Lost Without Maps on an All-Hallows Sea

The last post of October.

Feel that time has both stopped tonight, and also rushing forward to the inevitability of work tomorrow morning.
The evening feels still though, as if the manic forward momentum of the past year or so has temporarily been stilled. I'm not entirely sure why. Everything beyond tonight suddenly seems a long time ago, probably because the last few hours (spent reading blogs about comics) is the first time in a long time where I've not felt that pressure of doing something productive.
Can hear the first of fireworks out on the streets. Can't believe it's Hallowe'en night. Doesn't even feel remotely Hallowe'en-ish.
When I wake up tomorrow it will be November.
Waste time scattering these words before sleep as my cup of tea is still too hot to drink...

After I had sorted my room out, ready for the landlord and painter's visit tomorrow, I felt sorely tempted to go for a walk. It was about 9:00pm, and suddenly the thought of strolling along the Old Shoreham Road seemed immensely appealing. I don't know why. I was still quite weary from the walk I had with Em up along St James Street and the beach from earlier.

I hope I wake before it gets light, with the wind blowing outside, and feeling all comfortable and dreamy in bed, before falling back to sleep again.

A lone car passes by, a firework like a gunshot.
Night in Ciudad Huaraz.
Too cold here to pretend its there.

23:15

An aircraft.

A can of air freshener on the sideboard, where my television usually is.
The painting I did over summer looks ancient, a thing from years ago. One day it will be years old, unless it is destroyed first.

Footsteps, heading up the street.

I must remember my headphones are in my pot of paintbrushes.

This time last night, it would have been 20 minutes past midnight.

Last few mouthfuls of tea, still too hot, another firework-gunshot, and then a drifting into sleep, and when the first alarm call of November goes off it will still feel far, far too early.
It always does.

Samhain Night Melancholy

Things are shifted and strange now.
My room is odd. Because the ceiling is being painted tomorrow, I have had to move my furniture around to allow access. The bedsit has that strangely melancholy feeling of leaving. Also, the clocks were turned back by an hour today, so though it it a quarter to nine, it actually feels a quarter to ten. I also now have a bed. The bed is much more comfortable than the futon and I am pleased by it, but my bedsit feels new and unfamiliar.
It is also Hallowe'en night as well. A year ago today was the last night I spent living at the nightmare flat. I remember being woken from a dream I was having by the doorbell ringing. The dream was about something called a 'Mexican Moon'. This was some kind of lunar phenomena, involving the moon splitting into ghost-moons that circled the true moon, before rejoining again. I woke from this dream to the doorbell, and the events that would lead me to handing my notice in and moving in here at the end of last November. This sounds all like it was a dramatic night. It certainly was traumatic, but more in a dismal and depressing way than anything. I am glad I am out of there.
A Samhain night melancholy.
I don't know why.

Specific Hallowe'ens I Recall.

1982:
Ten years old. Out ghost hunting with Martin and Craig. Up in the small woods behind Burnside in Kinloss, Scotland. The sun just over the tips of the trees. Running away from the Burn because Craig had heard the sound of 'mutoids' in the water. Looking back along the path, and seeing Craig and Martin starting to run. running as well. Craig later informs us that the 'Mutoids', a family of monsters, has grown in number  since the last time he has encountered them.

1984:
Twelve years old. Trick or treating around Southside, Kinloss with John Kelly. Probably stay the night at his house before school the next day.

1986:
Fourteen years old. Had spent the week at Nan's house in Wolverhampton. Stay the night at my aunt and uncle's place in Cheltenham. Listening to the Friday Rock Show on the radio. Hear two tracks from Slayer's 'Reign in Blood' album for the first time.

1989:
Seventeen years old. At home in Ickenham alone. The doorbell rings. I ignore it thinking it may be trick or treaters. When I finally open the door I discover it is friends of mine.

1991:
Nineteen years old. An attempt at a 'haunted tour' of Hillingdon. I drive my parents car, accompanied by Edward. I remember we went to Court Park, and the cemetery near Abbotsfield. We end the 'Haunted Tour' on the field between Ickenham and Uxbridge. On the edge of a small pond. I tell Edward to take a few steps backwards. Edward steps into the shallow pond. Wet feet. Angry Edward.
(As an aside, there weren't actually any truly haunted places in Hillingdon, so we just ended up going to places that may have been vaguely creepy... but weren't).

1992:
Twenty years old. Watching 'Ghostwatch' on BBC1, and being quite terrified by it.

2000:
Twenty eeight years old. First Hallowe'en in Brighton. Get dressed up (well, wear white face paint) and end up in the Ocean Rooms. Gatecrashing a wedding party. Meet Valerie for the first time Not getting home until 5 am.

2005:
Thirty three years old. Working a late-shift at the petrol station. Watching the sunset tinged sky outside getting dark, and thinking 'this is Hallowe'en.

2007:
Thirty five years old. Going ghost hunting with Joe in Preston Manor churchyard. All is serene and peaceful. Lying on a tombstone, I give a fright to two passers-by, possibly ghost hunting as well. Rising up, all dressed in black, they look at me and run away.

2008:
Thirty six years old. End up with Claire in St Nicks Churchyard. I attempt to tell her ghost stories. We are both drunk.
Claire falls over a lot.

2009:
Thirty seven years old. I stay in and watch a programme on ghosts of the Isle of Skye. The programme is excellent and I draw as I watch. I feel quite contented. Later that night I am woken by the doorbell ringing at 4am. What followed were the events that propelled me to hand in my notice to leave.

There are other Hallowe'ens I remember, but because I cannot nail them down to a specific year, I have not allowed them an appearance here. I have not included the 'Shantell' (a song by And Also The Trees) incident of 1997, because though this occured datewise on the 31st October, it was actually the night of 30th October... if you see what I mean.

Helping Flood the Launderette

After I had finished my four hours at work this morning, I headed home, then went straight down the launderette. This was really the last place I wanted to be in the world, and really wanted to be drifting back into sleep on my bed...
The launderette is quite busy on a Saturday, but I was pleased to find a spare washer. I put my clothes in and had just settled back on my seat by the window to continue reading the book of true ghost stories I hadn't had time to read when I noticed that something was wrong.
I looked again.
There seemed to be quite a copious amount of water coming out of my washing machine. I jumped up and tried to close the door properly, to no avail. The water spread in a pool around my feet.
'I think there may be something wrong with the machine' I said to the woman behind the counter, who looked like she had wondered in from a 1960s episode of Coronation Street.
'You can't do anything now once its started. You've got your clothes stuck in the door'.
This did indeed seem to be the case. The water continued spreading about me. No-one else in the launderette seemed remotely concerned about this.
The woman bought out two towels, and I attempted vainly to mop up the spreading water.
'You can't do anything, it will just keep coming out'.
I looked at my book of true ghost stories on the side. I had been looking forward to reading that.
She bought out a mop. I tried to mop up the water.
The sock, or whatever it was that had become lodged in the machine had now disentangled itself. At least no more water was coming out. Strangely I was quite happy mopping up the water, and felt strangely sad when I had done all I could.
I returned the mop and sodden towels to their rightful place beside the counter, apologising to the woman once again for the 'lodged sock' incident.
'You won't be the first and you won't be the last' she said.
She spoke not only with the voice of experience, but the voice of precognition too.
I had finished reading one report (about a house haunted by the ghost of an unfriendly woman on the stairs) when I heard the rough tones of the launderette assistant again. I looked up to discover that the washing machine next to the one I was using was now disgorging a high volume of water in the sane way that mine had been.
'You've got your clothes stuck in the door!' the woman railed 'First him and now you!'
I felt quite tempted to point out to her how prescient her last words to me had been, that she had been right in ascertaining that I wouldn't indeed be the last person to leave a sock, or some other item of clothing, lodged in the door of the washer creating a miniatiure and entertaining flood.
I thought it would be best not to though, and resumed reading.

