A Return to Worcester Part 4: Saturday

Joe Bird headed off to play cricket in Malvern for the day, leaving Joe Walmsley and myself to our own devices for the day. For the rest of this post, seeing as Joe Bird is away for most of it, Joe Walmsley will be referred to as just Joe.
Worcester has haunted us both. I guess university years always do. We talked about this back in Joe Bird's house before we left. Talked about 'closing the dark heart of Worcester' which meant we would just go on a long meandering walk through the places that held some meaning to us.

In Joe Bird's house, before we set off on our trip down old English memory lane.

Our first port of call was to be the cathedral gardens. A pleasant place to dream away a sunny day. Arches in crumbling stone walls. Squat blossom-covered trees. A side of the great cathedral watching, stained-glass window eyes. Repeating triptych patterns. I remember, in the dark days that accompanied the end of Ruth and mine's dark narrative, coming here. I remember sitting here with Joe in the June of 1997, talking about Europe. He went. I ended up in Middlesbrough.
When we got there though, the gates were locked. The gardens forbidden. No explanations, just warnings of 24 hour security and guard dogs. Part time work for Black Shuck now the old english lanes are not so well travelled.
We headed for the other side of the river Severn instead. I had a dreadful headache, the result, perhaps, of yesterday in the hot sun. Dehydration. Maybe mild sunstroke, and still that surreal shock of hearing the call centre had gone down.
There was some kind of event in Worcester that day. Boat races on the river. Loud speakers and families. So incredibly hot. We walked past children playing in the fountains (not there when we lived here) traversed the bridge, and entered the cool tranquility of the other side of the Severn. We would walk along here then take a shortcut up into St Johns.


Sat on the steps leading down to the river. I remember coming here in the late spring of 1999 one weekday afternoon, when I should have been at a lecture, and thinking about an impending trip to Middlesbrough.

We lay down in the shade of trees for a while. Gradually the headache began to recede. Worcester seemed so hyper-real when compared to Brighton, the trees brighter, greener and larger. Everything seemed like a dream of England, rather than England itself. We headed up Slingpool walk - a path between the river and the area known as St Johns, where the University is.


Joe stood in Slingpool Walk.

Slingpool Walk took us into St Johns, a broad suburban area, all red-bricked houses, cars pavement-parked and local shops. We visited Joe's old house on Ellis Road, looking surprisingly Tudor. I only went there once, a visit I only vaguely remember. Something about a basketball movie. Bad vibes. Everyone said the house was haunted by something dark. 'Always felt like there was someone in the next room to yours'.
Why I didn't take a photograph of it is beyond me. Oh well.
Cutting through unknown alleys we found ourselves on Bransford Road.


46 Bransford Road. The first house I lived in Worcester. I was happy here. September 1996 - January 1997. The landlady decided to sell the house. We we were told a few days before Christmas. I've never been very lucky with houses!


After 46 Bransford Road I moved across the street into 37. This was not such a succesful house, though there is a bit of a ghost story connected to this one which I'll get round to telling at some point... 37 is the white house, well, the left hand side of the white house. My room was directly above the front door. Seems to be walled up now. A lot seemed to happen while I lived here. I left here in the June of 1997 for 136 London Road, where I stayed for exactly two years.




Some shots from my walk to college. The first photograph shows a piece of vandalism on the railway bridge. Unbelievably it was there way back in 1996 when I started my degree. It says only 'VAND' now, but back then it read 'BIRCH VANDALS'. Hmm.




Being back in the college / uni grounds itself was strange. It seems I don't really have very many memories of being here. There was just a vague feeling of anxiety. Joe had it too. Afterwards we discussed this. Visiting the college grounds, we decided, was the least favourite part of our nostalgic trip.

After Calling back at Joe Bird's house to watch Doctor Who, we set off again. This time up to London Road. I had, of course, been up here the night before, to go to the petrol station. Before we got to London Road we had a rest in Fort Royal Hill Park.


The view from the park. Watching the sun begin to sink, or the earth rise. Everything shifting and arcing. Nothing stays the same.


Joe stood in the pathway to Elmfield Gardens. He lived in a flat here for a few months in spring / summer 1997.




...and finally 136 London Road, where I lived from June 20th 1997 - 30th June 1999. So many things happened here. One night I found at 2:00am I found a black dog curled up at the end of my bed. It was that kind of house.


We stopped at Fort Royal Hill on the way back. I wonder if the cathedral was purposefully built so that the May setting sun seemed as if it was to be pierced by the cathedral spire.

Joe B and Joe W went out that night, but I stayed in and played on Joe B's guitar and thought about returning to Brighton the day afterwards. A strange and oddly fateful trip back to Worcester.

