There are Wolves in Here

The (un) hallowed month of October, and the veils are thinning.
The nights seep back into the day, twilight comes where only two months ago there would have been bright sunshine. The skies seem unpredictable; blue skies and bright sun today, yesterday, rain and gloom.
October coming, and everything belongs to that season - October is a season of its own - mundane roads a little bit more lost in their own shadows, the sea both brighter and somehow more indistinct, the air tastes as if it has been spiked with frost - sometimes anyway, and there always seems to be an unseen distance crowding in.
Maybe.
October might be that feeling of someone following you a few streets away, or the song of the wind as it tears the leaves from roadside trees.
(and waking in the dark of the small hours once, listening to the wind in the chimney, all I could think was 'there are wolves in there' and I fell back to sleep again, and when I woke all I could remember of the dreams that followed were dark roads on the outskirts of unknown towns)
Bone-white and whistling with mysteries. Old lines written in notebooks. Down on Perranporth beach over the autumn of 1999, walking Bracken the Yorkshire Terrier. Up along the sand dunes looking down at the sea coming in. 10 '0' clock tides. And the wind through the grass, through the sand, through the day.
Apples lost beneath trees to darkly growing grass, and the last of the wasps hover round their golden, rotting repaste. Slice an apple in half the wrong way, and you'll see a pentagram. One of your magickal five-a-day. No wonder Eve tempted Adam with one.
Ghost-stories and daydream. Early afternoon is a wild time if the wind blows and the sun is out. Up little used alleyways, along deserted streets. Watch the leaves scuttle from the parks and ther pavements, lost in roadside streams.
At night the leaves under the light of street lamps look like rats curled up in the neon.
I thought this once at Worcester. Autumn of 1998. Walking  to the petrol station where I worked and the breeze blowing through the rain. Dark light, and a temporary fireworks shop on London Road. 'Black Cat Fireworks' and the back-lit sign, a ghoulish brilliant yellow shining out like the small hours, a horror-comic shop.
I am in love with October.
Rest on hilltops and watch the town below, drift with ships on horizons, and there will be hours spent in ramshackle cafes on street corners. Drift away into the miasma of evening. Dusk-coffees, and the sound of ashtrays on wooden tables. No. No smoking now. These must be the ghosts of cigarettes. Look out of the window at the street, coats wrapped around passers by. Umbrellas useless in the wind and the rain and the day.
Days sinking down.
None of this has happened.
All of this has happened.
October is an engine at the heart of everything, the heart of a shadowy factory. The factory chimneys reach up for a fecund, pregnant moon in the sea-like skies of night.
Wild and blind as ghosts, and on this night before October - not even twilight yet though- I see her pale skin and distant eyes. Her footsteps in a hallway, and when I turn there is no-one there, just a few discarded leaves, disordered with fevers of red and orange and yellow, bright offerings to this most nocturnal and narcotic of months.

Postcard from the Battery Farm Internet Cafe

In the battery farm internet cafe again. Chairs too low and the desks too high. Hunched over the keyboard like an old crow-like man. No privacy and a choking claustrophobia. Still too hot.
I really must find another lunchtime internet cafe.

Lots of odd dreams last, most of which I can't remember. One which I do recall was about a reality TV show where a group of oriental women were being trained as ghost hunters. They were marked according to how well they were able to investigate hauntings. One haunting they were investigating was in a building where the Tescos near Hove station is in waking life.

Waking from this dream by the 7:00am alarm. Night creeping into the day. When I woke, my room was still a twilight grey. Sat there with a cup of tea for an hour in the increasingly cool morning-shock light before I start work. When I left the house of bedsits, the sky was that uniform shade of grey common to early autumn.
A light rain and a daydreamy pull luring me to unseen horizons.

The new town out of the window has gone. I cannot get it back. There is a building I have not noticed before though, out on a hill. Or perhaps it is just a larger building than the others surrounding it. It resembles a prison-school, grey as the sky. The windows seem to be hidden. I can't quite work out where it is. New England House? Maybe.
It seems that windowpanes have a habit of confusing geography.

A short post for today because this internet cafe is the most ridiculous and uncomfortable in existence. My arm hurts from typing at a level near my chest.
Oh well.

Back into the grey day for me, and an afternoon that already seems to belong to evening.

Just Down the Road and Twenty Five Years back

I spoke to someone today at work from Elgin. I immediately recognised the area from the postcode, or rather, the first two letters of the postcode :'IV...' That Highlands accent, that imagined sense of space behind the disembodied voice of the listener down the earpiece. 'I used to live near there, at Forres!' I said. 'Just down the road! Its nae changed much!' came the answer. The man seemed delighted someone knew his locality. 'I imagine not...' (my voice now sounded ridiculously English. '...it was twenty five years ago I left'.
Twenty five years ago.
After the call, I let these three words roll round my afternoon mind. Twenty five years. A quarter of a century.
A lifetime ago.
As I get older, the more I seem to actually nurture an almost physical longing for the Moray coast, for Forres and Kinloss, where I spent the ages between 6 and 13. Home sickness for a place I only lived in for seven of my (admittedly) formative years? I suddenly think of someone back in 1985, the year that we left Scotland, longing for a place that he (or she) lived in 25 years before, and that would be 1960... Playing with time like this makes me realise how much time does actually pass. Fifty years? A half a century?
Of course I am mythologising and romanticising my childhood. I imagine that everyone does it, and far easier to do so when the place that childhood was experienced in is not readily accessible by travel. Mostly I feel lucky that I can mythologise to such a degree. An intimate and haunted Asgaard, a miniature galaxy, a frozen city.
I had actually thought, that on a return trip I took there, five years ago now, that my nostalgia for the place would inevitably still. I thought that confronted with the reality of it, I would see it through adult eyes and the place would lose that resonance I had built up over the previous fifth of a century.
Interestingly this was not to be. I found the landscape as mesmerising and timeless and mysterious as all of my dreams over the intervening two decades. The woods and forests were as deep, the summer-light clear and refined in a way that I have not noticed in the south. Kinloss seemed as haunted, and the nearby town of Forres still exuded that mysterious dream-like provincial / industrial air it had way back then. Even the black woods on the top of Cluny Hill still dominated the town, as inscrutable and watchful as ever.
Nelson's Tower still there, Sueno's Stone on the outskirts, now encased in a glass tube, and our old garden in Drumdian Park still with the fence that my parents put up when I was 11.
Over the last five years I find I am dreaming of it frequently, most notably Southside, the Sergeants Married Quarters in Kinloss. In these dreams it is usually the first hour of darkness, or the beginning of dusk. I am attempting to find my way into the heart of Southside, to near where I used to live. I attempt to reach that fence where I would stand with my best friend Carl Haslam, fingers curled around green wire, and stare into that small clump of trees we called a wood by the railway line. Looking for ghosts.
When I went back that wood -a clump of trees really- was still there. In direct opposition to that oft-quoted maxim that childhood places seem smaller when returned to as an adult, the trees seemed to be larger, as sinister and beguiling as ever.
Still, I suppose they have had twenty five years in which to grow.
Anyhow, in these dreams, I rarely succeed in reaching the place I seek for. Southside is often subtly changed; there is a river running through it, the streetlamps are larger, there is a cafe where a house used to be. I am not sure whether I am meant to be in Southside, particularly after dark. Often, Southside has some kind of rumoured rivalry with Burnside, the Officers Married Quarters, where I also lived. If it is dusk in these dreams, the air is heavy with a surreal miasma of otherness. A sense of deep and profound timelessness which I cannot describe when I have woken, but stays with me throughout the following day.
'Just down the road'.
The man I spoke to doesn't think twice about Forres, or Kinloss, any more than I might think Portslade or Rottingdean anything special. To him it is 'just down the road' and to me it is a lifetime away. A quarter of a century back, and yet, a place that is still here.
One day I imagine I'll go back again.
I wonder if I'll find what I'm looking for?

Alan Moore Invokes a Strange Sunday Evening

2:30 in the afternoon. One long complicated call taking me 15 minutes into my lunchtime. Now in a ridiculously hot internet cafe down North Street. Sat by the window; a bustle of buses, foreign students, cars, pedestrian crossing dramas. Directly to my left, an alleyway leading into the Lanes.