House of Bedsit Mysteries

There seems to be lots of mysterious activity in this House of Bedsits of late.
After the manically painting Polish man of late August / early September had finished his work (who I nearly knocked of his ladder coming out of my room one night), the next thing that occurred was the installation of the Creepy Green Lights.
I assume that this was to circumvent the problems caused by the timer switches, which always seemed to pulunge you into darkness when you were halfways up or down a flight of stairs. I imagine that the continual leaving-on-of-the-toilet-lights-at-night may also have been an influencing factor also. Though this quite annoyed me at first, I discovered that creeping along in a darkened landing in the small hours, still half asleep and fumbling for your own door was not an advisable or enjoyable reality.
The Creepy Green Lights are kept on all of the time. During the day you don't notice them. If the landing lights are on you don't notice them. If you leave the bedsit in the middle of the night you do. You are immediately plunged into a world of dim-green nightmare. Everything looks like it belongs to the interior of a nastily haunted house. Woe betide anyone who actually runs into anyone else when using the Creepy Green Lights as navigation, for then, previously normal people adopt the features of some childhood-nightmare come to life.
Or, with the Creepy Green Lights on, you can pretend that you are in some futuristic but decaying space-craft, creeping about endless corridors, hunting down malevolent extra-terrestrial forces.
What the Creepy Green Lights don't do is actually illuminate anything. Visibility is no better, really, than when everything was total darkness, except now you have the conviction that the house is in fact nastily haunted.
Other bedsit mysteries have made themselves apparent recently too, namely my landlord's strange obvsession with my furniture. 'Is the futon yours?' he asked me back in August when I last saw him. I told him that it came with the room. 'I do not remember it' he puzzled 'would you like a proper bed?'. I said I was fine with the futon because I did not want to give my landlord any trouble after him being quite okay with waiting two months for the rent whilst I was waiting for Housing Benefit over the summer. 'Is the sofa tours?'. I agreed with him on this point. I found the sofa on a fogbound night back in March. Shortly before seeing the Swans on Wednesday night I heard from him too. After having a yearly inspection, he discovered that my ceiling was in a 'very bad state' and was going to hire someone, possibly the manically-painting Polish man, to re-paint it. I talked to the landlord today too, organising when the painter was going to come around. 'I have never had a ceiling look like that before. It is a mystery'. A mystery indeed, this curious brown stain in the corner of my room. It grew over a couple of days and then stopped. Some water leakage possibly. I do not know. 'Is the furon yours?' he asked again. 'No, no, it came with the room,' I reassured him again. 'That is strange. Perhaps somebody left it'. There was a silence. 'Would you like a bed instead? It will take up much less room.' I said I would very much like a bed, which seemed to please my kindly landlord.
The last mystery of the bedsit is a note I found pushed under my door a couple of days ago. 'If you have my clothes airer please bring it back upstairs as I need to use it!! No:14'. I imagine that this same note was pushed under all the doors in this house of bedsits as I also found a couple of these notes where the post usually sits in the hallway.
The note brings up a number of questions. Why was the said airer not kept in the bedsit itself (well I can see why the bedsits, or my bedsit anyway, is very small) and where was it kept? I have not seen any airers on the ground, first or second floors of this building. Why does the mysterious no:14 think that people from the ground, first and second floors would creep up to the higher floors in search of airers that would happen to be left randomly about?
The number in no:14 refers, presumably to the bedsit number. There are 3 bedsits per floor, and I am on the second floor, so if my calculations are right, then there would be 3 bedsits on the floor above me (10,11 and 12) which would mean that no:14 would be on an ever higher floor, possibly an attic level, shared with no 13 and maybe even a no 15.
What would it be like on these mysterious upper floors? Why have I not thought about them before, just looked at the door that leads up the third floor and thought nothing of it? What might be up there?
Perhaps the greatest mystery to the note is that he or she does not give her name, but refers to themselves as the number of the flat they live in. I imagine going up there and knocking on their door; 'hello no:14, I am no:7, I have come about the mystery of the airer'.
I would not be able to offer any solution to the mystery though, but really, I am afraid that if there is any sighting -let alone conversation- between anyone who lives in this house of bedsits, the universe may well very end.
If everyone else thinks the same, I think the airer may well be lost forever.
Sorry no: 14.

Swans and Concordes; Brighton Light from the Mouth of Infinity

Saw the Swans last night at Concorde 2. Remember when I first heard them, on the 'White Light from the Mouth of Infinity' album over the summer of 1991. I had bought the album on cassette from Our Price while on a lunch break from my Saturday job at W.H.Smiths. The Our Price in Uxbridge was often an unexpected haven for obscure albums that should never have been there. At least in the late 1980s / early 1990s. I would regularly find artists such as Samhain, Diamanda Galas, Cowboy Killers, Broken Bones, Playground, Die Kreuzen there... Ah, back in the days of cassette tapes and vinyl...
Anyhow.
The various members of the Swans all looked hard as nails. Must all be in their forties and fifties now. Main man Michael Gira like some crazed southern American gentleman from the last century who had spent too long in the desert. Found God through Peyote and snake-venom... Immaculately dressed, deep-drawl of a voice;  'turn the lights up on the audience, I want to see their faces...'. The keyboard and bass player both looked extras from some brutal Southern-Gothic fever dream. Mexican / American border hell-lands via some lawless prison, soaked in the occult and drug deals gone bad, mission towns, murder, isolation, and moons too large in too-long night skies.
It was an intense performance.

Morning Drift

A  rainy blustery morning, another later shift, then straight to the Concorde to watch the reformed Swans. A busy day awaits me, accompanied no doubt by the rain, and the knowledge of that early darkness, the last few days of British Summer Time...
I had the week off this time last year. On the Monday I took a walk with Joe up to the other side of the Marina, had roast chicken from the Asda at the Marina. A year ago today I took a walk to Preston Manor, and wrote bad poems in a notebook. I took a photograph in the gardens there. When I looked at the photograph later on, there was a figure through the archway I don't remember being there when I took the photograph.
On the Thursday of that week, Joe and myself took a long walk through the countryside around Stanmer, the last of the warm days that year if I remember rightly. On the Friday I met Sarah for a coffee, bought a French zombie film 'The Grapes of Death' (people were turned into zombies by drinking wine made from grapes treated with a new pesticide) and an album by a band I had never heard of before; 'Faun Fables'. I remember sitting on the beach feeling a strange sense of euphoria.
I stayed in on that Saturday night, Hallowe'en, and watched a programme on the ghosts of Skye, and worked on some artwork. Following the nightmarish events of later that night I handed in my notice the following day and spent the month sleeping on Andy's sofa. At the end of that month, shortly before moving in here, I started 'Tales from Bridge 39'.
I had three pints at the pub with Jo last night. I feel their heaviness in my head, and may well have to requisition some paracetemol on the way to work... Gone are the days of going clubbing then going straight to work three hours later.
45 minutes till I leave for work. Enough time for a cup of tea.