Night Songs

Twelve minutes to 2am. The ox-hours (the haunted time between 2 - 4am) are about to begin.
There are footsteps in this house of bedsits. I'm not sure whose they are, out there on the landing, but I look beneath the crack of the door, and see only a strip of darkness. Who is walking out there in this night of stairs?
And out in the streets, the wordless vocalisations of drunkards. Nonsensical utterances, primal strings of sounds woithout consonants. Vowel disorder. When I was younger - well, eighteen or so - I would hear these shouts at night and think; you always hear them, but you never see who shouts. I envisage shadowy figures, always in the street adjacent to the one you are in, shouting proclamations in their own inexpressible language... and others replying from other more distant streets.
You never saw the shouters in the night.
Never on your road.
I can hear the fridge though. Humming away. A night-time sound. Strangely peaceful. I never hear it during the day.
Five minutes till the ox-hours.
Sat in St Annes Well Park this afternoon, watched a group of people play boules. Balls clicking metallic on dirt. Sun on silver. A man approaches them, though I do not see him arrive. He tslks about the history of the area, and his conversation is littered with words I recognise. Throwaway streetnames; Brunswick, Palmeira, Montpelier... He says we're not in Brighton, or Hove, but what was once Brunswick. Twilight town, a halfway home.
I rearrange my room when I return. Get it ready for the summer. Find my lost prescription behind my cupboard. Have no idea how it got there. I suppose it must have slipped from a chair diagonally, fell irrationally across books, crawled over a pile of clothes to nestle in the nook between wood and wall. Enchanted prescription. A fairy-thing.
Two minutes into the ox-hours.
The middle of the night
and dawn is so close here.

Trying to Remember the Present

Happily, my p45 and last payslip were included in the original pack sent to my old address. I was immensely relieved. I have just finished filling in my redundancy forms. I am going to try and take it straight down to Whitemaund (the company dealing with Telegen's liquidation) after a bath. I need to also ask them about my credit card insurance forms. Part of the form has to be completed by my old employer, who, of course don't exist any more...
This week is a near Kafka / Orwell -esque labyrinth of forms and offices, phone calls and meetings. I wonder through them all in a daydream-like daze, because it still feels so unreal.
Happily, my landlord seems fine about waiting for the housing benefit to come through, so that is a huge weight off my mind.
After I had spoken to my landlord and the Citizens Advice Bureau yesterday (who were kind of helpful) I walked down to the Marina, ostensibly to use the ASDA there (but really to go for a walk). ASDA is the cheapest supermarket in Brighton that I can think of. The sun had come out, washing away the grey of that morning and the day before. It was quite hot by the time I had reached the Marina. I managed to buy a week's shopping for under £7:00. This includes eating a lot of 9p noodles, but until I know when my benefits are coming in they will have to do... (and were in fact quite tasty. i had them with some 'smart price tuna chunks' last night.)
I wondered slowly back home afterwards, sat on the beach for an hour or so, watching the sun get minutely lower in the sky. So long these days, but, I suppose, we are only three weeks away from the equinox now... After I had had my dinner last night I lay down on my sofa. The next thing I knew, it was 7:30am this morning. I don't remember dreaming, nothing. Twelve hours spent in blissful oblivion (well, it would be blissful if I can remember any of it!)
How intense and strange these days will be remembered! I wonder through them now, living from moment to moment, one mission to another mission... but this post-call centre phase will be remembered forever. As much as the week between leaving the petrol station and joining the call centre back in 2007, and the long 6 months I spent unemployed between leaving the photoshop in 2001 and joining the petrol station in 2002. What bits will I remember? What songs will trigger back memories of this time I am living in, pressed in by summer heat and the unknown future that is fluttering about me?

Postcard from the Unemployment Lands

It was a surreal walk to the job centre yesterday. Still, everything seems surreal these days. It was so blindingly hot, and I wasn't quite sure where I was going. Portslade seemed an odd place... provincial and urban simultaneously. My interview at the job centre went okay. Everyone there seemed nice and helpful (unlike the dreadful insincerity of the HSBC bank staff yesterday) though they all seemed to have wandered in from the 1980s. I couldn't help but notice that the window looked out onto the train station, and the footbridge over the tracks. I wondered what it would be like to work there, to come in on bleak grey winter morning, and watch that bridge crawl from one night to another. What would it look like at twilight and in the rain? In hazy October sun and buffetted by wind?
As I waited for my appointment a half familiar voice said hello. I couldn't remember his name - Abdul? Ahmed? He was a customer at the petrol station, used to work at Toys R Us in the retail park next door. Married now with a child. I first met him when he was 19 and just wanted a car. Now he's the same age as I was when I first met him.
I walked back along the Old Shoreham Road. Hot again, but I was feeling strangely optimistic, though unsure as to about what. I came home, and after dinner, fell asleep for an hour or two. I didn't do much when I woke. As I was going to sleep I felt wind shake the window.
The weather had certainly changed today. Vast banks of grey skies. I finally headed out of the bedsit at about 1:30pm. I headed down the beach, and as soon as I got to the beach it began raining. A slick, half-heavy summer rain, lukewarm and the opposite of refreshing, like feeling mildly ill when you were a child. I headed up to the Marina, though did not reach it. A wave of despair overcame me. I felt absolutely overwhelmed by everything.
I came home and slept for a few hours.
When I woke, I opened a letter that had come from the administrators. My P45 and last payslip, they informed me, had been sent to my old address at Wilbury Crescent. They advised me it would be worth my while to obtain it. So I went round, and thought that I had been given what I needed. I opened it and discovered it was an advertisement for DFS sofas.
I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.
It's now 7:15pm. A week ago, I had just left work for the last time, though I didn't know it, and was mildly worried about how much my trip to Worcester was going to cost me. Seven days later and I am living on £2 a day. Strange how quickly things can change.
I wonder how things will unfold from here.
I really can't see at all.