Last night after returning from the rather more serene (and not so nauseously hot) internet cafe on Western Road, I watched a couple of episodes of Star Trek on DVD (I bought last weekend) and settled down into continuing painting. As I painted I played Alan Moore's spoken word album 'Unearthed' I had purchased after work on Saturday.
I'm not sure how to describe it. A two hour mesmerising ramble aboput a friend of his, another comics creator, who eventually ended actualising a projection of Selene, an ancient goddess, he has fallen in love with. Except it's not quite about that. It's about London, and Shooters Hill, and Greek myths, and the now dead British comics scene. It's about the occult and melancholy. It mentions dream-sequences involving new credits for the Avengers tv series, the Blitz, coincidences and bloodied London histories.
The whole thing sounds like an invocation.
It goes on for two hours altogether. I played both discs back to back, the second time I have heard it, and the time passed by in what seemed a few minutes. Strange Sunday evening time-warp.
Full darkness had fallen by the time I had finished both the listening and the painting. That low melancholy curve of Sunday night sweeping up before me. It was full dark outside, had been night for a couple of hours now, not that I had noticed.
The rest of that evening felt strange, subtly altered, as if Alan Moore's rhythmic voice ('a twilight gossip...') had indeed effected some kind of magick. School memories, -those drear sitcoms of Sunday nights heralding the heavy walk to bed with homework not quite finished and plans for the weekend not quite done.
It felt like a school night last night.
I went to bed at about 11:00pm, and as I lay there in the dark of the bedsit, which lately seems to be collapsing about me in a chaos of too much stuff in too little space, I thought about 'Unearthed'. I began thinking about coincidences - they had been spoken of during 'Unhearthed' and of about the patterns in things. Were coincidences just, well, coincidence, or evidence of some deeper more obscured order of things?
As I fell asleep, I decided that I would purposefully watch for any coincidences this week. Just to see what turns up really.
I didn't have long to wait.
As I left my house this morning, the man in the bedsit next door to mine left his, -the man responsible for the Meditterenean cacophony of cheerful guitar and bongo playing of late. I said hello to him. He looked nothing like what I imagined him to, being considerably shorter than my mental pictuire of him. He recognised me. Turns out that he works at Family Investments also, on the second floor (I am on the fourth).

The afternoon goes on outside the window. There seems to be a gap in the buses now, and as I look down a moth with a pushchair takes the opportunity to cross the road. Ah. The buses are back now.
An old man with a walking stick across the street. A young couple kissing.
The sky is bright and grey, anbd there is a lone seagull perched on one of the buildings on the opposite side of the street.
I wonder what it sees.

A Blueprint for Nocturnea

4:00pm exactly, and I am sat in an internet cafe on Western Road, near the Sainsburys where I used to buy my dinner from when I lived in my old flat on The Drive. Some pleasant, indian / oriental music is playing in the background. A low murmer of conversation at the counter. Everything seems pleasant and peaceful and uncrowded in here.
And, oh, the joy of writing without the various curses of the laptop. The keys pick up every letter, Internet Explorer won't shut down every three minutes or so. Writing becomes less an exercise of semi-literary, semi-literate endurance, and more something that happens as if by magic. I think something and it appears on screen. I'm no longer aware of having to check to make sure that every key stroke is accompanied by the letter on screen any more. Not even aware of the motions of my two fingers typing. An unconscious motion. mind and word and texts drifting into cyberspace.
Someone else has just walkd in, is at the counter. The woman says 'what one would you like to use?' The man replies 'any', 'four , seven?'.
I am sat at number 10.
I really should have chosen 39.

Autumn seems to have come down now. No traces of summer left. Walking to the Evening Star last night, I luxuriated in the novelty of the cold. Its interesting the way that autumn - or any seasonal change really - makes you more aware of the usually taken-for-granted space around you. As I tried to write in the curtailed post of this morning, the darkness between the lamps seemed very different, as if the texture of the darkness was palpable. A soft and velvety thing, a fabric that rumoured of deep water. Falling into pools on summer days and finding the current dragging you down into the cathedral-like depths below. The fall of the street light created little islands in the darkness. Looking down a long road whose name I can never remember, these ordered islands seemed almost like an equation, a night structure perhaps. A blueprint for Nocturnea, an umbra, a region of shadows.
Up above, the sky was mostly cloudless. Even the darkness there seemed different. Less shallow than summer night. Deeper. Everything in autumn seems deeper. A newly waning moon that really did seem to be a sphere, hanging there in space, and the few stars I could see seemed so cold. A desolate and yet somehow comforting presence.

Brighton seems quieter now that October is on the horizon. The tourists have thinned, and the influx of new students have mostly not yet arrived. the beach has begun to attain that rather more abandoned feel which is far more conducive to walk-dreaming (like daydreaming, but while walking) than over summer.
A slightly unreal dream-like atmosphere seems to suffuse everything. A layer of silver, a shiver of gold, and a feeling that the afternoon skies are watching you. My small bedsit window increasingly begins to show a street that seems ever more distant. There are less cries now in the night, and those seagulls... why are they so silent now? Their racket would invariably keep me awake over the summer, but now... I can't remember the last time I heard them.
Maybe some great disaster is coming, and the seagulls, like that myth about the ravens at the Tower of London, will leave when the city is in danger. An easy get-out clause for the Tower though, the ravens wings are clipped. Throw them from the Tower and they sink to the ground. Birds exiled from the air.
The seagulls in Brighton are free to leave when they will.

Maybe the current lack of seagulls is due to some secret seagull rendesvous out on the Sussex Downs. A mysterious cabal of gulls reciting the arcana of seas and herrings and fishing boats and storms. It is rumoured that cats hold their own mysterious conventions (back-alley tom cat myths, feline gangsters drawing up plans to run the forgotten wastegrounds of suburbia for their own mouse-hungry ends) and I can imagine seagulls doing the same. Actually, thinking about it, there are well documented tales of bird-parliaments, vast gatherings glimpsed on roadsides. circles of rooks and crows, and the largest in the centre of this circle, holding court as it were. A 'court' maybe a well chosen word. There are also tales of birds being 'tried', as if for avian crimes. Magpies held down by rooks, attacked by other birds, and the silent circle outside watching the proceedings with equanimity.
And if birds have their own laws, their own parliaments, their own justice, then what of their ghost stories? The ghost-stories of seagulls, what would they be like?

Rambling now, drifting from tangent to tangent, luxuriating in the comfort of writing on a computer that works, as I luxuriated in the novelty of cold last night.
We are still distant from twilight here, but outside the light has begun to adopt that flat-white look of Sunday afternoons. Premonitions of dusk, both of the day and the year.
Home at last. 

The Pyrrhic Victory that Technology May Engender

Unless  I wish to write haikus for the duraton of these Tales from Bridge 39, I fear I may well have to oversee these posts from internet cafes in the future. Three minutes, and then 'internet explorer is not responding' Then the screen blanks out, a filmy white mist, shuts down, and then restarts.
I get the chance to write three lines and thats it.
Apart from this; late September, blue skies, cold air and warm sun. A pleasing mixture. At night, the pools of street light deepen the shadows between the lamps. Last night, a waning moon as I walked up the slope ofa road near St Anns Well Park.
Just restarted again.
I'm going to stop writng now.
Pen and paper had some advantages after all it seems... Except of course no-one could read it. Technology is sometimes a good definiton of a pyrrhic (spelling?) victory...

The Laptop's New Curse

Temperature plummeting, an autumnal sea happily devouring everything. Out on Em's balcony this morning having a cigarette. The cold air tightening my skin, the clear skies.
We are far from summer now.
Next week we'll be entering the deeps of October.
And, alas, as my laptop keeps on ending internet explorer, this will be a very short and annoyed post...