For the Last Twenty Years

The call centre becomes a tower as darkness falls. The roofs of Brighton below adopt a more sinister and beguiling aspect. Instead of the sea seen between the buildings there is now only a black void rumouring tides.
I think of the waves crashing on the pebbles, the silent merry-go-round, the empty space where the bookstall was over summer.

I didn't have to be in work until 11:00am this morning, so spent my few extra morning hours drawing and watching 'Jeremy Kyle' on the television, the latter an echo from the unemployed summer where I would wake every day especially for it.
The grey morning gave way to a rainy afternoon. Soaked walking home, the rain on my glasses fracturing everything into imperfect diamonds, a deep-autumn blindness. A void like the sea.

As I walked back home, I started thinking about the autumn of 1990. How could this be two decades ago? I was eighteen back then, a fifth of a decade, but it doesn't seem that far back. I thought back to what I was doing then -at Uxbridge College studying for my art A-level, buying Star Trek on VHS video and drawing unfinished horror comic illustrations. I had my i-pod on random, and as I thought of that far back autumn, the song 'All I Wanted' by the band Leatherface came on. I had bought the album back then over that autumn, buying it again on cd two and a bit years ago (I had bought the original on vinyl from the Our Price on Uxbridge High Street).
The chorus jarred me 'for the last twenty years, the same old song...'
A coincidence obviously, but it left me with a vague undefinable quiet.

I think of London Road in Worcester, of being there on Friday evening with Emily just before twilight. The four terraced houses contained the house I once lived in, 136. The four houses, in my memory, seem situated on top of a small hill, and there is a red sun hanging behind them. Blood-glimpses through the undressing trees, the air tasting of leaves and fire and a certain kind of sleep.
London Road is still there now, across miles of dark countryside and unnamed towns, a ghost-machine still operating on the fringes of my awareness.
The smell of fire-smoke, the Esso garage I used to work at, the Seacrest fish'n'chips bar, the Sebright Pub, 'Odds and Sods', the junk shop that opened up there when I lived there.
The dark waters of the canal, the brooding currents of the Severn drifting through that unmapped countryside beyond the Diglis Weir...

A draught blows under my door, car horns on the street outside, that curious silence that rain brings. Time trips on, stumbling into November, and Christmas, then into the new year, the dark January geography, the grey fields of February.
Bright and yellow spring, fresh and unexpected as always.

Life passes by so quickly, I wish I could pause time, so certain afternoons could last forever, and there would always be enough time to sleep and daydream.

This Cold Nocturnal Drifting

I won't leave work now until it is light next spring. A week of later shifts and the turning back of the clock next Sunday propels these evenings into darkness.

It was strange watching it get dark from the fourth floor of the call centre. A bright and cold day gave way to a softened sunset, all pink and purple hues. After the sun had gone, these hues turned darker; purples and violets, till finally everything was black outside apart from the street lamps and the lights from inside of buildings.
Roofs were angles of darkness, the hidden corners of chimneys and the now-invisible sea creeping on the edge of my consciousness.
The lift down to the ground floor in silence. The doors seemed to breathe when they opened.

Walking back was cold. I stopped to ring Emily from the phone box at the top of my road, the street lamps through the distorted glass fracturing and warping. The road curving up by St Anne's Well Park, a summer place, now abandoned in deep autumn.

Cold in the bedsit tonight too, though I have my window open, so I only have myself to blame. The cold is strangely pleasant. It feels like stars and deep rivers, and the cars that pass by on the roads are the sound of the hulls of great ships cutting through these icy waters.
Rumours of frost, implications of winter hovering what must be only a few degrees above zero.

I remember Emily in the twilight of Diglis Weir, in that strange night that rose from the river Severn and the hidden places of wastegrounds, and that path winding into the woods where I last walked in the autumn of 1998.
Another path lined by trees and lamps, darkness pushing in from the unseen fields on either side, kept safely behind wire fences.

There is a stillness here as we approach midnight, a suspension of everything. A satellite in a decaying orbit around a planet of sleep.
Falling to sleep, I'll sink through stars in winter nights, hanging in their harsh and immutable dominion like crow-gods in some disordered and forgotten mythology.

There are footsteps on the streets outside. Their clockwork rhythm suddenly fades.

First of the Shifted Mornings

Shifted by an hour, a week of later shifts have now started. Today I begin work at 10:00am, and for the rest of the week at 11:00am. I finish at 7:00pm all week. With the clocks going back this weekend, on Hallowe'en, this means that it will not be until next year that I shall leave work whilst it is light.
We are deep in autumn now. Those feverish days of summer are all but forgotten. Already, Christmas adverts have begun to appear in shop and restaurant windows, aome kind of light to guide us through the welcome bleak days of November.
A night of strange dreams last night; watching a Star Trek episode that never existed. In a garden of a twilight house, thankful I had access to a small clump of trees. A two headed bull comes up to the fence and smiles at me. Returning to my room and discovering it had changed, my initial alarm evaporating when I realised that it was me who had changed things around but had forgotten.
The sunlight is up against the curtains. The House of Bedsits is quiet, and the penultimate phase of the year has now begun.

Photographs from an Inland Twilight; Worcester in October

Train-Rides through Twilight and the Strange Melancholy of Return

Something quite enthralling and strange about travelling by train in deep autumn; leaving in the bright sun of early afternoon, and arriving just after nightfall. That strange melancholy of returning from a weekend away, particularly when you have work tomorrow.
Watching the landscape change from the haunting countryside of the midlands, meadows and fields, lost little towns wondering what it would be like to live here. The sun sinking as the accents change, the train curving into London, and all the buildings tight with little mysteries and labyrinthine geographies.
Watching the sun set as the train heads deeper south, through Sussex, then finally back in Brighton in almost full darkness. Breathing in the too familiar air of Brighton again with all the kebab shops and post-Saturday night miasma. Walking up the hill to St Nicholas Churchyard, under the beige street lamps.
Far from Worcester now.
I miss that city.
Walking around Diglis last night with Em, twilight creeping up like autumn at the end of summer. The quiet waters of the Severn and the canal. An army of trees and tangled forgotten wastelands, and the chimes of the cathedral bell rolling out through the air.
I suppose Worcester will always be unresolved -not necessarily a bad thing- I don't even know the nature of the enigma the city presents to me, let alone be able to solve its puzzle.
On the first night there, walking with Em up London Road, back to Lark Hill Service Station where I worked from 1998 - 1999. Sat in the church grounds opposite 136 where I used to live, and the sky all red and deep with a slight sunset.
Seems so long since I lived here. No ghosts left now, but there is still a haunting. I'm not sure if it is me haunting the city or the city haunting me.
The shadows seem deep and hypnotic in that place, the rain split by bridges seemed old and full of dreams.
Walking through old songs and feeling far far from the sea, and strangely at home.
I wish I was there now.

A Morning in a City I Once Lived in

Sunday morning. The cathedral bells are quiet now. An hour or so ago, their chimes cutting through the October sun. One of those wet and bright Worcester days. A breakfast of toast and orange juice. A day of train travelling awaits me. The miasma of station changes, and very little times to change trains hangs over me. Also have to navigate my way from Birmingham New Street to Moor Street. Really must look this up on Google Maps, but know that by the time I reach New Street I will have forgotten the hastily memorised directions.
Joe B plays guitar downstairs, House of the Rising Sun', and a car door slams outside. There is the sound of voices on the street, a car driving away. Joe B comes into the room, we talk about directions and taking Eva for a walk.
The condensation on the windowpanes fractures and softens the outside.
I once lived in this city. It feels a long time ago now.