A Return to Worcester part 3: Friday Night (the Old Country, after Nightfall)

I forgot about this. We didn't go out on Friday night, and had elected to stay in at Joe Bird's house. I needed something from the local shop, a can of drink, but found out that the local shop was closed. It was after 9'0'clock. I think I really needed a walk.
The one option open to me, well the option that appealed the most, was the petrol station at the top of London Road. I had worked at that petrol station from July 1998 - June 1999, and had lived at 136 London Road from 1997 - 1999. A return to the old country, after nightfall.
I left Joe and Joe behind, and after following Joe B's directions (It's amazing how, after 11 years away, a town seems to have extra road which weren't there before...) I eventually came to the base of Londoin Road. London Road is set on a slight hill - so it was uphill all the way.
It was a pleasingly strange walk. The whole job-loss shock was beginning to sink in now, and the initial nervous glee with which I had greeted the news was beginning to fade back into a kind of unreal anxiety. London Road, and 136 in particular, was the site of the most resonant experiences in Worcester. I have the most memories connected with this place; summer 1997, Ruth, writing my dissertation, the petrol station... This nostalgia mixing with the unreal anxiety caused an odd, if not entirely surprising, shift in my perceptions, a kind of hyper awareness I suppose. the night birds singing, the cars passing by, the past, the present, the future... aware of all of it, and myself in the centre of this strange unexpected vortex.
The road hadn't changed much at all. It seemed narrower perhaps, but the old pubs were still there; the Mount Pleasant, the Seabright. Our local shops just past 136 had changed though. The local convenience store 'Pause for Thought' had been turned into a carpet shop, but I was pleased to see that 'Odds and Sods' a miscellaneous second hand shop that opened in summer 1998 was still there. I remember selling some things in there - albums and a leather jacket - so I could go and visit Corin in Middlesbrough.
The petrol station had changed a lot. It now had a Tesco Express. In my day there was only a small, slightly grubby ESSO store. A lot larger too, as I entered, it felt like another place entirely... No connection to my past all. Not even at the counter which was roughly in the same place.
136 though... I suppose in each life there will always be a site of haunting... A specific place that will not close down. I glimpsed the garden between the houses, the garden where we held the 'fire festivals' of 1998 (and where Ross had said to me that over the first few fire festivals it felt like I was mourning something. I remember staying out in the garden late into the night, watching the coals flicker into pale red orbs... the romantic drama between Ruth and myself had ended badly. I was still trying to pick up the pieces. She had gone to Poland for the summer.) I saw Al's room, the shutters open, and his room black and empty inside (His room? It hasn't been his room for over a decade) and up above the bathroom, and next to that Tim's room (then Ross's room, then Rizwan's room). 136 was a tall and narrow house. Four storeys including the cellar, where the living room and playroom and entrance to the garden were situated.

(A fragment from the summer of 1997. It was a hot summer, an incredibly hot summer. One day I even got heatstroke. It was that kind of hot. I spent the summer not working, while Al and Paul worked. There were only the three of us in the house then, everyine else had gone home until term began. We said that Sally's room (or what was to be Sally's room) was haunted because it was guaranteed that her room would be noticeably colder than anywhere else in the house. Even on the hottest of days it would be cool in there. When any of the three of us had been out and had returned, too hot and on the verge of collapsing from the heat, we would rest in what we came to know as the haunted room. One of my memories of 136... Using a cold room to freshen up because we thought that room was cold because it was haunted. Life just doesn't seem so poetic any more)

Walking back downhill I listened to 'Silver Soul' by And Also The Trees. If any album can be said to sum up my time (or more accurately the second half of my time in Worcester) then it is this one. Listening to 'The Obvious' it felt like time was stripping itself back, like walking back through the beginning of summer 1998. I was in crisis now having lost my job, and I had walked this route at the same time of year in crisis before (funny how romantic dramas seem like the end of the world at the time). Same points in space reached through differenbt times. Same emotions, same place, differen times... or was it? It didn't feel like it was any time. A generic Worcester 'timeless-time'. It felt like I had been walking down this hill forever; started back in 1998 and eleven years later, like some ghost caught in an endless repetition of past events. I passed by Elmfield Gardens where Joe W lived, passed Harry's Wine off license, those still-familiar little alleyways leading up into unexplored streets... and all the while, And Also The Trees on my headphones; 'all I can think is, remember your way back here, remember, that's all I can think, remember, remember your way back here...'
How could I ever forget?

It was full dark by the time I had returned back to Joe B's house. 'How was the walk?' Joe W asked. 'Weird' I replied 'Very very weird'.

A Return to Worcester Part 2: Last Friday

The first night in Worcester passed as expected. Joe Bird and myself met Joe Walmsley at Foregate Street Station as it got dark, then headed down to The Cardinals Hat for a few drinks. I fell asleep when we got back, in the spare room while the two Joes listened to loud music and drunk wine.

