Autumns Eve

From the confused days at the end of May, and the disquiet weeks that greeted June, through the sudden and welcome events at the end of June, from the lost July days through the deep-summer suspension of August, and summer is at an end. Handfuls of memories and future resonances, nostalgia to be. A tarot card image for the summer, resting amongst the pine trees of Hove Churchyard after signing on, struck by the heat and the summer seeming endless... encapsulated in this last image: The Summer of 2010.
September the 1st is not summer, no matter how hot, how un-autumnlike.
Summer is dead.
Autumn is here.

Today was a bright, hot day, more remniscent of those sudden optimistic days of the early part of this season than a herald of autumn. Sunbathers on the beach, the air-conditioning not cool enough in the training rooms, the evenings still electric with summers potential for anything could happen.
But the dreams of summer are shallow, an always adolesence.
But I could feel it, even through the heat, that sudden euphoria that comes when around the corner from home. My thoughts seem more ordered, more calm, more pleasant, my imagination no longer trying to translate the jagged and uneasy signals of summer.
Thinking, this afternoon, the words silver, milk, october A sigil for the autumn. Flowing quicksilver, the high moon among black and frosty stars, discarded leaves wrapped like tiny mice in the street lamp halos. Clumps of wood on late September days, long shadows and sunlight that tastes of gold. November nights, all orange, rain and sinking through air that feels likethe deepest and thickest of pools. Ghost stories and day dreams, the small hours a temple for the recognition, if not the worship, of slumbering dreaming night-gods.
In the bedsit next door, music and voices, the television broadcasting an ignored programme about houses split by cracks caused by trees ringing the building.
Summer is over.
This is autumns eve.

Postcard from the Last Morning of Summer

The last day of summer is here. 8:00am, and sat here in the bedsit I can hear the sounds of morning outside; the odd seagull, passing people, the rubbish collectors. The sun is pushing up against the curtains, and the hum of the refrigerator next door cutting through the walls.
Took a walk with Em along the beach last night. Still water and violet skies. Not really any traces of autumn as yet, in fact, it felt more like a summers evening. Dog walkers and swimmers in the sea. Em tried paddling but the water was too cold.
Half an hour before I leave for work, for that swift stroll down Western Road, past the newsagents and workers waiting for their buses, the closed kebab shops and the green strips of squares on the slopes leading down to the sea.
Nothing else to say really, just a quick postcard from the last morning of summer.

The Floating Head

Woke up sometime in the small hours. Bedsit-quiet, fragments of now forgotten dreams already fading. Suddenly aware of my girlfriend sitting up next to me. Still half asleep I didn't say anything, but then though she might be sleepwalking (well sleep-sitting.) Suddenly frightened by this - there is nothing as utterly terrifying as the dead eyes of a sleepwalker. Now, this is where things get complicated in my memory - I had just woken up after all. I suddenly sat up too - I'm not sure why I thought I should suddenly sit up, or how this would make the potential of sleepwalking eyes any less frightening but I did. I turned and discovered that my girlfriend was not sitting up at all, but was fast asleep. However, there was now a head floating above my girlfriend, one which seemed to possess a rather, well, malevolent countenance. It was staring ahead, profile to me. The head then faded out, and I fell back to sleep.
Was this a dream or a hypnopompic hallucination? (A hypnopompic hallucination is an image that is seen upon suddenly waking and is, in fact, very common. They seem to have an external reality, but are in fact 'dream projections'. They last for a few seconds only before fading. Images upon going to sleep are known as hypnogogic hallucinations.) Now, was this a hypnopompic hallucination or had I dreamed the whole thing? Had I dreamed that I had awoken and thought my girlfriend was sitting up in bed, before realising she wasn't and there was a rather alarming floating head next to me?
The halfway land between sleep and waking is a strange one, that is if I had awoken at all, but I was pleased at this sudden startling occurence. Life is strange, but sleep is even stranger.

And also as strange, I have just realised that I have written an entire post and my keyboard seems to be working perfectly! No more having to edit every damn post a million times now, still inevitably missing one of the many typographical errors that littered every sentence.
Unless of course I'm dreaming, and I'll wake up tomorrow and find my keyboard as useless as ever.
Why has it mysteriously fixed itself? It was making telephone ringing noises only a week ago...