Splinters from the Worcester Small Hours

Red wine and beer. Obscure German hardcore punk cds from the 1980s. Diglis Weir. A new bridge over the Severn. Amexica. A Pre-Raphaelite print hanging in Joe B's dining room. Eva the dog chewing a giant bone. A huge moon hanging over Worcester. A back street lit by four orange lamps. Rain. An old comic from 1960. Joe B playing music from downstairs. Some old punk poet, now dead I think. The Cardinals Hat. Watching night come down from the riverside.

(it seems to rise up from the ground, the earth generates this darkness)

The Eve of Another Return to Worcester

A gathering of police on the street outside. In the freshly fallen night, they are black figures, illumined only by the lights of tiny torches they carry. Across the street, people hang from their windows, necks craning to view the drama.
It all started about an hour ago. Some kind of argument between two men. One of them wanted his 'wallet back' and was very angry about this. There was lots of pushing and shoving between the two men. Standing by the railings of the house where one of them lived, another man. He neither said anything or got involved, but seemed to regard the events with a calm equanimity.
The pushing and shoving erupted into a haphazard violence. The two men circled each other, trading punches. One of them walked back into his house. The other man continued shouting about his wallet. He took out his phone and called somebody. His brother from what I could make out.
By this time I had grown bored of the proceedings, and shut my curtains and resumed eating dinner, fish'n'chips that I had bought on the way home from meeting Pam after work. After a while, there was more shouting again. I think the 'wallet man', even more cross that his wallet had not been forthcoming, was now being cross with members of the public.
I imagine that these members of the public were quite cross themselves, and it would not be beyond imagining to postulate the theory that one of them called the police, who turned up shortly after I had finished my fish'n'chips.

That strange eve before going away again. Packing my stuff for the weekend back in Worcester. There is a strangeness in the air, caused not in part by the sudden drop of temperature of late. It feels more like December than October, but I am quite often time-elapsed that way. Seasons and times feel somehow stronger in the season or time that immediately precedes them. Because I am returning to Worcester tomorrow, I have convinced myself that this feels like the cold of the December of 1997, thirteen years ago.

Well, I suppose I should finish 'packing'. Must remember to look up the address for 'Nostalgia and Comics' in Birmingham. Ever since my interest in old horror comics was re-awakened five years ago (after a dream I had about a horror comic that never existed) I have always veered on the edges of buying an old 1950s original pre-code horror comic... but real life gets in the way, and they aren't cheap, and there is rent to pay and bills, and the council tax, but I have heard there is a large back issue section there now. So maybe, just maybe... And if not there is always the comic mart in a couple of weeks time.
Goodness me. I'm less than a year and a half away from turning 40 and still buying comics?
Ah well...

The dream I had that triggered it all off again. I don't remember anything of the dream but a single image. The image was the cover of a horror comic called 'Forbidden Mysteries'. The logo was in yellow, each letter of the title 'shivering' in that peculiarly pleasing naive way that old horror comics of the 1950s are wont to do.
I realise that that last sentence was probably the clumsiest I have written in quite a while, and that really is saying something, so I apologise. I seem to have lost grasp of the English language tonight. Anyhow, the cover of the comic 'Forbidden Mysteries' showed an illustration of a man fishing from the edge of a pier at night. He was sat on some old boxes under the light of a single street lamp. Hunched over, his face and form was obscured. A horror-comic moon, white and bloated lay reflected in the water.
Somehow this one image captured all the mystery and obscurity of old horror comics. I can't explain why though. I've tried painting the image on countless occasions, and drawn it even more frequently, but nothing seems to quite capture that eeriness of the original illustration.

Anyhow, the evening draws on, and I have things to do.
I can't think what though.

8:13am, Half an Hour after Waking up

I sit in the bedsit, in the gloom of still-closed curtains with no light switched on. The cold of early mornings. I sleep with my window closed now. The ensuing muting of the outside world makes this bedsit seem a remote place - one situated in a building down an obscure street, rather than in the centre of town. The sound of the traffic is so muted as to seem almost consolatory.
The seagulls. I can hear the seagulls though. This morning there was the contented sound of a pigeon. the cooing sounded like it came from inside one of the walls. I imagine there may be a nest somewhere but I can't think where.
I can't believe how much the temperature has dropped! There are echoes of last winter everwhere. When I enter this house of bedsits after work, I imagine the inside realigning itself to what it was back then. The air tastes the same. The light falls the same.
Not even a year since I moved in - I moved in in December and it is not yet the end of October.
Time-lapsed, I seek solace instead in a barely started cup of tea before my too-short walk to work.

Exhaustion

Deep in autumn now. The air is actually cold and chilly. I sat out at the Pavilion Gardens today with a coffee, few remaikning green tables huddled in the sun. Had to pull my coat tighter round myself as it was too cold.
Too cold.
The luxury of those words.
A bright and clear day though. The sun has shone all day, and now, across the strreet, the last of the day is sunset-red, creeping over chimneys and windows.
Not a cloud in the behind the chimneys.
A cold, clear night coming.

Utterly exhausted today. I don't know why. I kept waking up throughout the night though. Too many coffees during the day no doubt. I remember vague, panicky thoughts about growing older and doing nothing, interspersed with falling-to-sleep images of paintings and drawings.
Sometimes sleep is more exhausting than waking.

Can barely even type properly tonight, let alone think of something even vaguely intelligible to write. My eyes feel as if they have been open too long, a hot-desert feeling. I hear the sound of footsteps on the landing.
Twilight is gathering in my room.
Down on the streets, the sound of children chanting something.

A return to Worcester this weeked, going up on friday with Em and returning on Sunday.
Worcester in October.
I hope this trip to Worcester will prove less tumultuous than my previous trip in May, where on my first morning there, I found out I was made redundant. Goodness. Five months ago.
Time is going by far too quickly.

I'm going to have to try and drag my concentration back to wakefulness, and resist the urge for sleep. After all, 'The Apprentice' is on in a couple of hours.

The Land Beyond the Tracks

I left Andy's house about 9:30pm, crossed the footbridge at Hove Station and into those lands beyond the tracks. The petrol station I spent five years working in is here, and the lost paradise of the flat at Wilbury Crescent of course. A dark and secret suburbia. You feel far from the sea here, and it shouldn't feel quite as dream-like and hypnotic as it does.
Maybe its because I associate these streets with night-time - from walking to and from the petrol station either early in the morning or late at night, from stumbling back drunk to Wilbury Crescent in the small hours. Even those twilight walks to Tescos / petrol station up Dyke Road (not the one I worked in). Everything about here is night and secrecy and forgotten places, far from Brighton's sometimes quite juvenile need for attention.
It is best to walk at night here then, particularly in the autumn and winter of a year.