Maybe it was the heat -a landlocked heat unleavened by sea breeze- but I woke surprisingly early the next morning. So did the two Joes. We decided to walk to 'British Camp'. It isn't actually called 'British Camp' but I had always known it as that. It is, in fact a pub, which is a few miles down the river Severn... I had made the walk before, with Al and his cousin Tyndale, back in the summer of 1998.



This is Holywell Hill. Joe and myself, just before we started the walk properly needed to buy something to eat and drink. I used to walk up this remarkably steep alley to get to uni (or college as it was then). One day going to a sociology lecture I was walking with our then pregnant housemate who had a remarkable attack of morning sickness at the top.

We started on the walk. Joe Walmsley was very hungover. Joe Bird had bought Eva the dog with us. It was a hot, bright day. As we walked the phone rang. I saw that it was Claire, from work. Wondering what she wanted, I answered, when, of course, she told me that the call centre had gone into liquidation.


This is me about five minutes after the fateful phonecall...

The thing about the Worcestershire landscape that I had forgotten was how deep it was. This was not the pale scrubby Sussex Downs, but a wilder, almost primal kind of countryside. An impossible green everywhere, the air thick with floating seeds, and that pungent fecund smell of early summer. Tangled and thick, this was a countryside that you could get lost in...







We finally made it to the pub. I was in a mixture of job loss shock mixed with mild sunstroke and slight hangover. Had I been more sane I could have taken some interesting photographs. The place was overrun by peacocks and other strange birds...





We finally headed back.
It had been a strange walk, and the news of my job loss had leant an already surreal weekend a feverish air. Everyone stayed in that night, and I fell asleep early, a headache caused by the unbelievably hot sun pounding deep rhythms through my head. I had strange dreams - about being up by Loch Ness for some reason. When I woke I still had the headache. Joe Bird headed off for his cricket match in the Malvern Hills, leaving Joe and myself behind.

Well, of course, I think I shall leave that to part three.

Moments in this Uncertain Time

Heatwave sun, and everything is bleached. Pale and unreal, the streets taste of car-metal and other peoples summer holidays. The curtains are drawn in my bedsit, allowing a serene yellow haze to wash over my room. Cooler too, though I must head out again in a few hours to the job centre.

So many things to sort out, and not knowing how they will, or if I am doing the right thing. Nonetheless, it is better to be actually engaged in the process of doing something rather than doing nothing. Went to the Citizens Advice Bureau for 9am yesterday. They had so many people to see, I waited 2 and a 1/2 hours to see someone. I have made a proper appointment for Thursday. I am hoping they will give me information on how to deal with my landlord (who isn't getting his rent next week...) They advised me not to say anything to him until I have talked to them. After the CAB it was off to the job centre. They gave me a number to ring, so it was off home (though I did call in at the Housing Benefits Office to briefly discuss applying for a claim). I had my first interview on the phone, which took about 45 minutes. The call kept cutting off, but they rang back. I have an appointment at the job centre this afternoon. Phase two. This isn't the job centre I was at yesterday, but a further one in the next town (kind of) of Portslade. Postcode lottery. It will take me an hour to walk there. The other one I could be at in 30 minutes.
After I could do nothing more yesterday, I met Claire in St Nicholas Churchyard. She was made redundant from Telegen last Friday too. We sat and talked about it, about the future, about everybody else. (My favourite story was that one disgruntled employee, when discovering he hadn't been paid jumped over the barrier, proudly procliaming 'I've not been paid, I'm gonna nick stuff!'. I don't know why that amuses me so much!) Andy joined us when he had finished his gardening job.
The churchyard was peaceful; a dog walker, a group of students, a couple of guys playing footballs between the gravestones.
After Claire left for home, Andy and myself headed down the seafront. he bought me a coffee from the Meeting House cafe, and we sat on the stones. Such an unreal summers day. Spring has been superceded. Summer is the new, if temporary, pretender to the throne.
I headed home. Found my tenancy agreement rather quickly (I need this for the housing benefit claim) and after a dinenr of tuna and noodles watched an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, before falling, utterly exhausted, to sleep.

Nearly 1:00pm now. Got up early this morning. Rang the company dealing with redundancy claims, then headed to the bank. Direct debits and credit card payments (the worst mistake in my life getting that damn card four years ago) going out next week) going out next week and no means to pay. I used their phone and got put through to a call centre in India (actually encountering that old cliche at last!). The people there read off their scripts and I tried to listen. Heavy accents and a bad line made them difficult to understand. My credit card is closed. Is this good or bad? They are sending me out a claim form (I have insurance). Do I still pay next week? Does interest continue? What is a new payment plan?

Lost in the unknown lands I headed home. Lunch and a cup of tea and write this. An hours snooze now I think, and then off to the job centre in that mysterious lost sector of Portslade.

A Return to Worcester part 1: Last Thursday

I remember walking to Brighton train station. A close day, hot and heavy. I looked between the buildings to the sea, saw to my surprise that sea obscured by thick fog, the tips of church spires blunted and hidden. Oblivion rolling from the sea.

Watching Brighton roll away from my seat in the train was accompanied by that feeling of bright optimism that accompanies most holiday journeys by train. Certainly the most pleasing way to travel, I was quite happy watching the passing landscape. Brighton to Clapham Junction, and from there to Reading.