Ghost Stories in a Beer Garden

No-one out here in the beer garden of Hove Place. The seats piled up on one another, pushed aainst the tables. Statues of cherubs and angels amongst the ivy. Remnans of rain. The sounds of traffic from the unseen road. A bright full moon illuminating the rushing clouds.
Sat with Em in some knd of Italian looking shelter, ignoring the no-smoking signs. No-one out here anyway. Start telling ghost stoies - well I do - same thing happened the last time we were here. Tell her again about te black cowled figure I thought I saw at my grandfather's house when I was five.At some point I look up at Em, and see a slight disquiet in her eyes.
'I'll have nightmares now!' she tells me as we walk back along Church Road.
Ghost stories on a September night.
Sometimes I think I'd like to write a horror novel. Well, a long ghost story rather than horror, but anyway. Over summer I began thinking about ideas for such a book. It would be the story of that ever fascinating archetype the haunted house. I wanted the book to be nightmarish and frightening, to imbue the kind of feeling that ghost stories gave me when I was younger. Fascinated by them in daylight, but when night fell I would regret reading them. The stories would come to seem hauntings themselves.
I used to think about ideas for this book - notes on the histories of this house. I began to come to know the interior of the house, of the locked upper floor leading to the dark attic, and the dead end stairway located in the attic itself. I could picture the photograph that would be found in the attic... The book would be a history of experiences there, different residents, different though connected tales. The book was to be written as if it was a 'true-life' paranormal book. As the book progressed it would become clear that researching the house was proving to have a less than desirable effect on the writer.
There would be almost nothing in the way of explanation, no denoument, no climax, little in the way of conventional narrative form.
I would think about ideas for the book as I fell asleep, and one night ended up frightening myself, lying there in the dark of 2:00am, waiting for a knock on my door from the empty landing...
Then I kind of forgot about the book and got a job instead.

A Decade of Septembers

September 2009 - age 37
A long walk with Joe throgh Benfield (?) Valley Park. Trying to find the observatory. Finding a delapidated mansion surrounded by trees. Onto the scrubby Sussex downs and back again.

September 2008 - age 36
In my room at Wilbury Crescent painting. The balcony doors open and a blue twilight rushing in. 'Isolation' by Dust of Insects. X-mal Deutschland. I don't know why I connect the latter with this September. I didn't (and don't have any on my MP3).

September 2007 - age 35
At Telegen. Not making the sales. Walking back home to Wilbury Crescent. Listening to an album by Arcana.

September 2006 - age 34
Long walks along the sunny promenade just before sundown. A man with stilts on watched by everyone. A week off work from the petrol station.

Setember 2005 - age 33
Working with Monika during the evening shifts at the petrol station. Thinking about the September of 1997 whilst on a morning shift there.

September 2004 - age 32
No real memories of the month.

September 2003 - age 31
Kath. Walking back from Oriental Place were she lived to my new flat at Buckingham Street.

September 2002 - age 30
A walk with Joe out past the Marina at twilight. Writing poems on the beach.

September 2001 - age 29
Unemployed. A holiday to Malta shortly after 9/11. Al and Paul's flat at Montpelier Road.

Septemer 2000 - age 28
Walking from where I lived in Moulscoomb to Brighton centre. Rain. The long slope down onto Lewes Road. Listening to 'Spirit the Earth Aflame' by Primordial.

Craving the Night-Chill

I left the house at 7:00pm, dragging myself out of an ever deepening evening sleep. I didn't really feel ike going for a walk, but neither did I feel in the mood for painting either.
Twilight had fallen by the time I left the house. A full moon lay in the sky, same blank and beguiling stare as always. I slipped through Brunswick Park down to the sea-front. Blue pools of night creeping out from bushes and below the trees, shadows thick as old summer nights.
The promenade was busy with waklers and cyclists. There were even some people who seemed to be swimming in the dark tides. Stormy looking clouds gathered above the huge building of flats at the end of the seafront. The building always reminds me of some Victorian prison, both dismal and grandiloquent.
I walked past the King Alfred swimming pool, and into new night-territory. I had never been here after dark before. Long rows of beach huts and the undulating sea. Past Mrs Bumbles cafe and the Babylon Lounge, the sea-front becomes more provincial and less polished than Brighton. There are patches of scraggy grass and fenced off wastegrounds. Em and myself saw a used syringe amongst the yellowed weeds here a few weeks ago.
It was my aim to walk to Hove Lagoon at wilight, but by the time I had arrived twilight had gone. Hove Lagoon during the day is a dreary, though somehow dream-like place. In darkness I had expected its atmosphere of January loneliness to only increase. It seemed to show a different side to itself after dark though. Lookng over the playground and past the cafe into the dark waters, it seemed somehow serene and slightly magical, like a theme park ride waiting to open.
I was disappointed.
I headed up to Portland Road and turned right to circle back home.
Portand Road proved to be far more interesting, another place I have never walked at night before.
Endless fish'n'chips and fast food joints, tawdry and appealing. Chinese restaurants standing empty. From one, a model of a wooden horse startled me. Demonic face and rictus grin, an equine nightmare. A dress shop called 'Eternal', 'Tech-u-lke' selling computers. Empty stretches of what appeared to be a business solely dedicaed to selling floorboards. Across the road a vacuum cleaner shop.
It could have been a street in Worcester, or maybe Southampton. Devoid of poetry but somehow real, and old. Older than Brighton's tourist-cool and picturesque lanes. A place where faling in love might be real. I love Brighton but sometimes it seems to be all style and no substance.
I passed by a nameless recreation ground, a great rectangle of darkness surrounded by houses. The pavement was covered with fallen leaves. Here, at least, there were real signs of autumn.
I slipped up to the Old Shoreham Road, passed the petrol station where I used to work. I tried to see if Mike was still there, but I couldn't make the figure out. Too many bright lights and cars in the way. It felt like I had never worked there, the petrol statin slipping further and further into the past. Memories like ghosts, like dreams you can't recall.
On my way back I walked by Andy's flat, empty until he returns on Friday. I tried to remember all the times I had walked this road regularly before, with varying degrees of success.
I have lived in Brighton so long now. It seems I have too many histories here, and it is getting harder to remember them all.
The walk, about four miles in all, tired me out. I was actually warm, almost too warm by the time I returned home.
I am beginning to crave the night-chill of autumn.

Last Night after Dinner, a Fragment

A line of ships on the horizon, so far out in the night, they looked like the heads of steet lamps rising from the waters. The waves were so still... -in fact, there were no waves, just a vast stretch of water, timeless and paused, undulating slightly in the no-breeze.
A nearly full moon lit everything with milky, muted silver. Sillhouettes of late-summer revellers down by the waterline, behind us, dog walkers passed along the promenade.
Looking across the darkness of Hove Lawns the city seemed far away, almost shrunken.
A week until October and it still feels like summer.

Looking into the Death House

The renovators have moved into the death-house. When I pass by in the mornings, builders lounge out from the windows. Rubbish is piled by the doorway. The Incredible Hulk voodoo figure has been removed from the ground floor window. There has been some accident with one of the panes of glass in the said window. Jagged and cracked, an irregular angle of night now tattooed tight onto the skin of this once abandoned building. This did mean I was able to gain the above photograph though. Stretching my arm in from front steps of next door. The interior of the room looks as dark and dismal as it promised to be. I wonder if the builders feel anything as they move from room to room, up and down the crumbling stairs, drifting through air unbreathed by anyone but ghosts for who knows how long? The ghost stories of labourers, white-van man horror.
I shall miss the death-house when it inevitably gets turned into another house of bedsits like this one. I shall have to seek out another abandoned and decaying house to satisfy my imagination.
At least the photograph is a remaining glimpse into the darkness.
Now the death-house is in the process of being exorcised, I wonder if any haunting might transfer itself to the photograph? Those old architectural silences locked now in cyberspace, a virtual ghost, an unquiet blogspot.
Another tale from bridge 39...

Warnings about Melancholy Factories

Why is getting up in the morning so difficult? Despite having eight hours sleep last night - deep sleep as well - when that alarm went off at 7:00am I couldn't ever imagine feeling awake again. Then dangerous and foolish ideas begin to occur, such as 'snoozing the alarm'. There is the danger of not snoozing properly and falling back to sleep ad being late, not that snoozing ever makes you feel any less tired. I know this, and that the best thing to do is to have a shower and a cup of tea. This does actually wake you up. When that alarm goes off though, 'another ten minutes to wake me up' seems the best idea in the world. Not that I did though. I heaved myself out of bed, had a shower, and now feel relatively awake. I can't really look forward to a lie in on my day off though, because any time spent in bed on a day off seems a waste...
When I first woke this morning, a little under an hour ago, I remembered my dreams quite well. Having a shower has devoured any memory of what I was dreaming about though. All I recall is something to do with 'melancholy factories', a shop in the middle of nowhere, and a woman with a West Midlands accent giving me a loud warning about something.
Possibly about the perils contained in gloomy sites of industial commerce...