I cut through the small industrial estate that led up to the petrol station, noticing with my usual disappointment the 'Furniture Warehouse' that stands at the back of the station. For most of the time when I worked here it was a waste ground. When I walked back late at night, I would always cast a sideways glance in. There was a chair half lost amongst the grasses and the weeds, looking like it had only been recently vacated. I used to call this place the 'Glowering Wasteland', though why I can't remember now.
I moved onto the Old Shoreham Road, to my left the yellow light of the petrol station, obscured by the 'Oddbins Off Licence'. I wondered if Mike was still working there.
I headed right, along the Old Shoreham Road up to Seven Dials.
I was always fond of walking the Old Shoreham Road at night. The houses here are set back from the road behind walks, hidden behind bushes. Large houses, though not old. The houses of slightly well-off people. The houses are too new really to be of any real architectural interest. Just your typical suburban houses, swathed in shadows, and their back gardens hidden shut gates and bushes.
Across the other side of the Old Shoreham Road is far more interesting. A stone wall keeps in what seems to be a tangled overgrown cluster of trees. The grounds of a Catholic school. I remember over the late summer and early autumn of 2006, there was a plastic bag caught amongst the branches of the trees. I first noticed it in those black and lightless hours of 6am early mornings. Drawing nearer this walled off wood, and noticing this whiteness hanging from the branches. In the silence and the cold, it was all too easy to imagine this plastic bag as some kind of mask. A gaping malevolence, skull-like features, that blank and fascinating Halloween like gaze. As I walked by, I imagined this accidental mask watching me, and when I was doing the late shift at the petrol station, I would remember the mask, imagine it waiting for me in the dark.
Over a period of months, the plastic bag lost its mask like qualities, and just became a piece of litter caught amongst the branches. At some point over the winter of 2006 / 2007, the plastic bag vanished.
After the walled in wood, there is one of those always intriguing electricity sub-stations, festooned with the usual 'danger of death' signs. One time there was some work being done here, and new signs warned of 'deep excavations'. I imagined Victorian archaeologists lost in some kind of electricity-sewer system below the road, investigating the depths of some labyrinthine pre-human Shoreham tomb.
After the substation there is Hove Recreation ground. The Rec. The Wreck. Large and empty, I have never set foot onto it. It seems a place as dreary and as strangely entrancing as Hove Lagoon. Reminds me of Sundays in provincial towns where there is no sea, and the skies are grey and drizzly, but there is some recompense in the dreaming stillness of such places.
It is dark too along the Old Shoreham Road at night. maybe the street lamps are placed further apart, but as soon as you turn into Seven Dials, the difference in light always strikes me, all bright and clinical and scouring. An exaggeration of course, but I always prefer that secret darkness down the Old Shoreham Road.
It took me about an hour altogether. I remember thinking as I fell asleep that I miss the regular walks back along that road after nightfall, in that land that lies beyond the tracks.

The October Sea

The ship is drifting deep here.
Black waters thick as oil, and the tides are sluggish with a honey-like exhaustion.
Above us, the stars, and this voyage is dictated by their bright cold navigation.
New constellations watch us.
There are serpents below.

Back to the Early Morning Missives

7:55am, and thanks to the magic of 'ctrl and F11' I now have the internet at home again.
This did, of course, mean that I lost everything on the laptop when I restored it to 'as it was bought', but, aside from some photographs, and an abortive attempt at a dream diary back in January, it was not too much of a loss.
Well, not a loss at all actually, as I couldn't get the laptop to work at all, and was confronted with a blue screen every time I turned it on.
My experiments with internet cafes soon lost their novelty. Crammed in with (mostly) foreign students, there was always a sense of it being very un-private. Still, the cafe around the corner from me was excellent though. When I left my bag there one night they kept it for me until I returned the next day. They are obviously used to this for there was a cardboard box marked 'lost property' in the corner.
Having the internet at home means I can make quick posts in here - five and ten minute fragments. Oddly enough there didn't seem to be enough time to do this in the various cafes I used. I can now write first thing in the morning again, and late at night, times when I am actually inspired to do so, which never seemed to be when I was passing internet cafes.
And of course, it means that I can type without having to go back and edit every damn word like I had to with the old laptop that didn't pick up all my key-strokes!

8:02am now.
An hour since I woke from a dream that is already fading. Anyway, in the dream I found myself outside a music venue. It may have been the Concorde 2 on the seafront, though bore no resemblance to it at all. There were a number of people queuing wearing leather jackets painted with black metal logos. There was the sound of music coming from inside. This looked quite good, and I decided to join them in the queue. There were a couple of people in front of me whom I vaguely recognised but couldn't think from where. Should I say hello? Maybe not. I couldn't remember where I knew them from. I had a feeling that Andy was inside. I thought of what it might be like if I went to this gig on my own. A few pints and a mosh pit - I would have to stay awat from the front of the stage if I wanted peace. It seemed to be taking us a long time to get inside, and why were we waiting if there was music playing anyway? I looked up, and discovered the queue had gone. The next thing I remember I was in the reception area, drawing with pencil on a canvas. A jaw of some great shark-like creature. I tried to erase the drawing, so the lines would fade, ready for painting, but they would not fade. Ugly thick pencil marks. Then I heard music. I had forgotten there was a gig!
The music was my alarm.
I woke up.

Snow on an October Afternoon

The long straight track, the utter stillness of the air -no breeze, no movement- and silence. No birdsong even. Nothing. Just this track through the Sussex Downs. Above, the sky, blue and cold, and the sea in the distance still as a photograph.
The white track we walked upon. Chalk-dusty and straight. Talking about ley-lines and black dogs. 'Wish hounds'  they're known as in Sussex Folklore. Get the map out. Crouch down in the autumn. See if we're walking a leyline - whatever they are - no-one actually knows even if they exist.
A celtic equation. Use a long piece of grass as a ruler, measure a line from tumulus to barrow, through old church and hilltop. Can't remember how many points there are supposed to be to make a ley. Anyway. Three points in around half a mile.
The long straight track.
A ley line for Sunday.

It was like walking through an equation, as if a perfect piece of mathematics had expressed itself as a landscape. Rolling hills, the distant sea, the ceaseless tone of the sky. Everything so still.
Bits of memory ragged and caught on the air. Sheep-wool round barbed wire. Look to my right to a nestling of houses, across barbed and thorny field. Tangle-wild trees, stunted in the hill-top air. This looked familiar. That curious kind of deja-vu that gives you half-memories of times you've never known - or half-memories of dreams you have.

Deeper into the country and the track, now running along a ridge began to curve. Everything began to seem quite surreal, almost dream-like. The quality of the light. October clarity. 'That valley looks old' Em observed. She was right. I had been thinking much the same. The valley to our left did look old. The clump of trees now in shadow. Even the new building, still held up by scaffolding, looked old.
On the slope of the hill across the other side of the valley, sheep grazed in the last few hours of sunlight, gold like apples fallen in this silver season.
Where were the wasps, I wondered, don't they hover round fallen apples on October days.
No-one here.
This ley line for sunday.
Still.

By the time we reached Rottingdean, the spell had passed, and we were back in Sunday again. The bus ride along the coast was pleasant and exhausted. When we got off the bus, opposite Churchill Square shopping centre, there was, inexplicably, a pile of snow by the newsagent.
I prodded it with my foot.
It was definetly a pile of snow.
On a pavement on a bright October day.
I don't want to think about it too hard and find a rational explanation which there undoubtedly is.
I wonder if its melted yet.