I had an hour to spare at Reading. I knew Reading of old, from the Spring and Summer of 1994. 22 years old, lomg hair (no beard) and as unsure if myself then as I am now. No youthful arrogance for me. A strange time. Reading was hot and tasted of glass and angles. I walked into town - when was the last time I had done this? Nine years ago when I last saw Mark? Nine years, my god... Red brick buildings and pale air. Pale uncomfortablke light. I found a shop in an arcade, to my delight finding an old horror comic from the 1960s (?). English as well. A rarity. Never heard of it before. 'Fantasy Stories' 'Weird comic eerie' words proclaimed in a diamond, and across the title 'The Unknown and Supernatural'. Delighted (I love old horror comics) I returned to the train.

Watching the landscape change. Train running past stations I knew. Evesham. Moreton-In-Marsh. Kingham. Honeybourne (so close to Bretforton) Pershore... Then a silence, and I look out of the window.
Back.
Back again.
Worcester Foregate Street.

I ring Joe Bird, and he agrees to meet me in the high street. As I wait for him I taste the air, that landlocked silky heat. Living by the sea for so long I had forgotten this, that hot electric taste, that scent of earth and something lost.
People talking in old accents. Looking about me. My past. A sense of unreality, of something...
A man comes up to me. An old man? I can't tell. He shows me something. Tarot cards, of a sort. The Archangel Raphael warning of 'change' and 'a new phase'. I felt a slight panic sweep through me. What was this? What was going on? 'You know what that is don't you'. I looked. A common occult symbol (too late at night to look for it now, but it's the one connected to the medical profession. I'll find out tomorrow...) 'You've seen it before haven't you...' I tried to tell him that, yes, I had seen it before, but he was not listening. 'With your 3's and your 7's...' I looked at him and he looked at me. 'There's a snake wrapped around the lampstand...'
Joe turned up with Eva, his dog. I backed away from the man.
The sun was hot. Everything tasted of metal and nostalgia, and something old and powerful and strange.

Last Hours of the First Half

Sat in Joe Bird's spare room. Sun is shining outside, I can see a red brick house across the street. Can't hear anything but birdsong. Not those siren seagulls of Brighton, but English summer birds. So quiet here. No voices, no cars, nothing.
I leave Worcester in a few hours, and arrive back in Brighton at just gone 5pm. I can hear the chiming of the cathedral bell. A voice from the past; Sunday songs drifting through the haze. So hot again. Makes everything seem so unreal. This all feels so unreal. I'm sure I will wake up soon, and I'll be going back to work on Monday... Not to be though.
Fractured sleep last night. The two Joes went out drinking. I really didn't feel like it. Stayed in with Eva, Joe's dog - dogs are always fantastic company - and wrote a song on the guitar about (probably) having to leave Brighton. I went to bed before they got back - it was light when they returned. I slept for a bit, but then drifted into a kind of half conscious slumber. Fragments of the sky getting lighter, the layers of blue lightening, and each lighter shade drawing me closer to this unwelcome morning when I leave this landlocked city for another by the sea, for how long I can't know.
Ups and downs. Waves of optimism crashing down to disheartened tides.
Two hours until I leave Worcester. The first half of my life, if last weeks ponderings prove correct (and it seems that my premonitions have been remarkably accurate of late) Then the 6 hour train journey, neither here nor there, then whatever is to come begins.
I wonder how I'll remember this moment in times to come, this turning point. Will I be in Brighton this time next week or in Cornwall back at my parents house? And the summer? And where will I call home come autumn?
The cathedral bells are chiming again.
I'll sit in the garden for the swansong of these years.

Postcard from Worcester

It seems that my premonitionary feeling about this weekend was not for no reason after all. Am sat in Joe Bird's spare room, writing on a keyboard that barely works. Out of the window, a Worcester twilight has begun to creep over a long, hot day. A walk by the river Severn today to a remote pub where the gardens were overrun with peacocks and turkeys.
I got a call at just before midday from Claire, telling me that the call centre has gone bust. Liquidated. 300 people, including me, out of a job, and not getting paid (as yet) for the last two weeks.
I would write more but Joe Bird's keyboard is impossible to write on, so this short postcard will have to do.
In closing though, I have no idea what happens next.
No idea at all.

Beginning the Second Half of my Life

Spring has now passed to summer. The light feels all yellow, and though some leaves are still pale-green, the shadows underneath the trees are thick as pool water. The horizon is hazy, and the air tastes all sunburnt (not that it has been particularly hot or sunny) and makes me think of holidays in foreign countries.

Back to Worcester tomorrow. For the weekend. Feel strange, premonitory about this trip, which I didn't the last time I went to Worcester. I think it's because it's summer now (well in Stuart's world view anyway) and things seem more intense when seasons have just begun. Still, I talked to Joe today too. He'll be coming back to Worcester for the weekend too. He said that he feels quite strange about it, and that he didn't last time either.
Curious.

I was thinking, earlier on, why this time feels so charged, and it struck me that it feels like the second half of my life is about to begin. That would be strange wouldn't it? If exactly halfway through your life, you just knew. If this is the second half of my life about to begin, I wouldn't be too upset. Another 38 years would suit me fine. I'm sure my 76 year old self would want more though.

