into the depths, as if trying to figure something out.
Martin stayed over, and we made efforts to penetrate the mysteries of the Black Woods. The Black Woods lived up to their name, and in some ways, Craig had been right in naming them so, for there was something dark about them, particularly the section that our house backed onto. The section of the wooded hill that sloped down into the town of Forres proper held a graveyard - the same one that Craig claimed his gang, the Efrafa, had been attacked by living skeletons. There was also a tourist attraction in the shape of Nelson's Tower. I can't remember any of the history of Nelson's Tower, but I think it was well over 500 years old. These weren't the Black Woods proper though, they were the section at the back of my house.
The expeditions into the Black Woods weren't exactly fun. The further you penetrated into the dense trees, the more and more remote it seemed - and dangerous. You seemed constantly on the verge of panic. Just inside the woods was a small electricity sub-station. This has always puzzled me. What was it doing in the woods? Fingers clasped around rusted railing, I noticed that someone had scratched something into the concrete. Arcane typography. It gave me a shiver when I read it; 'Satan. Mine Humble Home'. We called it the Pet Cematary of course. Further round the perimeter of the Black Woods, next to a huge mansion owned by the new age community at Findhorn, was a seemingly vertical slope, covered in ivy. There was an old tree trunk we used to make a base in. We enjoyed playing there until one day we discovered the bones of an old dog, lost and forgotten under the leaves.
I shall never forget one day though. My sister and myself decided to go for a picnic in The Black Woods. So, taking food with us, we penetrated the depths of the wood far further than we ever had before. Eventually we came across a clearing, deep, deep in the woods. We decided to have our picnic here. We settled down to eat, both of us trying to ignore the gathering uneasiness around us. The clearing held scraps of debris; the remains of an old iron bed, the rusting skeleton of a motorbike. Piles of old clothes. The remains of a fire.
A wind started up. It was the wind of course, but this breeze through the trees sounded like voices. An inhuman moaning, more a sighing really, that sounded as if it had once been human. It bought curiously disturbing images to me; an old, old thing, something that somehow defined the feeling of being lost, an ancient malevolence.
Finally; The Dark Force, and we were alone with it, and we weren't meant to be here.
We didn't run back, and this was somehow worse. If we had run, it would have signified we were still enjoying ourselves, as we had in Kinloss. We made our way back though, as quickly and quietly as possibly. Quietly for one reason; we didn't want it to follow us. It felt like we were being hunted.
We never went as deep into The Black Woods again.
The year afterwards, we left the pleasant confines of Abbeylands Primary School for the local comprehensive, Forres Academy. At the end of the first year, Martin and his family were posted down to Cornwall. I remember, sometimes though, lying in my bed at night, and being far too aware of those woods at the top of our garden, that I was glad Martin and Craig had gone, because it meant I would never have to go into The Black Woods again.
My last year in Scotland, leaving in the summer of 1985, when I was 13, was a strange one. I hated secondary school, full of bullying and violence, and, with Martin gone, very isolated. I made new friends of course, but these new friendships were fractious and untrustworthy things. There were still occasional ghost hunting phases, but though, I was, and am, as interested in the paranormal as ever, they had begun to lose their charm. Maybe I was growing older but it felt more and more like we were just fooling ourselves. Killing time.
What I most remember about that last year in Scotland was a growing sense of melancholy and darkness. Sundays sitting on my bed, listening to the Top 40 on a mono-radio, looking up at those ever watchful Black Woods, trapped in the house, and feeling ever more trapped within myself. I would feel a painful nostalgia for Kinloss, and felt like a shadow had passed into my life.
Looking back on it, I can see my time in Forres, particularly that isolated last year, as a fertile breeding ground for the depression that was to develop during my ensuing adolesence, blossoming into that hated, if controlled -sometimes anyway- chronic condition that I still have today.

I didn't really enjoy Forres.

We left in the summer of 1985, when mt Dad was posted down to West London. I wasn't sorry to leave, though frightened of starting a new school, which I was to discover, was far, far worse than Forres Academy. We spent a summer at my Grandfather's house in Stone, before moving, first to Northwood for a few months, and then to Ickenham for the next 7 or so years.
By the time we had lived in Ickenham a year, I was to change a lot. Childhood was dead, and after a year there, I had kissed a girl, swapped Adam and the Ants for the delights of underground thrash bands such as Sodom, Voivod and Kreator, visited London regularly without my parents, and had my arm broken in the school playground when someone picked my tiny frame up and threw me to the concrete ground (the snap of my arm, and the pure blue sky as I lay there moaning, everyone laughing at me).
My interest in the paranormal was only to grow however, and our house on Woodstock Drive in Ickenham, more than anywhere else I have known, was, whatever it means, haunted. Certainly in that house, I experienced something (and it was only a mundane thing really) that I have never been able to rationally explain.
But that's a story for another time.
And this is the end of the confessions of a childhood ghost hunter.