The Echo of a Childhood Sixty Years Old

Wednesday lunchtime, but it has felt all day like Tuesday. Tuesday has a strange taste about it, like crunchy summer cereal, a field of wheat, or corn, and an impossibly blue sky behind.
Wednesday tastes of rain and gloom. Not necessarily a bad thing. Wednesday is a day spent inside a ground floor room with inadequate lighting, while a heavy Scottish rain falls down outside. From the tiny window grey changeless skies are only interrupted by the branches of one winter-dead tree, branches tapping at the glass. Wednesday tastes of heavy afternoon sleep and the dreams such afternoons inevitably bring (of stairways in cupboards, and songs of remote landings in labyrinthine farmhouses, and clusters of woods, unreachable in the centres of fenced off fields).

Well, I say Wednesday lunchtime, but it is really mid afternoon - nearly 3:00pm. Time is all deranged today.
3:00pm.
A pool in a wood, like something out of January, but a bright and warm January day though.

Flipping back time with the painting I started two days ago too. A reproduction of the cover of a 1950s horror comic 'Worlds of Fear' that I bought from a comic mart seventeen years ago. As I paint, I am taken back into my own past, of poring over printed reproductions of horror comics in magazines and childhood books. Ten years old, and here I am, nearly thirty years later, as fascinated by the arcana of old horror comics as I ever was.
I become absorbed in the painting, and as I try to reproduce this cover, there are echoes of other childhoods, childhoods older than mine, American childhoods. Shadows of  World War 2 and Pearl Harbour, the Korean War, atom age ghosts.
After all, who did once own the comic I am using as Source material? Who was the original owner of 'Worlds of Fear' - number 5 I think. As I smell the attic-ancient pages, I wonder over its journey, from America to here. Must have been bought at some American newsagent, but where, a city, the countryside, -what state did this journey begin with?
Where was it first read, before the pages yellowed, before the colours faded, where it was all new and fresh and exciting?
Coming up for sixty years old now.
Sixty years old.
The very words seem to disorientate time even further.
If the child who originally owned the comic is still alive, he would be an old man now, in his early seventies.
This thought creases my mind.
We age, live, love, fade and die, but as I paint late into the night of my bedsit, only horror comics survive.

Lost in the Woods

Of course I spurned the idea of a map, being somehow convinced that 'if we got lost it would be an adventure' and also that I had some kind of 'innate-woodland radar', which would forestall any 'getting lost' type of incident. Em and myself set off into the wood with light hearts. I had been here before of course. How could we possibly get lost?
I had, of course, forgot that Friston Forest is actually quite large, and though I had been there before, on both previous occasions had also got lost.
Still, everything started off well, half familiar places passed by; pools, the houses on the edge of the forest... After a short while travelling I only had a vague sense of direction of what way the entrance we had used was. No matter, I thought - what's this through the trees?
What was through the trees - well, in the middle of the trees - was some kind of building, surrounded by a fence. A large single storey building, surrounded by other smaller hut-type edifices. The place was surrounded by fences. It seemed abandoned. What was it? Was someone living here?
It seemed to be owned by 'Southern Water' and a signpost named it as 'Friston Pumping Station'. Ah, this was exciting. There were numerous manholes dotted about this now exciting fenced off area. Strange showerheads rising from the ground. Warnings of 'phosphoric acid 75%', whatever this meant, were bolted to locked doors..
I sat down on a raised concrete rectangle (containing another manhole) outside this edifice. It reminded me of 'It' by Stephen King, and I spent a happy cigarette or two thinking about the book, and also about how really excited I would be if I were a kid, and we fround this in the middle of the woods. Actually, it all reminded me of some of the buildings at RAF Kinloss, where my dad worked during our time spent in Scotland; nissan huts, sheds - mysterious edifices whose purpose lay concealed. We would have convinced ourselves certainly that this 'pumping station' was haunted. Maybe I could do so now?
Actually, it was relatively easy. Was that a figure watching me from inside the building? Didn't the air feel charged with something... watchful?
Roused from this reverie by Em, we headed off into the wood, and somehow ended up walking in a circle, back to the pumping station again. We then headed down another path - one we had definitely not chosen before - and ended up walking past houses that were different from those we had passed on the way into the forest.. We eventually came to a road - a narrow lane busy with rushing traffic. Unfortunately we had no way of knowing what direction the sea lay in. It was about 3:30pm. As we doubtfully headed back into the woods, nightmare images appealed to me of having to phone work the next day and tell them that I would not be able to make it in because I was lost in Friston Forest.
A short discussion followed on whether we should follow the signpost in the woods to 'Westdene'. What was Westdene though? Wasn't that in the opposite direction? Despite being convinced that Westdene was an error, I really had no idea of where I was. Neither had Em. The sun sinking across the sky, and achieving a slightly reddened 'sunset' type of colour did nothing to put my mind at rest.
We headed toward Westdene. To my delight we came across a sign saying 'Seven Sisters Country park 1/2 hour'. We were saved! I was feeling jaunty and cheerful again. 
As we walked back, em asked me if I had been panicking. I took a deep breath and prepared to lie, but then thought better of it.
'Panicking? Of course I was - I thought we'd never find our way out!'
I paused.
'Were you panicking?' I asked
'No, of course not. I knew we'd get back sooner or later.'
Hmm, I thought.
I soberly promised myself that next time I entered a wood I would bring a map with me.

Craving to Sleep without Guilt

Another lunchtinme, another postcard from another internet cafe. Up in one by Brighton Statiion now. Some cellar type environment. The humming of fluorescent lights and ventilation lead me to imagine that this may be in some strange Mexico, a refugee from Bolano's masterpiece '2166'.
A morning of complex calls at work, and between those calls, looking out of the window at the building in the near-distance whose location in real-life I cannot place. I think about old horror comics and old places I have lived. A strange nostalgia for the suburbia of Ickenham this morning. Grey and rainy days, and all those shadows and pools gathering down unremarkable streets. Miles and miles of houses. A carnivorous anonymity.
Slept deeply last night and woke up this morning exhausted. Was convinced that I would niot feel awake for the rest of the day, but, as usual, after a shower, felt quite awake again.
Glimpses of the sea on my way to work. The continual rain of recent days finally lifted.
An old man sits next to me in the internet cafe, and upstairs, the Polish man behind the counter argues loudly on the phone with someone. The voices of foreign students.
I would like to sleep without guilt. I mean, really sleep. Go to sleep, and not set the alarm, and not feel I have to get up, just sleep and sleep and sleep, all day if I needed to, and not feel guilty about it at all. What time would I wake? What dreams would I have?
No notable dreams of late. Well, only one. I was with the three other people from my training group. We were all living in the same house which was haunted. trying to keep the doors and windows shut because the hauntings tried to get in from the outside. Invisible malevolent forces, taking the form of street light and wind.
A bang upstairs in the internet cafe newsagent.
The Polish man tells the old man there is a printer upstairs; '10p a sheet. It is upstairs'.

A Bell Chiming in the Distance

Seems so high up in the fourth floor of the call centre, an astral building, a tower looking down on Brighton, almost from the clouds.
It rained most of the day today, only clearing up when I left work not yet an hour ago. The kind of day that always seems to about to descend into twilight. Grey, heavy clouds, unbroken by change or glimpse of sun or sky.
Looking out of the window, I could see one light left on somewhere _I can't remember where now- and it put me in mind of being back at school, on days as similarly dreary as this one. Headaches used to always threaten those days. the lowness of the clouds bringing an odd pressure into the interior om skull.
Grey drizzly weather always seems to be accompanied by a sound, or at least an imagined sound, and that is of a huge bell chiming somewhere in the distance. A low almost unheard frequency, it seems to steal concentration, sends my mind over dream-like, imagined landscapes; scrubby fields, dead meadows, through bare tree, boughs click-clacking together like bones.
The low wind, the vastness of the closing skies.