Maybe it was the floating head...

A Breach Detected in Summer 39/3; Cycles 22 and 23

First week done at work, head full of interest rates, ISAs and early mornings. Walking to work in the rain, watching the grey sea from the training room windows. The complicacies of using the lift, getting off at wrong floors, forgetting to press the button for the correct level. Old call centre ghosts, Telegen survivors, swapping tales of redundancy dramas and lucky escapes, -for those people who left only weeks before anyway.
Summer dying. Light now permanently changed. Sky all tumultuous and unsure. Nights creeping in earlier and earlier. 8:30, creeping back to 8:00. Fallng asleep before midnight. Half fragments of dreams and waking up in the half-light of dawn, waiting for the alarm to go off.

A painting nearly fnished. Play with titles in my head 'A Breach Detected in Summer 39/3; Cycles 22 and 23'. Wordless journal freezing echoes of the last of August, an abstract diary entry. First time I've written the probable title. Hanging on my wall now, a fragment from this passing summer. Walks to the job centre, charity shop albums, drifting in the churchyard on the way back.
Memories becoming ghosts.
Last Sunday a rainy evening. Took a pre-work nerves walk through the twilight. Across London Road and along Upper Lewes Road to Lewes Road. I hardly ever come here any more, but when I first moved down to Brighton, over ten years ago now, most of the people I knew lived here. Jim's room full of paintings and Leonard Cohen albums, Dave's house at the tp of a hill, Mick's house full of students from Italy and Portugal and Germany. The place is full of ghosts and seems so old now, seems to resonate with dream-like memories. An ancient geography. On the Lewes Road, and my old wak back into Moulscombe where I first lived, curving away into the edges of Brighton. The grubby shops and fast food joints, Doner Kebab winds and Burger air. The cracked facades of slightly decaying houses spilling evening light out onto the pavements. Orange street lamp halos glittering and reflected in the roadside streams.
Only the rain rememers, only the rain knows.

The rain passed now though, sunny all day yesterday, but the light was softer, a swansong summer. The blue of the sky was deep as dreams and pools and sleep. Summer is over. Bank holiday weekend ritual, last ceremony of the summer, and now the long and luxurious curve to winter.

And last week, the wind. I remember sitting on the pier and watching the waves come in. Spindrift frenzy and foam horses gallopng and falling, and between the frothy tumbling, the gray of the sea, deep as the sky and full of serpents clutching autumn in their jaws.

Outside the window, the song of seagulls, and in their harsh charm, echoes of bleak and dreamy Sunday shores where September stretches into October, and October seems forever.

Not Summer, not Autumn

Grey, drizzly skies. Still too warm, clammy heat clinging to skin. The air is thick and altered. Even the sea seems sluggish.
At the launderette this morning. Sat on the steps smoking cigarettes, watching passers by under umbrellas. Dark-light. October memories.
This is not summer, but not autumn either.
August is pregnant with autumn.

Last day of a phase for me. In years to come, today will seem split by a wide gulf from tomorrow when the new job starts.
Chapter-end, and already, those churchyard walks back from the job centre are seeming a lifetime ago.

A strange summer.
I remember when it started, back in Worcester, along the banks of the Severn. That phone call from Claire.
Sudden redundancy, glee-shock.

Joe down last week, now back to Poland looking for a job. This time last year, the worried weekend before the court case on Monday. Looking for patterns stretched through these years, a tarot card geography.

The sky is thick and wet outside the window. It doesn't feel like summer is dying, but more that autumn is stirring somewhere nearby.

3:30pm, The Last of The Uncertain Summer Days

A white sky.
The sound of a band from the Brunswick Festival, across the other side of Western Road. Muted songs drifting on the no-breeze.
A half finished painting on my floor.
New job on Monday, hopefully.
The closed-in hours of the last of summer.
Dreams of Kinloss, and the mysterious parallels between the two estates there where I lived.
A day drifting by.
In winter twilight would be gathering.

