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.