(and school. Back at Abbeylands Primary School in Kinloss. Maths, or some other lesson that I could never get. Yellow fluorescent lights humming, and the silence that hangs over an absorbing, difficult, yet boring task. Outside so dark, the reflection of hundreds of schoolkids, ghosts in the drizzle. Beyond the playground, and the playing fields, beyond the farmers fields to that solitary clump of trees by the railway line. Always taken there. The chiming of the bell. The call of a distance cloaked in sleep and headaches and heaviness)

A quick walk to the council tax payments office at London Road. 'Closed for Lunch. Open at 1:45.' Not helpful to me as I had to be back at work by then. Back through London road. Clusters of people and umbrellas at bus-stops, the charity shops full of pensioners and books without interest.

The chiming of the distance is stilled now. The air outside has lightened, twilight still an hour away.
Longer than an hour away, the length of a country away, I think of that wood, that solitary clump of trees by the railway line from Forres to Inverness and wonder if there is a bell chiming there.

A Night-Walk Under the Lantern Constellation

Walked Em to work last night, the first hour after nightfall. Went for a wonder when I had left her. A light rain, but the breeze had died down. everything orange and black. Sudden glimpses of how deep autumn can be.
Slipped from Cromwell to those streets over the other side of the railway line. A sudden falling of quietness. Far from the noise of the city, suburban-gothic geography, all knee high walls and curtains drawn against the road. Passed the abandoned house that always used to fascinate me so much. A death-house for those years I spent living in the flat on Wilbury crescent. Now being renovated, scaffolding covering the once decaying works, looking all shiny and new and not frightening.
A sharp turn to the right. To my left, down an embankment, the railway line, and to my right, more houses. The overhanging branches of the trees always seemed to create pockets of deeper shadow here. The solitary street lamp seemed muted (I suddenly realise that I describe quite a lot of things as being 'muted') and I remembered walking this way in the early morning when I worked at the petrol station. Often the street lamp - and the one at the entrance to the alleyway over the railway line was not working. A road of dead lamps. A pool of thick night.
Back in those black early mornings of winter at the petrol station, when, half-asleep and exhausted, I would cross the alleyway over the railway tracks, I would imagine a huge black dog to be waiting for me. Black Shuck country. They're said to haunt these liminal places, boundaries between one place and the next; rivers, hedges, green lanes, bridges... I paused and looked down the lines; one way past our old garden at Wilbury Crescent, and the other where the tracks disappeared under the bridge across the Old Shoreham Road. A red light shining as always. Red for danger.
In the newsagent in Scotland (the V.G as it was called) there used to be a small book section upstairs. Back when I was, -what, seven or eight-, there was a book whose jacket fascinated me. It was called 'Red for Danger' and showed a railway line disappearing into a night-time forest. Deep in the depths of the forest a red light shone out. My seven or eight year old self was mystified and fascinated. What kind of book was this? I knew I was too young for it, and never saw the book again... When I was 19, I began thinking about this fascinating cover again. I began using the image of the red light shining in a forest in some song lyrics, wondering over the book, this childhood ghost and what it was about. Over the course of the next week I came across two different copies of the book in charity shops with two different covers. Strange serendipities. For some reason I didn't buy the book until years later when I was at Worcester studying (ostensibly) for my dissertation. I came across a copy of the book in the market hall at Worcester. This time I had to buy it. A book of railway disasters, oddly enough, by an author (L.T.C.Rolt) whose ghost stories I was studying for my dissertation.
Passed by the old flat at Wilbury Crescent. All black with no lights on, and those echoes of silence... but no memories; it feels I never lived there. Every time I pass the flat I have never seen lights on. Always empty. Maybe we were the last residents.
I looped back onto Cromwell Road, and walking along the edges of St Annes Well Park I glanced up at the sky. Stopped in sudden shock. Six or seven large and bright lights loomed over the trees. A collection of those curious air-fire lanterns which seem to be popular in Brighton at the moment. Rising through the air they looked like the forerunners of some extra-terrestrial invasion force, or a new, possibly Lovecraftian constellation of carnivorous and sinister stars.

The Phantom Flute-Player in the Prestonville Arms

When publishing yesterdays post to Facebook, I was somewhat puzzled to see that the instructions to do so were in Italian, or perhaps Portugese. Clicking on 'Accepti' (or something similar....) I thought nothing more of it until I logged into Facebook later on and was confronted with the home page of an Italian, or perhaps, Portugese man, whose latest posting was a link to Tales from bridge 39... He obviously hadn't signed out, and I was much amused by the possible puzzlement on his face when he next logged in.

Down at the Prestonville last night with Em, Al and Andy. A wild night, all rain and darkness and sodden leaves fluttering about like drowned and broken wings. There is a certain quality to the darkness in the Prestonville area which I have always found intriguing. A mixture of the relative elevation (there are some quite atmospheric views down to Brighton from this hilly area) and the increasingly old fashioned orange streetlamps that illume the winding streets.
The Prestonville was busy last night, though not overtly crowded. A blues guitarist played too loudly. Though what he was playing was not necessarily offensive, I was glad when he finished. We ran into a fellow drinker from the Evening Star there, who had 'come for the music', Stu. Stu sometimes plays harmonica in a rather good band called the Sumerian Kings, a kind of industrial-psychedelic-swamp-jazz combo. When playing the harmonica he has such a look of unbridled delight on his face, he seems as if he is fulfilling all his lifelong ambitions at once.
Seated as we were by the toilet, he had to pass us every time he wanted to relieve himself. Shortly before we left, he had popped into the toilets again. Al whipped out a flute from his bag, began playing it haphazardly and ale-affected. He happened to put it back in his bag just before Stu emerged again from the toilet, looking somewhat puzzled. 'You know.' he said, 'I could have sworn I heard an instrument'. 'What kind of instrument?' someone asked. 'A flute'. He went back into the toilet again, as if to search for the location of his phantom flute player. He came out again looking puzzled. 'Maybe there are ghosts, but I definetly heard a flute playing'.
He wondered back through the crowded pub again.
I wonder if he told anyone else about his disembodied flute player.
On the way back home, Em and me came across Tony, a sudden small-hours meeting. Flat cap to keep the rain off. He said he had been drinking with old school friends and was very drunk, but didn't seem to be at all. Sudden meetings in autumnal streets, October synchronicities.
I remember the leaves in the night behind him, and the buildings beyond, and everything dark and nocturnal and timeless.

Heavy rain this morning when we woke. Our proposed walk to Friston Forest curtailed. Tea, pizza and Eastenders instead. The rain had eased by mid-afternoon, and we walked down the windy seafront to the pier. The seagulls seemed to be scattered by the wind, littering the sky in elegant but somehow beguiling fashion, an avian chaos.
They looked more like leaves than birds.