Days of February Summer

It is a curious phenomena that only seems to occur every few years. It usually follows after a relatively harsh winter, this concept of a 'February summer', and is due, mostly, to that feeling of relief after the claustrophobic days of January.
January is an odd month, always beginning optimistically, albeit in a harsh way, but by the time the last half of January appears, that optimism has been transfigured into a sense of slushy claustrophobia; grey nights, where the air is so thick with cold it seems impossible to breathe, where there seems no colour apart from black, white and the orange of streetlight, where (for some reason) my eyesight seems to deteriorate to such an extent that it is difficult to read by lamp light.
A February Summer is that sudden plunge into sunlight that makes being outside pleasant once again. There is no warning that this will occur. Heavy rain was forecast yesterday, but when I woke up, and peered at the street outside, there it was, bright sunlight.
It couldn't be classed as a February Summer until I got outside, and felt how warm it was, but no, it was quite warm. Pleasant even. I had missions to complete yesterday, which had causing me no small amount of anxiety all week. I had to finish a t-shirt design for a band (less than 48 hours to design and finish the thing before the band's singer had to hand it in to the printers), and I to visit the dread environs of the council tax office.
Between these less than pleasant excursions, and the more pleasant rendesvous of meeting Yovee, over from Poland for the weekend, for coffee, I made it down to the beach. I bought myself a cup of tea from one of the numerous seafront stalls, and settled onto the pebbles. The last time I had been able to do this was the last week of October, those days just before the final incidents at my old nightmare flat which necessitated me having to move out the following week.
Oh, the relief. Not just of the warmth, and of being able to be outside again (I hate being inside. I am like a gentleman of the road who has a building to sleep in at night) but the pleasure of being able to read once more. The act of reading, for me, is always bound up in circumstance. A book is vastly improved be being able to read it in a cafe, on a train journey, or more so, at a park, or at a beach. This perhaps explains why I am still reading Robert Bolano's 2666, after a month and a half. Reading indoors, particularly those ever-gloomy places I seem to always be living in, just depresses me. I cannot concentrate, and over the winter, I seem not to be able to physically read. Eye-strain. Premonitions of growing old.
There was the crashing of the waves to enjoy, all spindrift madness, some predator clawing the stones back into it's maw. A hippy, off to my left, played a guitar I couldn't hear. To my right, a foreign woman, I think she was Polish, lay on the stones, in the langorous attitude of a cat.
I had sat too close to the sea though, and the tide was coming in. There was a great leap toward me of white foam, nearly reaching me. Somewhat perturbed by this, I retreated back, and sat amongst dried seaweed in the sudden sun of a February Summer.

It seems, or perhaps I am being overtly optimistic, that there is another day of February Summer outside. I must make the most of them, for they never last for long, and the bleakness of late winter soon reasserts itself.
No matter, it is nice anyway to have even only a few days relief, if only to remind us that winter, like periods of melancholy, don't last forever.

I don't think the February Summer can explain quite so much why I enjoyed Megadeth's 'So Far, So Good... So What' album though. I downloaded it last year but hadn't listened to it for over twenty years.
Ah well.
Probably back to winter tomorrow.

Wednesday 3 February 2010

The Year Continues (Just Turned Midnight)

The year continues. February replacing January.
Midnight, just turned.
A cup of decaffineated coffee, surprisingly black. I need a harsh taste tonight. I don't know why.
Seemed to take me hours to get to sleep last night, and when I did, I dreamt long, epic, but strangely mundane dreams. Worcester at night. I was living there again. Stealing a street lamp to hide in my room. Remembering I had brothers, of varying ages. I was staying at their house, worried I wouldn't get on with them. Staying in a hotel where And Also The Trees were also. A dumb waiter acting as a kind of transport around the hotel. I did not know how to operate it.
Been oddly nostalgic for spring days in Ickenham today. Don't know why. Suburban streets, knee high walls and neat and tidy gardens. A mundane labyrinth of houses and houses and neatly kept parks, and the odd clump of trees. I remember in my teenage years, canal walks with the family, listening to thrash metal on my walkman. Electric taste of sunburnt air. So many trees in Ickenham. All we have is the sea here.
Nothing to say. I am mute tonight, and am putting off sleep, for I do not wish that insomnia to descend again.
Another day at the call centre tomorrow.
The year continues.