The Romance of Certain Old Horror Comics

In the autumn of 1982, when I was ten years old, we moved from the village of Kinloss to the nearby town of Forres. Kinloss was only a few miles away from Forres, and both were located in the relatively remote Scottish region of Morayshire. For my tenth Chrismas my parents bought me a book called 'The Encyclopaedia of Horror'. This exciting tome contained chapters (with pictures!) on such things as 'Evil Monsers', 'The Frankenstein Saga', 'Vampires and Werewolves' and others too. I was particularly enamoured with a chapter on the living dead. A mixture of historical fact, as well as film and literary sources, this well written book (aimed at adults rather than children) was to prove somewhat influential in my life.
I remember flicking through the book on Christmas Day, and coming across a small chapter at the end called 'Catalogue -Comics'.
This was the most excitng thing I had seen in my life. Horror comics? I hadn't realised that such a thing could even exist! Even more exciting were two pages reproducing the covers of these comics. The front and end papers of the book even printed two full colour reproductions from the comics theselves (see the first and last photograph for this post).
I remember reading this small chapter constantly over those dead days between Christmas and the New Year of 1982. The history of these comics were fascinating too, and to my delight I leart that these comics were so frightening that they atually banned in the 1950s! I couldn't even begin to imagne what they were like. I scoured the words for as much information as possible about the stories, of criminal baseball stars who were disembowelled and their intestines used for playing a game of revenge, of corpses risen from the dead seeking victims, of 'bald headed moon maniacs', hungry werewolves, carnivorous space monsters and monstrous ghosts.
I remember sittng in my room of our house in foress, still dark at 9:30am, and reading and re-reading the chapter, whilst listening to the cassette of Adam Ant's 'Friend or Foe' album, another Christma present. The closing instrumental 'A Man called Marco' seems imbued with that time. The fnal handclaps at the end of the song once coinciding perfectly with the streetlamps lining the lane at the top of the garden switching themselves off.
It was the covers themselves that fasinated me the most. They promised a world of mystery, of graveyards where the tombs were always crooked, the sky always blood-sunset red. The reproductions themselves were tiny, and this led to even greater scrutiny on my part as I tried to devour every last detail of them... 'It's Tom's leg, but he was executed last night!' shouted one character on a cover of a comic called 'Dark Mysteries' ('Thrilling Taes of Horror and Suspense'). It showed four manacled prisoners overseen by a prison guard armed with a whip, all reeling in horror from a dismembered leg that had appeared in a corridor. 'Strange Mysteries' showed an unfortunate woman, also in a jail cell, confronted with a Bela Lugosi style Dracula rising from the earth. 'Out of the Night' showed a man with a surprised expression playing a flute outside a graveyard. Two wispy monsters rose from the graves, one saying 'The music of the dead calls us - we rise at your command!'. This would no doubt end in disaster I wisely thought, and solemnly promised myself I would play no kind of wind instruments near any graveyards.


In stark contrast to the comics I had previously read, these seemed to imply that everday places -perhaps even Forres- could be as mysterious as these covers. They also fed into my interest with the urban landscape as a source of fascination - a world of street lamps and pouring gutters and city graveyards. Places I could relate too.
Having no chance of actually reading these comics, my mind roamed wild as I tried to imaine what their stories might actually be like. I would daydream of finding some in second hand shops, and of course tred to draw my own horror comic strips. The one attempt I reember was about a boy whp was attacked by a possessed rope swing. Whilst recovering in bed, his nurse became possessed by the same evil force too! I, of course, finished none of these attempts. Probably just as well really.
But something had been set in motion though. I think part of the reason that these comics so fascnated me was their very forbidden-ness - comics actally banned, as well as the fact that they were so old -The 1950s! That was thirty years before - three times my age!
Even now, lookng at the covers of these comcs can take me back to my small room in Drumduan Park in Forres, the light fading on snowy winter days, and as the afternon darkened to evening, glancing up from the Encyclopaedia of Horror to the black woods glaring down at me from Cluny Hill.
The all absorbing state of fascination so easily achieved in childhood is hard to come by as an adult, but here are times when flicking through an old horror comic I come across a certain panel, perhaps showing a monstrous and distorted dead tree below a bloated moon, or a desolate city street lit by a single crooked lamp, that the same fascination sweeps all too briefly across me. Not quite as strong as then perhaps, but there is a certain romance in old horror comics, can't quite rest easily in the grave.

An Autumn Equinox made by Machines

Woke up nearly an hour ago, two mintes before my alarm was due to go off at 7:00am. My room was in that dream-like transitional phase between night ad day. An early mornng twilight. As it is the autumn equinox today (which always has so much more meaning to me than to rather the more remembered summer and winter equinoxes) I thought it rather fitting; waking up halfway between night and day on the day when both are equal in length and significance.
The sounds of the morning filter in through the curtains; cars and creaking, the noise of taxis waiting in the rank below this house of bedsits. The mornng seems strangely free of human and animal noises; no seagulls, no walkers -morning made by machines.
Fragments of dreams stayed with me after I had woken. A long coach or bus-trip, where the interior of the vehicle was wide and vast. Some trouble with the vehicles toilets. A grey and uninspiring sky out of the windows. Another dream about a tiny river. Not even a river really, more a brook. I was watching the course of a large leaf I had named New Orleans (I have no idea why). Watching New Orleans get snagged and stuck, then finally tipping down into miniature waterfals where I followed. The water became slow and sluggish, as if composed of honey rather than hydrogen and oxygen molecules. New Orleans became stuck again. I suddenly felt rather precarious, balanced on the rocks of this tiny ravine and afraid I would fall into the waiting water below.
Thinking about it, if I want to walk to Hove Lagoon at twilight, I had best get on with it soon. Before I realise, it will start getting dark too early for me to make it there after work.
Summer really is over.

Remembering the Terminal Lands of the Metropolitan Line

The Coblers Thumb last night was full of people dressed as pirates and fairies, some kind of theme night whose origins were uncetain, but a tall goth girl was wearing a birthday badge, which was probably the nominal reason.
Sat in the crowded smokng area while the rest of the pub was empty. Brick walls covered with graffiti paintings, and in the corner, a box like a miniature shed hummed away to itself. Warm to the touch, I tried to lift the lid to view the generator (or whatever) inside but it was nailed shut, a forbidden industry. Mr Flo and his friend Kate, her father an actor known mostly for a part in the old television series 'Butterflies'. Sunday nights when I was a kid, that theme tune reminding me of school approaching fast the next day. Oddly, of summer too. Long Scottish days where I would go to sleep before nigtfall and wake long after the sun had risen, a season without darkness, summer in an imagined Arctic.
As I grow older I find that I drink less and less when I go out. Last night I had three pints and a Jack Daniels and couldn't drink any more.
Despite this, Em and myself finally got up as it neared 1:00pm today. A day full of cold wind and rumoured sun. There was talk of going for a walk into the Shoreham Industrial Zone, but after a full English breakfast in a cafe, where loud Chinese men who looked like fishermen talked in Cantonese or Mandarin, we settled for a film at her flat.
We watched 'Metroland', based on the film by Julian Barnes. I think I had tried to watch the film before -I have certainly read the book- but it had been on too late and I had had work the next day, a 'Butterflies' for my thirties. This was over the petrol station years when I would regularly get up for work at 5:00am. A film basically about suburbia, 'Metroland' was full of shots of commuters, train windows looking out onto shaggy, half-untidy gardens, tennis clubs in tidy parks and autumn paths littered with leaves. I felt a strange nostalgia for Ickenham, for those adolescent years spent in the terminus lands of the Metropolitan tube line. I suppose 'Meroland' was actually set in the area.
Suburbia.
I find something oddly comforting and fascinating about suburban landscapes; long hidden gardens nestled behind detached red brick houses, and those secret gardens, tiny strips of countryside, that are known only by the people who live in the house.
By the time the film had finished twilight had fallen, surprisingly early, about 7:00pm. We left Em's house, she to the shops, and myself back here.
I find myself thinking abut those tube rides back from London. Station names like an arcana of mundanity; Ruislip, Northolt, Hillingdon, Harrow-on-the-Hill, Northwick Park... A litany of places I knew most intimately from the Metropolitan and Central line carriage windows. Hidden, unthought-of country etched briefly on glass.
Sometimes, I imagine myself living there, commuting to London and back. The sound of starlings kissing the electric rail in sunset-raw mornings. The platforms like long islands in a sea of railway lines, and coming into Baker Street that one building that was so labyrinthine and ragged and vast, I was convinced it had grown rather than been built.