A Sigh of Something Perhaps

The building where I work on a Saturday is mostly deserted, and presents a far different face than the one it wears during the working week. A non-descript building, it is almost on the sea front, next to an old church currently holding an exhibition on 'the way things used to be'. Stretched over eight floors, the building is usually busy with people clutching files and five pence coffees from the vending machines, endless glances at the clock as everyone waits for their next break, for lunchtime, for going home.
Like seeing your school at night, or on a Sunday, there is almost something almost transgressive about being in there for four hours on a Saturday morning. There aren't very many people in for a start, a small group of 'customer service advisors' huddled around their pods in the midst of all this novel emptiness. Like sheltering in a wasteland, but instead of rain a near silence pounding down on us all. The break rooms feel curiously empty, and the administration sections with all their rows of empty desks and chairs look somehow forlorn, but only recently deserted, as if everyone has only just left their posts. Leaving the call-centre floor for the toilets, and with the voices of co-workers locked out by the shutting of the door, there is an oddly haunted atmosphere. A slightly restless silence, and the thought that those eight flight of stairs, waiting just down the corridor provides a pleasingly disquieting atmosphere. Slightly haunted flights.
No-one uses them really. Emergencies perhaps, or to get to either a floor above or a floor below.
As I stepped into the lifts for my mid-morning break, the humming of the lift doors as they closed seemed almost an animal noise. A sigh of something perhaps. Empty buildings are more alive somehow. Freed from the shackles of people, they flex their freedom, and all those empty corridors and locked rooms seem suddenly more full of activity, and stepping into one of these rooms gives one the impression that someone has only just left.
As I stood in the lift, the mirror behind me, I wondered, what would happen if the lift doors opened onto an entirely different floor, what would I find there? A phantom call centre, and the ghosts of the workers there drawn and pale, inbound calls from a nightmare campaign, existential insurance from beyond the grave. Dream-surveys conducted in an air as green as absinthe.
I tried to find the smoking area that was in the underground car-park. Usually we use a pleasant space between the building itself and the church next door, but this is locked at the weekend, -a move to deter the West Street drinkers of Friday and Saturday night perhaps. Usually I would go at the front of the building, but I thought I would find this subterrenean tobaccohaven.
Not quite an underground car-park perhaps, but the darkness of the grilles that encloses it gives the impression of a permanent murky twilight. Pipes running up ragged brickwork and stained wall. Piles of bins in the corner, sinister looking doors closed against unknown spaces. and warnings of a 'danger of death'. The few gathered like rusting factory site wolves.
There seemed to be no smoking signs everywhere. I admitted defeat and went to the front of the building where I normnally do.

There is this and Nothing More

Out of the fourth floor windows at work, a sudden glimpse of the sea. For a moment shifted into dream-memories, of all those night visions of Brighton being flooded by Tsunamis and monstrous waves. The sea looked so high. A great grey and boiling vortex of a sea. A sudden moment of reality-panic -was I dreaming?- and then the reassurance of knowing I was awake. But the sea.... It seemed so high, right up to the railings itself (this no doubt was an optical illusion). I could imagine great waves crashing over inneffectual barriers to flood the city. Smoking a cigarette in the smoking area I was half-waiting for those great grey waves to envelop us all.
The elevated vantage point of the fourth floor in the call centre provides an envious view of Brighton, even in, or should I say, particularly in, the relatively torrential rain we have had today. The mysterious building I can see on top of a hill out of the left hand side window had disappeared into the white void of the rain. An all consuming nothingness, and I still wonder what the building is used for, what or whom it houses. What would it be like to wait there in the upper storey windows, looking out on Brighton from the white, through the rain, through the sinking afternoons..?

Rain masks the sound of footsteps.
Nine years ago, walking back from Al's then flat on Montpelier Road. A thick November rain, heavy with unemployment and the coming winter. Leaving long after midnight. Wrap myself in my coat, light a cigarette.
Through the streets so empty of people. T.S Eliot's 'half-deserted streets'.
The wind was up that night, and the rain too. Great gusts of night-tides. Ripping the few remaining leaves from the trees. Squalls of rain, beholden to their own patterns, the night-rhythms of secrets and the small hours. I came across no-one on my long walk back to my house. Literally no-one, but we'll get to that. At some point, walking through the tangle of streets near Seven Dials I became aware of a sound. Carried by the wind and distorted by the rain, I couldn't quite work out what the noise was. A pub-noise, I thought. Something to do with bars and clubs shutting down for the night. The noise most closely resembled the sound of a large plastic container hitting the ground with some force. I imagined the plastic container to be the size of a large car or a small van. A pub-noise..? No, more a hidden-factory noise. I didn't pay that much attention to it. It was, after all, just another nocturnal sound, something that I wouldn't remember the next day.
Except then, a few streets later, quite a few streets later I heard the sound again; the same pattern of the initial large noise and then a few following smaller echoes. I paused, trying to locate the source of the sound, but apart from the conviction that it was 'a few streets away' I really had no idea.
I continued my walk. Through the wind. Through the rain. There was something absolute about that night. So old, so ancient, so timeless. I crossed the Old Steine, that borderland between the town centre and St James Street and eventually Kemptown where I then lived. I heard the sound again. The same pattern of echoes, the same rhythm, the same level. There was either a similar source for all these noises, or, I considered, the noise, or whatever was making the noise, was following me.
Obviously I didn't really believe that at all. It was an interesting notion though. As I walked on, I heard the noise again, for a fourth time. The idea that it was following me was proving more and more difficult to shake.
Up the long upward rise of Edward Street, past the courts and the job centre, all huge and monolithic structures, and the American Express building, nestled in itself. An air of monetary pre-occupation. I passed a small shop to my right. A tiny shop that never seemed to be open that specialising in the selling of autographs of celebrities. I never seemed tro notice the shop in the day, only on these long walks back long after midnight. Hastily blu-tacked yellowed, greying photographs in the window. One was of Joanna Lumley. Glamorous and smiling, the photograph seemed strangely incongruous in the slightly grubby, tiny window. She masked the darkness of the shop behind her, and I became convinced that the shop-night was leaking out through her eyes that followed me as I passed by.
The rain grew harder, and Edward Street became an almost-equation of the pavement I walked on, the road to my left and houses to my right. Nothing else but this, and the rain, and the wind. The continual rhythm of my walking. I felt like I had been walking this road forever.
Ahead of me there was a man walking the same direction as me. I really couldn't make out any details of him, but he seemed dressed in a light coloured jacket and wore some kind of hat. He was walking really quite slowly but I never seemed to get any closer to him. Like I'm walking behind no-one was the thought that came to mind. No matter how quick I walked, this road-phantom ahead of me seemed to get no closer. I started to think of the photograph of Joanna Lumley's eyes, that sound that was following me, and I felt that there were footsteps in the rain.
The rain hiding footsteps.
(
And with the sudden certainty of a ghost story, it struck me that the man walking ahead of me, in the same direction I was, was actually following me.
Another thought I couldn't shake. It made so much sense, even if it was completely incomprehensible. An inexplicable conviction. I kept up my pace and the man ahead of me must have sped up his for he soon vanished into darkness.
I was soon home. Stood in the hallway leaning against the front door, listening for footsteps, watching for sounds. .
There was the rain and there was nothing more.

A similar rain today, near luxurious in its intensity. Everything faded to monochrome and straight lines and grey sinking to white. Met Em for a coffee at lunchtime. Neros in the North Laine, a man slumped inn a chair, looking half-familiar from somewhere.
Glancing out of the window at the internet cafe, the rain is as consistent as ever, and twilight seems to have fallen early tonight. A dusk you could sleep in, a nightfall of sleep and rain and footsteps and sounds a few streets away that seem to be following you.