Monday 1 February 2010

Confessions of a Childhood Ghost Hunter III: Tales from Burnside

In the second part of these confessions of a childhood ghost-hunter, I outlined the all encompassing fantasy world that my friends and myself had created for ourselves over my year and a half living at Burnside. This mythology provided us with a backdrop for our ghost hunting expeditions, a set of legends we could lose ourselves in, and modify if we thought it was necessary. An early form of 'world building' perhaps, and I think it is my experiences at Burnside that informed my fascination with fictional mythologies, most notobly, Lovecraft's nebulous 'Cthulhu Mythos'.
In this post, I'll tell a few tales from the Burnside Cycle...

I had spent the Christmas of 1981 at Nanny and Grandad Mole's house. My grandfather was ill, and would pass away in the new year. Despite the fact we all knew he was dying, I remember that Christmas as my best Christmas ever. This puzzles me. Surely at 9 years old, I was old enough to understand the ramifications of death? I don't remember the grief that must have covered my grandparents house as my Grandad lay dying in hospital. All I remember is snow, action men, Adam and the Ants and the Pan Books of Horror Stories. On Christmas Day I was treated to the rather surreal sight of my aunt, who was a nun, in full habit, reading the 14th Volume of the Pan Horror Stories. It was an arresring sight. The cover showed some monstrosity with red eyes and it's lips torn off revealing a rather disturbing skull-like lower face.
We returned to Kinloss in the first few days of 1982. Craig had moved back to Southside, after his time away in the nearby town of Forres, and the golden age of ghost hunting was about to begin.

A rather ambiguous episode I remember happened early on in the year. It was probably January, as there was deep snow. One evening -nights fell early here remember- Martin and myself took the sledge up to the woods. On the edge of the woods was a tiny cinema -The Astra. Between the back of the Astra (now closed) and the woods was a concrete path, and it was this that we had bought the sledge for. There was quite a considerable slope to the path, and Martin and myself took turns sledging down the slope, bringing the sledge back up, then the next person would take over. It seems a hypnotic memory this one. The dark woods to our right, the block of the cinema to our left. Claustrophobic in the darkness. Our sledging bought us nearer and nearer to the small drop into the woods. A gathering sense of premonition. The absolute winter night. And Martin and myself, sledging in the midst of this all.
Then Martin told me a story. He said that while we had been away for Christmas in Wolverhampton, he had seen our car, the car that was down in Wolverhampton with us all winter, parked in our driveway. Martin had thought we had come back. I said no. We looked at each other, and suddenly we both felt - for no reason I can think of, as it wasn't a particularly scary story - very, very alone, and very, very isolated, on the edge of these black woods. In the snow. In the night.
We didn't need to say anything, and in an urgent terror, we ran back into the safety of Burnside.

Over the Easter of 1982, when Martin was away, Craig and myself had gone up to the Burn to play. There was a small path between the fences of the gardens of Burnside, and the Burn itself. As we were walking along this path on a bright Easter day, we were surprised to see a car coming toward us. We were surprised because this was a footpath. We had never seen a car here before, and we ducked behind a few trees for a second or two, to let the car pass. We popped back out onto the path again.
The car was gone.
It wasn't reversing back along the path it had come (no room to turn around) and neither could it be seen on the playing fields that the path eventually led out onto.
Craig and me stood by the bridge over the Burn.
'Do you think we've seen a-'
I didn't need to finish the sentence.
We looked at each other and ran.

Of course we incorporated the 'ghost car' into the Burnside Mythos, postulating the theory that the driver of the car was in fact killed by King Hairy, the woods resident werewolf.

Another time we were playing on the banks of the Burn, and we came across a fragment of what we thought was a gravestone, which led, of course, to us running back into the safety of Burnside. Another victim of King Hairy perhaps?

We seemed to spend our entire time discussing these mysteries of the woods. It would come in phases, some minor incident would spark off our interest again, and we would plan our next expedition to 'solve the mystery of Kinloss'. One time, when it was just Craig and myself, after an exhausting morning's hunting in the woods said that we should maybe forget about it for the afternoon, because, he said 'it lingers on the air'.
I remember thinking about his words that night, as I tried and failed to get to sleep. Had we talked about ghosts in my bedroom? What happens if they did indeed linger and attracted some kind of spirit?
Sleep was a long time coming that night.