Capturing the Haystack

I found these old photographs on the computer, dating from a trip into the countryside near Hassocks on the August bank holiday of 2007. They made me laugh when I found them. The first photograph shows Andy, Joe and myself, shortly after having found a haystack in a field. Thinking this was a great opportunity for a photograph, I set the camera to self timer, and balanced it precariously on another nearby haystack. A number of mysteries arose when we looked at the photograph. The first were the expressions of absolute delight and unbridled joy on our faces at being next to a haystack. The second mystery is of why we felt the need to all rest our elbows on the said haystack. If you look carefully though, you can see that Joe, on the right of the picture isn't acualy resting his arm on the haystack, but that his elbow is acually suspended somewhere above the haystack. The photograph looks like one of those old hunting photographs, where hunters stand proudly above their kill.
We certainly look very happy about something.


The second photograph shows us shortly after the fist photograph was taken. Having captured the haystack, we now felt the need for a photograph showing us sitting on it. Why do we now look so miserable and serious? Had the haystack disappointed us in some way? Had a shadow of anxiety passed over us? Perhaps there was a group of rival hunters who now felt the need to take our haystack from us, necessitating us having to sit on the haystack to protect it from being stolen.
The answers to such questions will remain mysteries it seems.
Probably just as well really.

Morning Disorietation Session

The alarm woke me from a dream I can't now remember. Sent me into a sudden, disorientating sem-panic. I ouldn't remember what day it was. Where was I supposed to be? At Em's? At work? Had I the day off work? Just as I wondered how on earth I was going to find out what day it actually was (I was half-asleep remember) I woke up properly.
I had work. It was Saurday. I still had an hour before I left for my half day.
Panic over.
A cup of tea and a shower later and it seems normal service has been resumed.

An Eagerness for these Ghosts

'An Eagerness for these Ghosts'
pen and coloured pencil on paper
autumn 2009

This season creeps in from woods and unused alleys, a twitten-thing, twittering down the suddenly sloping afternoons. The sea rushes to greet it, an eagerness for these autumnal ghosts.
I would sit in the garden and think on an evening like this if I could. Watch the darkness sweep in over fences, covering the first few discarded leaves.
Dreaming of internal autumns.
I do not have a garden though, and I must content myself with watching the chimney-shadows creep up the buildings across the street. Blinded by walls, the sun sinks somewhere to my right.
The remaining traces of the sun on the houses opposite seems heavy, refined in factories to become as thick and welcome as exhaustion after a long day when sleep finally nears.
Back in Wilbury Crescent, I would often sit in the garden, smoking cigarettes and drinking secret cups of tea, and feel the light fade and the night settle about me. The trains that passed by the end of the garden seemed almost consolatory. Sudden windows of yellowed passengers coming home. Very rarely, a steam train would pass by and the garden would be shrouded in an industrial fog.
There was a tree in the garden two houses down we called the Magpie Tree, because there were always magpies about it. I think it was a poplar, and was never still, seeming to rustle even when there was no breeze. Jittery butterfly wing movements.
I would sit on a rocking chair below the apple trees, happy in the pools of darkness, watching the hedge become shadow, the cracked paving stone fade and become as comprehensible as a map seen from a distance.
There was always the smell of wood smoke in that garden on autumn nights, a ghost of all autumns perhaps.
I would remain outside until full dark, and when I would return inside the interior of the house seemed full to too many angles and dull dismal yellow light.
I miss that garden, and there is no garden here, just thoughts of the sea and a September nostalgia for places I shall never see twilight in again.

Miniature Autumn Landscapes

The air deepens, the shadows writhe with depth and the light seems to fade through different layers of violet. Finally, tonight, I breathed in cold-fires, pulled my jacket around me because I was actually chlly.
Autumn is here, at last.
Today was hot though. A cup of tea with Em on the pier, watching the sun shift and become hidden behind a cloud. The sea below us was the deepest shade of green I could imagine. Two seagulls on the tarot caravan nervously look at each other, young bird-lovers in their first September, gull-desire and feathered coyness.
Comng back from Em's house, somebody asked the direction to the Hotel. I had only just passed by it - it was empty and hypnotic as usual. I pointed her to the building, felt almost inclined to ask her if there were any reports of anything unusual in that always empty downstairs room.
At work I doodle miniature autumn landscapes in my sketcbook. They shift between the scrawled notes on the calls I take; percentage rates, fixed rate cash ISA summaries, wrong passwords. Fragments of a tiny countryside where sole streetlamps lean in a wind of leaves, and a scrawled sky pregnant with sleep and smoke and dreams implies that night is king here.
I forgot to look at the Death House when I passed by and when I looked back, it seemed a shadow fell over it. Miles of corridors full with autumn, and I wonder if the house knows it is being watched.
The House of Bedsits is silent. The humming of the fridge is hushed as a cathedral. Dark for hours now, two months back, the sun may just have been setting.

Suspended in Restless Hours

A permanent dusk has settled over the city, a twilght suspension. The sky has been eaten by a white void, and the blusters of wind down the streets seem to somehow emphasise the stillness rather han oppose it.
There is no time here, a chronovore has crawled out of the restless seas and fed itsef on hours and seasons, minutes, days and twilights. This could be one of those nowhere days of January, a gloomy summer day, or one of those afernoos in April, where the white skies seem both restless and frozen.
I dreamt last night that the crack in my door had grown, and a woman lounged on the other side of the doorway, resting her elbow in the crook of the door. I woke from this dream half-convinced of an incursion from one of the shadows of this house of bedsits, or perhaps a darker shadow from the Death House two doors down.
The new town out of the window at work showed a different side to itself today. Perhaps it was even another new town, for I dd not feel that sense of joy and intimacy that the original new town gave. A new geography caused both by the white void of the day and the fact that the blinds were closed on the fourth flor of the call centre. There is a buildig in the distance, but between the slats of the blinds it resembled more a hazy wood on the brow of a hill. I could imagine a row of street lamps flickering on there in grey and desoate Novembers. A rainy evening walk by closely clustered trees that in their movement would emulate the sea.
I have lately become attracted to the idea of walking down to Hove Lagoon to arrive at twilight, but this does not seem to be the right kind of twilight for such a journey. Hove Lagoon is a strange place, incongruous in this city. A kind of loneliness hangs about it, remniscent of dull afternons in nowhere towns, rainy cigaettes and clinging sleep.
I have begun to think at dusk though, the still water, the swans and the low buildings by the closed cafe would exert a mysterious pull, 'dreary but meaningful' to quote Fritz Leiber in his story 'Smoke Ghost'.
My god, the air here in this room is so thick with twilight it feels almost palpable, like a London smog of the 1950s. Foreign voices in thehallway, and footsteps on the stairs suddenly disturb my reverie. They fade agin, back into the miasma of this house.
I feel full of dreams and uncertain afternoons. The white of the skies is begining to darken into greyer tones. This must be the street lamp twilight. I can hear them begin to awaken. Night is coming, and this is their country, their season now. The roads belong to ghost stories and unfocussed memories of times once lived. Suspended in this dusk, the city shifts and sleeps and casts her dark shadow over us all.

Fragment from a Muted Morning

A dark, breezy morning. The sound of passing vehicles has a drifting, sleepy quality. There seems to be a wind in the hallway, I can feel it come in through the crack under my door, an interior breeze.
A door opens somewhere in the house. Someone walks down the landing, opens another door.
A floor board creaks, and out in the street a door slams.
7:59am.