I hope there are some old ghosts in Worcester. I don't so much want to exorcise them as exercise them.
Some haunting somewhere.
Some reminder that I once lived there.

And this time, I absolutely will NOT lose my glasses.
And if I do, I won't be blaming pet dogs or poltergeists as I did last time...

(I have just thought of something. I remember on the last evening of being 17. Of watching the clock race up to adulthood in that haunted house on Woodstock Drive in Ickenham, and wondering what the first ever act of my adult life would be. Thinking about this for hours. At some point before midnight I put in a microwave curry (I know I know, this was 1990 though...) The microwave pinged, and I took the curry out to take upstairs to my room for the journey into adulthood -though why I thought a curry would be a suitably portentious beginning to adulthood is far beyond me- balancing on the plate; knife, fork, cup of tea, socks, slippy kitchen floor, clumsiness...
Well, the whole outcome of this was that the first act of adulthood was clearing a microwave curry up off the kitchen floor. Oh well...)

Train Tickets to Worcester (and I feel like i'm over the water)

I'm not sure where last week went. Surely not a week has gone by since I last wrote here? What has happened to time anyway?

Time has much occupied me these last few days. I re-established contact with a childhood friend I've not seen or heard from for close on 30 years, and this weekend, I return to Worcester for a weekend...

Worcester.
We all have places in our lives that will forever hold a powerful resonance over us. I am lucky in having more than one (Scotland being the other of course). Those places where the person you are now was forged. Life changing events, for good or bad, that you couldn't, back then, guess would have such a long lasting effect...
I have gone back to Worcester since leaving there in the summer of 1999, this was nearly four years ago, the November of 2006. A strange return trip... for a place that holds so much meaning for me, there was no real feeling when I went back there. I had a nice time of course, and Worcester is a pleasant city, but it was like I had never lived there. The anti-climactic nature of returning? Perhaps. But going back to Scotland five years ago (a return trip which had a profound effect on me) and even going back to the drab confines of West London four years ago held something for me, some memory, some ghost.
Why hadn't Worcester?
I've thought about it a lot over the last four years. I don't know why. Maybe it was the fact that I lost my glasses on my first morning there, and couldn't really see much that weekend... until 20 minutes before leaving, where they were found in a place I had searched (we had all searched) numerous times.
Curious in itself.
This time feels different though, and I can't quite fathom out why. Butterflies in the stomach, the kind you get when you're on a ropeswing over a river, and you launch yourself off the bank.
That moment over the water, for the first time.
It feels like that anyway.
There was so much unresolved about Worcester when I left. Loose threads which can't be picked up again. A hauned place. A haunting place.
Not that I mind ghosts of course.
So much unsaid, undone, unknown.
The unconsummated city.

It will be nice to see Worcester anyway, whatever happens.

Post-script: my apologies for comments unanswered, particularly Nadja, the Scrybe and Ingrid. This shall be remedied forthwith.

Forthwith?
What does that mean anyway?

Ah well...

What the Fairies Find, they Take Away

Despite not getting to sleep, thanks to a sudden bout of unexpected indigestion, until 2 or 3 am last - deep in the ox hours - I find myself awake and sat on my sofa at the ridiculously early time of 9:30, having already written today's entry into the dream diary. (Hmm. That was a very long sentence. Oh well). What on earth am I going to do now? Being up early is excellent when you have lots of things to do, but life is going through a very quiet phase recently. Looking out of the window, it seems a bit too cold to sit on the beach. Go for a walk? Buy an album? Look for my fucking prescription again? (After last week's glee at asking the fairies to help me find my lost prescription again, and this working, I neglected to remember in what 'safe place' I then put it, and am now convinced I have thrown it away, and will have to face the doctors receptionists on Monday morning...)
I can hear a wood pigeon, no doubt from nearby St Anns's Well garden, which isn't helping this curious mood I'm in. Makes me long for... some fragment of my past. Worcester? Worcester probably... I'd like to be able to spend the weekend in Worcester, looking round the old places, wandering down by the river, listening to the wind through trees-
Trees! I need trees! Unfortunately I live in Brighton which is relatively treeless. No woods around here alas. Still, there is St Anne's Well Park, so I think a shower, a walk into town (maybe) and then check out St Anne's Well Park in search of some inspiration.
Lost prescription be damned.