Last Night, Centuries Ago

The day feels slightly cooled, though rumours of sunlight push against the curtains. A feeling of expectancy in the air.
Voices drifting in from the street, passing vehicles, a road drill.
This morning reminds me of:
I: Starting Worcester University in 1996, that mixture of optimism and nervousness. My room at 46 Bransford Road, lit by sun all day round. The blue September skies. Wet air and sunlight. Living in a new city where I didn't know anyone.
(It turned out that one of my housemates whom I didn't meet until a week after I first moved in was a friend I hadn't seen for two years)
II: Malta, 1976. There was always road drills in Malta. Taste of dust and roadworks. A building site next to our school spewing out toxic smoke. Rumours of the school having to close down. Lizards amongst the stones. Scrubby fields stretching on into unreal distances. Pale and washed out lanes.
III: Walking to the Marina with Joe, end of August 2002. Listening to Orplid on my headphones. Asda at the Marina. Walkng along the edge of the breakwater. The shifting at the end of summer.
The walls between times seem thin at this time of year. The past leaks into the present. Linear time disintegrating.
I remember falling asleep last night, listening to the late summer night outside.
It seems like centuries ago.

The Train Journey Starting to End

I left Andy's house to use the phone box by Hove Station to ring Em. The sky was different, rippled blue and the horizon wet with sunset. The air still humid, a vampiric heat, but there is little doubt these are the last days of summer. Something in the light, the deepening of evening, the way sound carries. You can hear autumn, like a humming in the distance, the sound of playgounds carried on windy days.
The dog show ('Scruffs') in St Annes Well Park. Bales of hay, and chidren runnng around after harassed seagulls. Men drinking beer, good natured but raucous.
The dogs were well behaved.
A group of people sat next to us wo all looked like minor celebrities; Martin Freman and Bill Bailey, someone who looked like they might have been in Casualty or Holby City. I met a colleague of Al's who went to school with And Also The Trees, my favourite band. I sat amongst the crowds and drew in my sketchbook, a semi-indusrial mass of cathedral windows and barbaric medieval abstractions. I didn't like it at all, and was vaguely embarrassd to be drawng (what I thought was) such a terrble picture in public. People kept complimenting it though, much to my puzzlement, and a man who owned a t-shirt company took my number with the possibility of doing some designs for him.
Strange.
1:01 am now. Back in my bedsit, and I feel exhausted. I ring up tomorrow to find out if I am starting my job next week. Haven't heard anything back yet. Meetng Em when she comes back from Worcester on Tuesday at midnght at the train station. Joe coming down that day also before he leaves for Poland again on Friday.
The summer train beginning to slow. Suitcases starting to be collected from the racks above us. Shuffling in the seats.
Nearly there now at the autumn stations, the long summer train journey starting its end.

No Tides in these Single-Room Days

Days drift by with little to distinguish them. I haven't seen anyone else since I met up with Sarah for coffee on Wednesday lunctime. This alone-ness is not necessarily unpleasant. I fall asleep at around midnight and usually wake at mid-morning. I drift through the afternoons, snoozing, attempting to paint but not getting anywhere, listening to music (Julie Feeney, Bathory, Pombagira, Emily Jane White) and writing half-songs on the guitar that are ever to be finished. Fragments of old lyrics grafted onto fragmets of new sentences. Trapped within each ther, a sentence of sentences... 'an idea of a girl / sleeping in the sun / a church bell chimes / the colour of the earth / and the lamps down the old lane / sing an older song / I remember you...'
Exiled, as I feel, from the vulgar celebrations of summer I do not feel that much desire to venture into the outside world. I visit the local supermarket or newsagent for tobacco, supplies and newspapers. The odd charity shop or two, where cheap albums bring back memories of older sumers. I found an old goth compilation for 50p the other day. I used to have it before it got scratched to unplayability. I was pleased because it meant I had, again, the song 'Tragic Vaudevilles' by Love Like Blood. Summer of 1995. Walking with Bracken out over the Bretforton fields, August lasting for ever. No rain for months.
(- A short aside. In a rather alarming and unpredicatble turn of events, my coputer has just -very loudly- played me the sound of an old antique telephone. For no reason at all. I fear a virus is to blame. This laptop is falling apart. Hard-drive haunted by obsolete telecomunications devies-)
My bedsit smells strange. Of fresh polish and sprngtime. I don't know why. Puts me in mind of Southampton. Those lost days, and looking out of the window, those lost days of new September-terms at new colleges in mostly unknown cities. Oh yes, and the sumer of 1994, my last summer in west London. Those days so much like these, seeing no-one for days, lost inside a single room. The year ticking away, hours marked by daydreams and indolence...
I feel like an artist or a writer living a garrett life in an old city, but I finish no paintings and write nothng.
I dreamt last night about my new job. On the first day I had gone back to the old call centre accidentally. There was some kind of teaching program in operation now. Chidren amongst the pods and the phones and the computers. I realised I was in the wrong place, and looking at my time to start I could not tell whether it was 9:00am or 9:30am.
Numbers in dreams are always hard to read.
4:49pm. Late afternon, but it feels like no-time, or all time.
The drifting days of summer continues. Sun and rain, sleep and waking, and falling asleep again.
The river is sluggish, a langourous pool. I drift on the waters, waiting for a current, for a tide, for a ship.
For something which will inevitably change.
The nights are creeping back and twilights seem beautiful again.