On other occasions there was a strange kind of poetic quality to our days, unexplainable really. One afternoon we were stood in the small patch of trees that stood at the entrance to Burnside. It was a bright sunny day, but the wind was blowing, a warm breeze. The wind seemed to make voices amongst the trunks, but these seemed benign spirits. 'The Guardians of Burnside' Craig said. 'It sounds like they're urging us to write evrything down, so we remember'. 'Apart from that one'. Craig pointed to the most remote tree in this small clump. 'Yes' I said, 'That one seems to want us to forget everything'.
We never spoke again of these Guardians of Burnside.

Despite the presence of a manor in the woods, there was little in the way of incident here... I know that our overactive imaginations created this fantasy world for us, the ultimate playground, and it isn't even an incident really, just some strange short circuit in my memory, but, every time I think about the manor, an image - more like a memory really - always comes to mind. I have no idea where this image comes from, but it is of a girl, dressed in Victorian attire, sat in a swing in front of the manor. She is holding a parasol to shield her face from the sun, and she is smiling, but it is a cold smile, and her eyes... I cannot place this memory, and every time I try to reach for it, I seem to be on the verge of remembering something, but I just can't quite touch it.
A dream probably.
Still gives me the chills now though.
Her cold smile, and eyes that were, very, very old.

Our ghost hunting expeditions picked up in intensity as we moved into the autumn of that year. This was probably due to the knowledge that we knew Craig would be leaving in November, and my family would be moving to Forres. It felt like the end of an era, which it was really.
The Hallowe'en of 1982 fell on a Sunday. Hallowe'en was a big deal up in Kinloss, probably the influence of the Americans on the airbase. It had been decided, so as not to cause offence, that trick or treating would take place on a Friday. On Sunday, Hallowe'en proper, of course, the three of us spent the day ghost hunting. I remember early on that day, by the woods, looking over at Craig and Martin, and seeing the sunset tinged sun, just over the tops of the trees. I don't remember much of what happened that day, just a creeping sense of strangeness. I remember the ending though. I was walking in front of the two of them, on the path from the Woods back into Burnside. I remember hearing some commotion and looking behind me I saw Craig and Martin starting to run. I heard splashing in the river, or thought I did. I ran too. That same ecstasy of terror.
Back in the safety of Burnside, Craig told us that he had seen 'things' in the river. A new, and very late addition to the mythos, that he called 'Mutoids'.
I think the name came from Blakes Seven...

There was one last incident at Burnside that I can remember. It was an early November twilight, the sky that beautiful shade of sea-blue. We were on the path that lay between Abbeylands Primary School and the farmers fenced off fields. There was some work being done in the farmers fields, necessitating the formation of a huge mound of mud on the other side of the fence. About half way up the mound was a stray chunk of mud and earth. Simulacra came into play. This stray chunk of earth had the exact features of a witch. In my mind I can see it clearly; the gaping mouth, black holes for eyes, a crooked nose. It glared malevolence at us.
We spent the next hour trying to destroy the witch's head by throwing stones over the fence. When it got too dark to continue, we admitted failure and went home. The next day, the witch's head had gone. Craig said he had come back that night and destroyed it.

Craig left Kinloss soon afterwards. The three of us had spent the day together by the Burn, reminiscing about things. As darkness fell, we stood in that path where we had tried to destroy the witch's head the week before. Halfway between Southside and Burnside. Craig said 'ah well, this is it'. He held his hand out, and Martin put his hand on Craig's, and mine on Martin's. Nobody said anything, but we knew that something was ending. Martin and myself watched him walk away, along the road that led to the school, past the first few houses of Southside. He kept turning to wave at us every now and again. Martin and myself did not turn away, just kept watching our friend disappear into his furure. He waved for one last time, and continued walking.
I remember his sillhouette, his back to us, and the plastic bag he was carrying, as he was swallowed up by the houses.
Martin and myself walked sadly home.

Burnside was over. In less than a month after Craig had left, we had moved from Burnside to Forres, where my parents had bought a house. Childhood was ending. In 1983, we left Abbeylands Primary School for the less welcoming enclave of Forres Academy, the local secondary school. At the end of the first year Martin would leave, and a year after that, I would leave too.

I spent two and a half years living in Forres, in a semi-detached house built at the base of The Black Woods, as we called them. The ghost stories from Forres had a darker tone, far from the bright fantasy world we had created at Burnside. A foreshadowing, perhaps, of a difficult adolescence.
Or maybe I knew that when I left Forres, when I was 13, I would consider my childhood to be over.