Thoughts on Writing

I have always been somewhat envious of people who have an easy relationship with their creativity, though as I get older, I begin to doubt whether anyone really has. Perhaps some people see whatever they do creatively as a hobby? Sunday painters. Part-time poets. Doodling musicians. Whatever. I wish I could be a hobbyist, but I'm not.
I used to write a lot. An awful lot as it happens. Right through the nineties up until the summer of 2001. Short stories, and a few abortive attempts at longer pieces, but short stories mostly. At some point toward the end of the summer of 2001 I counted up how many stories I had written over the preceding seven years or so. I got to about two hundred before I lost count.
I hardly have any of these stories any more. The product of a difficult relationship with them I think. They get lost over the years, over the countless moves from one house to another, one city to the next. I wish I still had them. They would be interesting to read again. I still have a few. Pieces of them anyway.
I never gave any of the stories to anyone else to read.
That was one of the reasons why I made a conscious decision to give up writing back in the swansong days of summer 2001. I couldn't see the point any more, and writing the stories just for myself wasn't making me happy any more. It was a shame I stopped when I did, because if I remember rightly (and remember, memory is all too eager to provide distortions of what is being remembered) I was on the verge of discovering something that had, at least, the potentiality to be true to myself. Something original? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Memory distorts.
I destroyed all the stories I had written over the past few years (I had lost a considerable amount of them before as well). I thought that I would probably be writing within the year, but... time passed, and I didn't. I wrote poems of course. I think, even in some kind of coma, I would still somehow write poems, but poems were never meant to be for anyone to read. They were always a kind of catharsis, a kind of arcane... arcane something or another. I kept a blog -for a while- on myspace back in 2007, but my entries there were sporadic and fragmented.
And then, somehow, I came to this, Bridge 39, last November. Now, 6 months later, I'm thinking of writing again, and I wish I wasn't. I wish I could just be a Sunday painter (nothing wrong with that). I wish it could just be a hobby, something to kill the time.
The same with my art -and my guitar playing too- that... questioning I suppose. I have a half finished drawing on the floor in front of me. It seems to hang there, goading me, not allowing me to rest. Always being in orbit. Never landing. My guitar lies on the chair next to me. Unfinished songs. Unfinished drawings. All that questioning over whether or not I am wasting my time. All that self doubt.
Still that act of creativity has always been a compulsion with me, the art of transcribing the internal into the external. No, that doesn't quite work. With me, it's more kind of mediumistic. When it works anyway, when the ink flows, and the song slips, and the sentences, snake-like, rest in sunset-haunted afternoons.
Never talk to me if there is a piece of paper and a biro near (which I hate drawing -or writing with) because I'll end up not listening.
I don't mean too. It's always been this way. A compulsion as I said.

Actually, I'm not sure what the point of this entry was now! Think it could be time for a cup of tea, and a continuation of Hilary Mantelk's memoir 'Giving Up the Ghost' which is excellent.

And looking above, a note to myself; if I do start writing, please, never use the phrase 'sunset-haunted afternoons' ever again.
Oh well.

Life Under the Rule of a Mad King

This is inspired -in part anyway- by Fernando Pessoa's 'The Book of Disquiet'. Each of the entries below were originally written in a notebook, at various places over the past month.
I have resisted the urge to revise.

This is what I wrote in April. I'll try and update this project once a month,

1.
The sun is making everything unreal. The pale-blue, almost white of the water. Distant boats are scattered on the calm. They look like equations, non-Euclidean trinagles drifting on an isosceles ocean. Quiet here, but the beach is not empty. Voices are muted -but for the birds on the old pier, engaged in their choruses of ruin.

2.
Dreans I can't remember. Vague flashes. Things like memory. This morning with a summer silence. I must not count down until the end. Zeno's paradox. The end never reached. Forever is to be incomplete.

3.
Half past one in the afternoon. What does it mean? Once this would have been early, a time of rain and cigarettes. In these lonely days, it seems more a mountain, or a courtyard in a desert country.

4.
I think the glasses I wear make my face look sad.

5.
Unsafe Sunday afternoons. I sleep and dream of sadness, and of an old cat called Tiger who has been dead these 19 years. Empty and hungover I wait for the kettle to boil. I cannot bear to draw back the curtains. These are empty days, the sunny Sunday curse.

6.
It is like living in a land ruled by a mad king. Often he sleeps, though his dreams may still reach me. I become afraid when he wakes. Even when he is quiet he disquiets me, and his rages are terrifying; civil wars and rioting, executions and starvations... I spend my days walking the roads where he may not see me. But even here... It is the mad king's rages I fear the most.

7.
8pm on the twilight horizon. Still light out there. These spring days that taste of summer. Inside is not safe. That old refrain; home is where the darkness is. The implacable melancholy of these afternoons. Dreams still resonate. A disturbing echo whose language I cannot translate.

8.
Let me sleep and dream of falling in love, for when I wake, I find the mad king is already here.

9.
To lose oneself in the factory, to find a righted mirror in amnesia and euphoria in mechanics. This may be nepenthe, or just a forgotten thing.

10.
Railway station heat. Summer, air, metal and arrival. Bright shadows on the ground. A pale and dusty day.

11.
...and the trees are dusty too. The breeze brings up birdsong from the valley, a deep map of bird cries. Star burning skin. A fragmnent of a cricket match, Italianate church, a line of cottages, miners and millers. Avalanche history on the horizon. The sky hazing into the land, eating the distance and the triangles of roofs and what they shelter, hidden by trees. No leaves yet. Sleeping in the sun, but the breeze is both of black hills and August dreams.

12.
The blue shadow leaking down the platform. In the railway station shade, by timetables and emptiness.

13.
I notice a heavy sleep and the unfamiliar language of jazz prodding me to remember. Sun, bricks and summer holiday deeps. lost in woods and drunk in half-erotic air, only sleep providing consummation.

14.
On rainy days in the country, on long afternoons by unexplored woods. Autumn light makes love to sleep.

15.
I feel myself falling, a liquid shadow plunging through leaves. I have lost the ground. I feel the shadow of 40 years on me. I should not be here. I chose to stay only accidentally.