From the Nowhere Void of Lunchtime

The nowhere void of lunchtime. Another quiet day and the seagulls still silenced. A night of dreams that disturbed me from sleep; someone in my room, dogs sleeping in plastic bags. A grey drifting day outside. Leaving in an hour for the job centre. Hopefully the last time I sign on before starting my new job a week on Monday. Still haven't heard anything yet though. Maybe I should ring them?
Despite the autumnal lght it is unbearably hot in my bedsit. Everthing seems summer-infected. I am looking forward to the coolness of the churchyard after the job centre, and a long drift through evening time.
A friend request on faceook from an old school friend. Haven't seen or heard from him for twenty years or so. He now works as a wildlife photographer in New Zealand.
The dogdays of summer. This season ending, but it seems to last forever. I shall be glad when this time-suspended moment passes, when the clocks start ticking again.

Premonitions of Home

Light drizzle giving way to heavier pleasures. No sky, only gray. Soaked through. Wild waves, and the power station chimney vanishing into sea fog.
Summer is fading.
The sun is back today though, but after yesterday, we all know that autumn is only a few corners away.
Feels like being on a train journey when the names of stations become more familiar, like coming home.

The Seagulls are Silenced, Hello to the Road Drill

Grey skies and rain. The sound of a drill in the street outside. Aside from this everything else is quiet. Even the seagulls have been silenced.
A week into Augst, and every part of me is pointed toward autumn. Two weeks left until I start my new job. Well, hopefully. I am somewhat concerned about my employment history as they go back ten years, and numerous places I have worked for have closed down or changed management. Havent heard anything back yet. A time of waiting.
My blog entries have become somewhat lessened of late, thanks to my none-working laptop keyboard, which doesn't pick up every stroke. This means I have to go back afterwards and edit everything. Time consuming, and writing with this somewhat disabled keyboard seems to interrupt my train of thought. I really should use internet cafes. There are enough of them about, but the indolence of this summer seems to seep right through me.
My god, the seagulls really are quiet. I could drift and pretend its a winters day. It really is that silent. The humming of he refrigerator suddenly seems loud.
Em has gone back home for a coupkle of weeks. I miss her. Chapter three in this strange summer. The first chater being when I returned from Worcester into the outlands of unemployent (the endless long walks to the Portslade job centre, survivng on noodles and tuna for days). The second chapter began of course with Em, and the accompanying humid heat of high summer. That sense of there not beng anything other than summer. This is the third chapter, in some ways the most uncertain.
(stop thinking - stop thnking about unemployment references - stop thinking)
Autumn casts her shadow back here. All I can feel, though there is really little sign of her yet. The light in the evenings is different though. Clearer and sharper. The darkness seems deeper. Drifting off into pools of shadow between the lamplight, night-rivers running over walls and under trees. Willow-shade sea, and the wind that starts to murmer of black hills and sharp air.
No seagulls, only the road drill, and a waiting for summer to end.