Mysteries of the Civil Twilight

A low, grey day, the kind of day where daydreaming seems endemic. Like the chime of a deep bell, drifting across fields, days like these belong to the distance, to the obscured horizon.
I sat on a bench in St Nicholas Churchyard at lunchtime, drawing trees and gravestones. Before I began sketching an old man sat next to me for a while. His movements were abrupt and jagged and he kept looking at me as if he expected me to say something to him at any moment. I turned my back on him and looked down the sloping and uneven path that below the trees and old fashioned street lamps back into the town centre.
After he had left, a young woman sat on one of the tombstones near the entrance, got out what looked like a map or a guidebook. As nervy as the man, her furtive glances at nothing in particular were disquieting.
I did not see her leave.

There are different kinds of twilight, according to the internet. Astronomical twilight, nautical twilight and civil twilight. The ides of civil twilight fascinated me, the knowledge that twilight also precedes sunrise as well as follows sunset.
Civil twilight.
The words sound like something blue. Rain water siding down streets under fading skies, abandoned parades of shops, long streets rising through hills between tall and narrow houses.

The new town out of the window at work had a different character today. The hill in the distance became obscured by fog. Imagined spires and towers vanishing into the haze.
By the time I left work it had began raining.

More notes on the Death-House; the curtains in the windows of all four storeys are ragged and torn. In the ground floor window there is a narrow strip of dull light that can be seen emanating from the back of the house. A room the length of the house or an open door? The front step of the house is full of litter and leaves.
A long abandonment gathering in pools.

Ascending the two flights of stairs to my room in, the air seemed altered and deeper. My footsteps in the timer-switch landscape.

I imagine I hear the sea, but know I cannot.
Mysteries of the civil twilight perhaps.

From the Furnace to the Breach

'A Breach Detected in Summer 39/3, Cycles 22 and 23'
Acrylic on canvas
18" X 12"

When I started this painting back at the beginning of August (maybe the end of July?) it was going to be titled 'The Furnace', but as these things do they change. I had already used the title of the painting for another post, so couldn't use that as a title.
Apologies for the dreadful photographic quality; out of focus and the edges cut off, but the light was failing when I took the photograph, and if I had left it until the next day would probably never have got around to photographing it again.

A Side-Effect of Inland Water

Dreams last night of American cousins I have never met. Something to do with a steep, small hill covered with rushes and nightfall. Needing to catch a bus. A late night shop amongst dream trees and grasses.
Took a walk with Em tday from Shoreham to Bramber, to see the remains of the castle there. A hot day, summer-like, though the shadows cast by trees had that autumnal depth about them.
The countryside around Shoreham is pleasing. Wending our way up the river, sunlight split by clouds, interrupted by passing cyclists, the need to watch swimming dogs, and the constant checking of the map. We didn't actually need the map, but using one while being on a walk is pleasing. Strangely old-fashioned, ghosts of childhood fantasies of living in the wilds, plastic-compass myth and the imagined joy of sleeping under skies.
I felt far from the sea here in this landsape of inland water. The September-clarity of the light combined with the brightness of the day to invest the landscape with an air of dreamlike unreality. Somehow this got caught up in thoughts of the painting I began yesterday. The painting is strange in itself, or rather my reactions to the paintng. It seems to be turning into some kind of structure under a bright blue sky (I tend to improvise paintings and never plan. This advanced artistic technique is also known as 'making it up as you go along'). Afer an hour or two of working on it, it started to seem madeningly familiar - a memoy I culdn't place. More lke deja-vu than anything else. The painting gave me the same emotional resonance as those recurring dreams I have of sunlit, flooded landscapes, and that accompanying mixture of intimacy, nostalgia and srange triumph. There is something arctic about the painting too - or something that made me think of the arctic, but it is a bright, snowless arctic... and I am also put in mind of January too, those clear, well-defined Jauary days. The paintng somehow seemed a reflecton of all this, and it ccurred to me that I was painting a landscape that was sideways from wherever you were.
Somehow the painting had leaked into the walk.
Looking across the fields from the bank of the river, the countryside had that oddly revelatory feeling that always accompanies deja-vu, echoes of a forgotten dream that linger deep into the day.




We soon reached Bamber. After Brighton, it seemed strangely deserted. So used to the endlessly busy roads and the endless busy sea, the quiet here seemed almost eerie.
Tere isn't very much left of Bamber Castle itself. A few stones scattered about, but there is a rather impressive looking column of stone. Moving into the shadow of this column was interesting. The air grew somehow deeper, and it suddenly seemed very busy. Ghosts of old rooms and fires, and people moving about. Like being in a crowded and dark room, but oddly traquil as well. The imagination is a powerful thing, and castles -any old buldings really- are potent triggers for that imagination.
This fleeting impression was oddly overwhelming.
We caught the bus back from Bramber, winding through the forgotten suburbs of Brigton and Shoreham, small parades of provincial shops and stores; badly punned hairdressers, radiator traders, windows of washing machines and charity shops collecting for causes I had never heard of.
It took an hour to get back to Brighton, and we fially arrived at about 6:30pm. As we stepped off the bus, time seemed altered. It seemed somehow ealier, both in the day and the year.
3:00pm in August.
A side effect of inland water perhaps.

9/11, Nine Years Ago

I was unemployed and had spent the day alone. My flatmate, Mandy, was probably working. I can't remember what I did, but probably read, smoked cigarettes out in the garden and slept. We didn't have a television, and I never listened to the radio, and though I did have access to the internet, I hadn't used it that day. I didn't leave the flat all day, but I didn't mind because it was a nice place to live, and we had a fantastic garden, often visited by cats. I seemed to see a lot of stars from the garden.
I can't remember what kind of weather it was, but I had some vague memories of greyness, rather like today actually. I finally left the flat to buy some cigarettes. I remember it was dark, and I went to the newsagents by the co-op. Was I still smoking straights then? I can't remember. I remember buying 20 silk cut though. The newsagents was small, more like an extended kiosk than a shop. At the counter, the man motioned towards a pile of papers. He said 'It's terrible isn't it'. It was The Argus, Brighton's local paper, some kind of special edition. There was a picture of a vaguely familiar building on the front. I vaguely wondered why the Argus would bring out a special edition on a plane crash, but I hadn't read the article properly. I thought a light aircraft had crashed into a building or something.
I walked back to the flat feeling vaguely uneasy. Sometime after I returned, a friend phoned and asked me if I had heard the news.

A Night when No-One Passes By

A flat grey sky, or there was but darkness has fallen now, or I think it has. Drew my curtains jusr before twilight so hard to tell.
One of those low, daydreamy days, drizzle and ennui, neither particularly unpleasant. The sea undulates, but waves can't seem to break in the sluggish air. The day is haunted by sleep.

Looking out of my window earlier, I was struck by how similar it suddenly felt to last December when I moved in here. I watched people wrapped against the cold head up the slope of the street. A skinhead man who looked drunk spitting as he crossed the street. Somewhere I couldn't see, a couple argued loudly, a nasty, violent sound.

After work, I headed over to Andy's flat for a cup of tea. We both agreed that despite the slightly autumnal air, it was all still rather humid. He complained of not being able to sleep. Not a problem I have had since starting work, it must be said. He is heading back home to Middlesbrough for a week next weekend, and when he returns he (finally) starts his care home job. Another new chapter. September will be disappearing into October, and the last shifts in the factory of this year will have begun.

A few autumn leaves below Brighton's few trees. They look disconsolate on the pavement and remind me of November. Last November. Sleeping on Andy's sofa while waiting to move in here. Doesn't seem that long ago. Time flickering and juddering forward too quickly. Come the autumn equinox I will only have a year and a half before I turn 40. Really doesn't seem that long away, even if it does seem impossible that I will be in my forties.

In the front window of the ground floor flat of the Death-House a few houses down, someone had left in the window, a play figure of the Incredible Hulk. It looked ragged and torn, a haunted object staring out at passers by, a childs voodoo doll, something that watches the street at night when no-one passes by.

I hear the silence on the stairs in this house of bedsits, the quiet in the halls and the bathrooms on each floor. Even below the music I'm Playing (a band called 'Love Spirals Downwards') tonight seems silent. A welcome silence.

Through the crack below my door, I see a strip of yellow light. Someone moving through the stairs and the halls, past the bathrooms and the shut doors of each bedsit, the letters to old tenants ('return to sender') on the mantelpiece by the front door.

Autumn creeps about us tonight, quiet and persistent as a dream that lingers long into the day.