16.
An exhaustion around my eyes. These days are hot and dusty and everything is strange and empty. Walking through someone elses carnival. The fairground is closed. Only broken machines remain.

17.
And if I spoke to her, how much would it be of her emptiness and how much of mine? -Would it matter anyway?

18.
This is the price that is paid. This price or another, and the cost is always high. Less a transaction and more a pyrrhic bargaining. A sacrifice for something I cannot recognise.

19.
Spring has been passed. A fever of summers glut my skin. A nostalgia for winter, for that white lamp in the rain.

20.
You were beautiful for a moment last night. I glimpsed who you might have been through the haze, and when I looked again, you were tangled and lost, and the poison in my hand was slipping through my fingers. I could not bear this draught.

21.
My life is full of devices that break down.

22.
I live in a box. These walls are not mine. I try to drown this strangers air with songs and it does not work. I must descend two landings to reach the air.

23.
37 summers have released entropy. My body slows, an ugly braking into bones and memory. I shall not be the eight words before amnesia. I shall be lost. A blank.

24.
The black hour before dawn. I can hear birds singing. Ghost song. I have never known this house of strangers to be so quiet.

25.
Grey fog park. Fecund spring haze. The breeze brings reminders of what I can't remember. White light over dogs and pigeons. A cup of tea from the park cafe on the bench beside me.

26.
The tiredness that comes only after waking before dawn and not sleeping until it is light.

27.
(...)

28.
The daylight moon is pale, barely there. The wind silences me, bringing me from the tides the smell of seaweed, fish, mussels, cockles, sand-locked coves no-one knows. The sky knows me, its deep blue. The old jewel of the sun, swansong light wet on stones.
An old autumn, an old September. I can almost taste her voice, the songs I cannot bear to hear any more.
I lock my eyes on the horizon. The cold comforts me and I slip into an ecstasy of falling. A remembering of things I cannot touch.

30.
The sun, the shadow of my hand, the pen.

31.
I feel a flicker on the air
I know that summers here.

32.
The streets are empty with dust. The dwarves of old seasons have come back. Each breath is thick with roses drawing me down.

33.
Watching the flies in the mud above the flowerbed. I think there was rain when I slept. A girl who lay sleeping on the bench has woken and talks into her phone. Crow-croak to my left. Late afternoon sun.

34.
The remnants of the afternoon by the closed up cafe.

Thanking the Fairies

I had looked for it everywhere, turned every drawer and bag and box inside out. Looked in old sketchbooks, paperback books, emptied out the rubbish bag into another rubbish bag - that was unpleasant. Finally accepted that the prescription was not going to turn up, and would have to brave the doctors receptionists on Tuesday before work. As a last resort -and not a resort I was taking particularly seriously (and isn't it always the way in stories like these?) I asked the fairies if they would kindly find me my prescription again as I would be very grateful. This is an old technique I had been reading about somewhere, the Fortean Times message board, or something similar. And people said it worked. I didn't think the fairies would help... I mean, even the Cottingley Fairies were finally admitted as fakes (but the fakers still insisted they saw fairies at the bottom of the garden...). I asked anyway. I don't know why. Anyhow, I digress. Looking for something else today (my room has become some kind of object-eater recently) I opened the drawer in my bedside table.
And there, nestled on top of a pile of wires and leads was my prescription.
Which pleased me immensely.
So thank you fairies.
(and yes, I had looked in that drawer at least three times...)

Reservoirs Against the Night

2:38am.
I am deliberately staying awake as long as possible, for the sole purpose of sleeping as much of tomorrow as I can.
I haven't lain about all day in bed -with the exception of hangovers (rare these days) or illness- for longer than I can remember. The bank holiday weekend means I can have one day to waste on this ridiculous scheme.
Another reason is that sleeping through tomorrow is a way of building a reservoir against the night. The last isn't my phrase, but was taken from 'Duma Key' by Stephen King. I can't quite remember the context it was used in, but since reading the book in January last year, the phrase has come to mean a kind of battening down the hatches - the preparations you make when a storm might be coming.
Not that the coming storm -if it comes- is liable to be in any way dramatic, or interesting, but it seems to be in the air, in the sunlight, in the dusty, empty streets (which are neither dusty nor empty, but feel that way). Storms like this have come before, and are more likely on an empty weekend when it is hot, and Brighton will be busy, and there are no plans, and nothing to occupy your time.
Reservoirs against the night, against the storm.
Daylight makes such storms worse, which is why sleeping in tomorrow is advisable. The storms seem far less worse at night. Here we are, deep in the ox-hours, and I feel quite un-storm like.
If a storm does come, it will, in all probability last a few days. Maybe even shorter. Hopefully. I've had one storm which lasted the whole of a summer before. Thinking of that makes me feel kind of edgy.
Maybe the storm won't come at all.
But if it does, I'll just sit it out, read books, and go for walks through quiet parks to remote bookshops in largely unvisited areas of the town, and when evening falls, I'll sit by the calm of the sea and listen to music, and when the day fades, I'll watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer (about to start season 4 now...) and fall asleep on the sofa I found abandoned in the fog.
There might not even be anything brewing. Anything brooding.
But if there is, at least there are reservoirs to hold against the night.
It might make the storm easier to bear.
If it comes.
2:54am