Fourteen Years, Lost on the Carriages

The main symptom of this cold I have had now for a week is a rather high temperature, with very little in the way of other cold related side-effects. A ittle bit of the sniffles, a slight cough, but all I can really complain of is a high-ish temerature, a slight fever, and a constant exhaustion. Well, and a continuous low-level headache.
I failed to leave the bedsit today until twilight, when I needed more tobacco and some 23p cans of orangeade, or so it appeared when I got to the newsagent. I spent the rest of the day slumbering on the sofa, interspersed by finishing off my carton of 'tropical juice drink' and, for some reason, playing the guitar.
Playing the guitar while mildly ill is interesting. Certain chord progressions bring to mind images like memories; crows flying over a drizzly sky, a girl sleeping in the sun, a Meditterenean church, cracked tiles and white peelig paint. The stillness of a southern European day.
I wish I could remember more of the delerium fuelled dreams of the past week though. A few days ago, I dreamt I was on an epic tran journey, but people kept vanishing from their seats when they had problems wih their tickets. It transpired that the people running the train were getting rid of all the men, whle the women were chosen to work in myserious 'laser factories.' I escaped at a station called 'Wyverrn Falls' and was told by a woman I had escaped just in time. She had just rescued her friend from the train and that she had been lost on the carriages 'for fourteen years'.
I dreamt last night of a lost 1980s thrash metal band who were called 'Iron Destructor'. I don't remember anythng else of the dream, but they sounded like a band I would have loved during my teenage years. I had another dream fragment last night, of a secondhand bookshop in Brighto that I would go to and buy old horror and ghost story anthologies from the 1970s. When I first woke up I was convinced that the shop actually existed in Brighton and wondered why I had not visited it for a long time. It took a few seconds for me to realise the shop only existed in a dream. The strange thing was, as I lay there thinking about this unreal shop, I could 'see' where it would be in Brighton, in a vastly different West Street that didn't seem to lead to the sea.
It was strange realising that the street didn't exist. It felt, somehow, that waking lfe was wrong and that the dream-geography was right.
The man in the bedsit next door is paying his guitar. I wonder if he hears me playing mine, and when did the Portugese woman move out? I think I saw her once in the eight months I have been livng here.
The news is on the television, oil spills and floods, gas explosions and bank profits.
I coud watch a film, but I really don't know what to watch.
The uncertain delerium continues, and it is not necessarily unpleasant.

Looking through the New Rectangle of August

A shift in the tides, in the light. The sudden and welcome surprise of the nights drawing in. 8:30pm and it is twilight now. It is during the evenings that the change can be felt the strongest. The days are still hot and humid, grey banks of heat and exhaustion, but when the light begins to fail, somethng begins to stir.
The red of traffic lights in the distance seems stronger, and clearer. Less of the summer haze about them. The night seems to have rediscovered its own sense of mystery again. I feel sudden urges to go on long twilight walks.
Autumn is being born somewhere.
The other evening, in the throes of a moderately bad cold, marked most by an almost intolerable rise in body temperature, I lay on my sofa. The curtans were closed against the night, but, due mostly to the slightly hallucinogenic side effects that colds bring, the outside felt more like autumn, or even winter. I coud feel the differet layers of blackness, as if the street were submerged in water. The air felt suspended and cool. I imagined the light of bedsit windows fallng nto quiet pavements. Geometery shifting.
I think it was as I lay there that, synaesthetically, I felt the shape of the summer start to change. August, through the long and yelow flatlands of July, seemed an upill ascent over a long pane of glass, wading knee-deep through windows. It shifted then, and August seemed instead a long rectangle, looking down onto the homelands of autumn.
Fallig through water, breathing underneath pools.
Monday morning now. Joe came down for the weekend from Poland. Pints in the Basketmakers and vodka at Andy's flat. Ended up at the Hove Place pub last nght with Em. No summer here in these Italianate gardens. Benches and trees, closed in by walls, all safe in this autumn embryo. It began to raina little, thick luxurios drops.
Only August,but summer is beginning to end.