The Hotel and the Death-House

I've only begun to notice them recently. The Hotel first, and then the Death House.
The Hotel is on the corner of a street, and I don't know what first caught my attention. It's not a particularly ostentatious building, just another Brighton-Georgian building. Perhaps it was the very quietness of the bulding that first attracted me. Then glimpses in through the windows and the glass in the door of the hallway. At the end of the doorway, a stags head hanging on the wall. Glass-eyed dead stare. Another window shows some kind of lounge area. Dark walls and pictures hanging there I can never remember when I have walked on. A slight feeling of cluttered-ness -is that a word?- and age. Rumours of wooden beams and panels -I'm not sure because I've never stopped to look. Just glimpses as I pass by. There is something about the light of the room which both disquiets and fascinates me. Something lucid and bright and dark, all mixed up together. Empty chairs wait for occupants. An air of waiting, yes. A pensiveness. A kind of tension and dreaminess. The hotel seems a building without an exterior, as if only the interior survives. Something deep and calm and feverish. The Hotel is undoubtedly haunted, if such things exist of course.
I am still unsure.
The Death-House is closer. Next door but one to this house of bedsits I'm currently sat writing in.
It was Andy who first came up with the term 'Death-House' to describe a certain kind of building. Ragged and decaying, abandoned and boarded up, Death-Houses repel watchers, vanishng in their own quiet as much as the Hotel does. Death-Houses, though, are unpleasant, exuding a poisonous, toxic air, a miasma of decay and rumours of dark histories. Death-Houses feel as if someone has died in them.
Of course, most, if not all, old buildings, have had people die in them, but Death-Houses cling onto the darkest of the echoes and don't let go.
The Death-House two doors down from here is the same as this House of Bedsits, four storeys and a basement level. The black windows of the basement, past a wildly overgrowing and scraggy bush, show a floor covered in detritus. The door to the basement flat is boarded up. A blank wooden face, slightly cracked, revealing nothng, but rumouring of the floors and floors of silence inside and above, the darkened and forgotten rooms, and the stairways which must be echoing with ghosts.
Such places are built on rumours, and like the Hotel, they don't seem quite real. Cracks in the facade of our own rationality.
So easy to see where ghost-stories are born.

8:15am, Lit by a Single Lightbulb

I woke up this morning at 6:22am. The light outside the window was murky with the remnants of night. Darkness creeping forward to swallow up the mornings.
This short hour or so before I leave for work reminds me of old mornings, of getting up for school, or college or universities. Time seems frozen, and the single lightbulb that illuminates my room only adds to this feeling of suspension.
Before long, I shall wake up in darkness and it will be cold, and the trip to the bathroom from my bed shall seem a near-mythical feat of endurance and extremity.
Fifteen minutes till I leave for work. Quarter past eight. No seagulls, only traffic, and the day seems somehow soporific, as if the city will spend the day tired and dreaming of sleep.

Bethelbourne

I have long been fascinated by the naming of things, as if by naming something, in some way I might come to know it better, even if I have named it myself.
I used to write a lot of short stories, most of them set in fictionalised versions of towns in which I had once lived. They weren't only the same towns with a different name, but more like the nightsides of these towns. The towns as one might have enountered them in dreams, or in half hidden childhood memories.
Worcester bcame Clovelly Heath in my own mythology, and Southhampton became South Underwood. Ickenham became Uxley, whilst Forres became Drumduan and nearby Kinloss became Losskin.
The towns differed from ther real life counterparts too, a parallel geography, similar but not exactly the same. Clovelly Heath cathedral had a cafe in the gardens where its real life counterpart did not. In South Underwood a vast and labyrinthine museum (where people had a habit of vanishing in an interior of endless stairways) stood somewhere near the harbour. The names of these towns were important and until I had their names I didn't feel I could exlore them properly. Sometimes, finding the name of the nightside of the place would come easily, other times it would seem to take months, if at all.
I had long wanted a name for a Worcestershire village based upon Bretforton where my parents briefly lived from 1993 - 1996. A picturesque village, Bretforton, it also had the reputation as one of the most haunted villages in England, whose separate hauntings numbered at least eight or nine, even rivalling the better known Pluckley.

It was October of 2002. I was travelling by coach back from visiting my parents in Cornwall. It was one of those warm and bright Octobers; soft, golden sun and langorously mysterious nights. I was mulling over the ideas of names for this nightside Bretforton, and suddenly it came to me.
Bethelbourne.
Which should have been the end (or the start of it) but somehow wasn't.

(As an aside. The bedsit next door is currently responsible for the most atrocious cacophony I think I have ever had the misfortune to hear. A dreadful and chaotic mess of out of tune vocals and guitars - maybe even ukeleles - not to mention bongos. I'm not entirely sure what they are doing, or think they are doing, but it is really puttng me off my writing. Awful, shallow, and not to put too fine a point on it, crap).

The name 'Bethelbourne' seemed somehow too perfect to be used, and as the years have gone by, my reactions to the name have somehow changed. For some reason, I began to associate the name, or word 'Bethelbourne' with a very singular image; that of a group of poeple gathered in the countryside, perhaps autumn, perhaps winter, but certainly early morning. They are grouped around, or under, a great and dead tree. There is some kind of explosion connected with this image, perhaps itself conected with the tree. Perhaps the tree is lightning struck... or maybe a region of the earth itself has combusted. I am not sure. I am sure of the emotional resonance with this image thogh, and that is a feeling of euphoria or trumph.
I don't know where the image or the associated emotional respnse comes from. The nearest parallel I can find is those recurring dreams I have of sunlit and flooded landscapes, often hilly, mountainous areas. Sometimes I am trying to find this landscape again after losing it, and fail to do so. The feelings of these dreams are one of triumph, joy and nostalgia. A stange and inexplicable perfection.

I don't often think of 'Bethelbourne', the word or the place it might or might not represent, as if thnking about it will rob it of its power and resonance. Even the speaking of the word seems an act of magic(k), awakening echoes I can't quite place, as if it is a sigil denoting something I don't yet know.
Bethelbourne is a song that runs bright and clear through my head with all the power of a word, or perhaps a name, that I can't quite remember, remaining tantalisingly just out of reach.

(And as an aside, the dreadful cacophony next door continues...)

The Familiarity of Untravelled Roads

Feeling autumnal tonight, in fact, all day. Sky covered with grey, raining this evening. This time of year feels magickal (spelling very much intended), veils thinned and everything transient and somehow more alive.

The new town out of the window at work begins to grow. From where I sitat my desk, I imagine the sea to be behind me (in fact it is diagonal-right) -as if I am sitting facing north instead of east. The new town swells upwards. The church tower on Ship Street becomes a clock that may be on top of a small and dark museum. On the ascent of the fictional hill, I imagine church spires and a tangle of narrow streets. Upwards and upwards. There is a wood upon the hill, and around the base of the hill there would be larger houses, growing further and further apart, until the last remote houses and estates give way to hills and pine forests, small lochs and knots of tiny streams or burns.

There will be a time when the nights draw in so much that I shall watch the street lights come on over the hill.
Magickal twilight. Ghost-dusk.
Endless nightfall stretched out over hours.

Autumn, that time of year that signals, in fact, the dying of the year always seems so new. Hangovers from the past perhaps; school and universities. New cycles began as we fall, but this time of year both feels full of new beginnings and an ancient-ness. Why should something full of newness feel so old? Perhaps it goes back to the oldest beginnings, when we were born. Our earliest experience - the first experience in fact - being the oldest - the most ancient of all histories. Echoes of that ancient-newness flung down years, and each time we turn up an untravelled road, ghosts of that oldest, most ancient newness make themselves manifest.

Shadows of our birth, remembered in cells and skin and bone and flesh. Histories written in our molecules. DNA diary, a genetic journal.

The lamp has died in my room, and I am forced to recourse to the single bulb hanging down from the ceiling. That and the light from Coronation Street on the television, Macclesfield's cobbled streets, another fictional town - or an unreal region of a real town anyway - and the title-sequence flashes of rain and cats and chimney pots and television aerials seem as heavy with memory as everything else tonight.
(My grandparents red-bricked house in Stone, Coronation Street's melancholic tune cutting through summer holiday evenings, called in from playing in the gardens for dinner and quiet time before bed in that haunted house).
A candle too. A vanilla scented candle. Single flame over by the stereo, a box full of coppers and a tower of compact discs.
I hear the music of the man next door. Muted bass and little else.

If I could switch on the silence like I can't now switch on the lamp, I am sure I could still hear the sea in the middle of it.
I imagine now I can hear the tides in the rain, the cars passing by outside, -in the light, the air, and all the memories that hang round these early autumn nights as thick as ghosts and discarded leaves abandoned to pools, and the pools themselves already abandoned to the early darkness of these coming nights.

A Season without Name

Took a wak with Em through Stanmer Park yesterday up to Ditchling Beacon. A hot day that became gradually cooler, clouds covering the sun, ghosts of rain that didn't turn into a full hauntng.
Some of the leaves on the trees were beginning to turn, a feverish yellow, but really, there was no definite sign of autumnas yet.
Cavernous woods, and trackways through fields, the placid yet somehow sinister stare of cattle, an ice lolly from the ice cream man in the car park, and at Stanmer Church a second hand bookstall which held nothing of any real interest. There was an anti-abortin book for sale there with the title 'Babies for Burning' next to 'It' by Stephen King.
The long meandering bus ride back to Brighton down Lewes Road, past Moulscoomb, glimpsing the road I used to walk to get to where I first lived here. Dusty estate memories, roads too wide and too many houses. Still in my twenties back then. A decade back, the length of the eighties or the seventies, but seems somehow shorter.
Evening came on surprisingly early, the only real sign of autumn. Nights drawing in like a tide.
Fell to sleep last night at 10:30pm, and woke up this morning before the alarm went off at 7am.
Summer is beginning to seem a long time ago now, but this doesn't feel like autumn either.
I wonder what season this could be.

The Engines Choice; Ghost Stories and a Figure on the Roofs

It is feeling distinctly autumnal out there today, though I haven't drawn back the curtains to look yet. The sound of the seagulls are muted, and even the passing cars seem softer, more consolatory, as if the road is some distance away, across sleeping fields and shadowy woods, rather than two floors below.
I used to find the sound of the traffic at my grandparents house in Stone quite daydreamy. They lived in a quiet Worcestershire village, and in the calm of their house, the sound of the traffic was softened by the fields and trees. It sounded more like an ocean or a river that things made of metal and running on petrol.
Beginning to ramble now... Their house also always makes me think of those Castrol GTX engine oil adverts, the ones that had the tagline 'The Engine's Choice'. This would have been back in the late seventies / early eighties, and the adverts themselves (what I remember of them) were semi-abstract journeys into the landscape of the engine; all whirring pistons and... uh... other car-things... (I know nothing about cars as you can probably tell.) The final shot would always be of a pool of oil filling the head of a spanner. The music for these adverts was mysterious and even eerie, evocative of night-time and falling to sleep, almost cathedral-like in its soporific tones. The adverts would always make me think of petrol stations in the countryside, and beyond the garage itself a cluster of trees, and against their trunks would be lain planks of wood and metal poles, and around their base a scattering of tyres. These petrol stations of my imagination would always be lit by sunset, places of inimical mystery and dream-like resonances. They would, of course, have all used Castrol GTX...

St Anne's Well Park on friday evening. A barbecue held while the days are still warm enough and long enough for this to be possible. Seven or eight of us gathered, just up from the cafe amongst the rose bushes and the trees. The cafe was still open - I hadn't realised that it turned into some kind of restaurant at night - and they had a man there playing Spanish guitar. As it got darker - that soft late summer twilight blue - the light from the cafe spilled out into the park. A pleasing dreamy ambience. Ghost stories at the start of autumn; a dark and empty language school, the sound of footsteps on stairwells a few floors below, following someone up. No-one there. Reaching out for a doorknob in a darkened corridor, and then, from the emptiness of the classroom, a distinct knock from the other side. Another ghost story from someone whose job is to fix up camper vans. He told us how in the garage they had a van that dated back to the second world war, and one evening, passing by he swore he glimpsed a figure in the front seat with a helmet on its head. Glancing back of course, no one there.
The engine choosng shadows.

(A crossword clue in the paper last week. 'A region of shadows', the answer was 'umbra' - latin presumably, but that phrase stayed with me, 'a region of shadows'. Was there an epidemic of these regions that people had to come up with a word for them? Grasshopper mind this morning, jumping from one thing to another...)

More ghost stories at the pub last night. Someone telling us that as a child he had glimpsed a figure at the top of the stairs, a child he thought was his sister, but discovering that everyone else was in the living room. Discovering after they had moved from the house that the last owners had left. They couldn't bear to live in the house after their daughter had died there...

A sudden movement across the street from the pub. Somthing on the roofs of the houses. A black scuttling shadow. A man jaggedly clambering over the line of roofs, in that secret chimney geography. He was a sillhouette only, and at first I thought he might be a chimney sweep (not that I've ever seen a chimney sweep for years though...). He seemed to be wearing something on his face, but I couldn't make out what though, but it looked like some kind of snout, a gas mask shape. He dropped out of sight behind a line of roofs and we never saw him again.

The Laptop Breaks Down Again

Well, it seems that he last few days of the computer keyboard working have passed by, and I am back to having to write a post, then going back over it to putting back in all the characters that were missed. That first, rather long sentence contains eleven omissions. Oh well, knew it was too good to last.
Why do some things spontaneously fix themselves then break again? It seems that the keyboard particularly dislikes the space bar, (or the 'eyboard' as it appears). I haven't moved it since last night, have done nothing different and now back to its old incompeent ways.
Which rather puts me off writing, it must be said.
There is a part of me that is convinced that if I just carry on writing, then somehow, it will fix itself again.
Hmm.
It doesn't seem to be working.
Maybe if I type really slowly..?
Nope. No luck here either.
Maybe hitting it?
Lets have a look. Well those four words passed by without a hitch, and only one -no two- mistakes in the latter half of the sentence. Three now.
I'll try tapping it gently again.
Three taps.
Well, its evening now... No. No luck here...
Shaking it..?
Lets have a look. Hmm. No...
I really am cursed with laptops it seems... They only last for months before some disaster seems to visit them.
This really is most annoying.
Maybe if I go for a walk and come back..?

A New Town Out of the Window

Looking out of the fourth floor window at work this afternoon; a bright, hot sky, no trace of cloud, a heat wave echo from the last days of May. The first of September and no sign of sutumn yet.
I was call-listening, which just means listening to calls taken by other customer services representatives. It was a quiet afternoon, not many calls, and my attention wondered to the window to my left.
A familiar enough sight - central Brighton - a clustered mass of buildings and roofs - the church tower near Ship Street, but I hadn't seen it from this particular vantage point, out of a fourth floor window on a building down West Street.
It seemed like a different town. One, I thought, that seemed to be located in Scotland, maybe in Aberdeenshire. The latter point was strange in itself. I lived near Aberdeen when I was a child. Well, near-ish, but I think we visited there only once. It was an hours drive away or so. Possibly longer. Why had the view outside the window started me thinking of a town near Aberdeen - to be precise just south of Aberdeen? This new Brighton out of the window felt as it was still on the coast, but had a rather large river running through it down to the sea. This new town grew in my imagination. I started to imagine the parks of this town, well kept and picturesque, the large houses on the outskirts, and the whole place surrounded by hills.
It felt as if the town belonged to February. Not the dreariness we usually associate with February, but those bright, clear February days that seem almost a season in themselves. It felt like late morning too - even though it was the afternoon, and this new town outside the window came with a sudden feeling of triumph, or euphoria, as in the acccomplishment of some long strived for goal.
I could imagine coffees in quiet cafes, the burden of winter falling away, that fresh late winter sky... walking unknown streets having risen early from sleep, and the water of that river, splitting the city, snaking toward the wide sea and across the sandy beach (Brighton's beach is pebbled.)
Hotels and an antique shop, a harbour full of fishing boats and nets, wooden boards forming walkways across the water, the masts of boats click-clacking in the wind.
The new town out of the window became quite real to me, accompanied by a curious feeling of familiarity and intimacy, almost nostalgia.
By the time I met Em outside, Brighton had reverted to its old, well lived in identity, but I think about that new town now, at night, with street lamps shining, and the parks and the river plunged into a comforting darkness.
I wonder if I went there now, to that fourth floor window, if this new town would still exist?