Days set to a Permanent Sunset

Days set to a permanent sunset, horizon of the icy sky always reddened, as if the atmosphere itself is freezing.
Days set to a permanent rush of one kind or another. Quick toast at lunch before rushing back to work for the last three late-shift hours.
Days sent to a permanent daydream, always on the horizon, on the edges of these call centre days...

This Could Have Been Black Shuck Country

A year ago today, outside the old call centre, smoking with Pam and Tom. Afternoon dragging down to evening. Trying to come up with a name for a blog I was thinking of starting. Looking for some coincidence, some piece of synchronicity to guide me.
I wanted something to do with Black Shuck, that English folklore legend. Black Shuck country? Hmm. Maybe. Alistair came up the hill where we stood. He had just finished his days work at American Express and was heading home. I asked him what he thought I should call my blog - without mentioning anything to do with Black Shuck.
Without missing a beat he replied 'Oh definetely something to do with Black Shuck'.
...which should have been the coincidence I was looking for.
Back in the office at work, I found that 'Black Shuck' had been used for someone else's URL. I quickly jettisoned the Black Shuck idea, and somehow settled on 'Tales from Bridge 39', referring to a notoriously haunted bridge on the Shropshire Union canal. Not my favourite haunting by any stretch of the imagination - a phantom, monstrous monkey is alleged to attack people. Well, at least back in the 1800s... though there have been reports of it being seen as recently as this -or last- decade.
Anyway. The name would do, I thought, and I can change it around later on.
Everybody left the office early. Or had I stayed late? I can't remember now. I wrote my first first tale from bridge 39.
By the time I had left the office, it was full dark outside.
I can't remember anything else about that evening.

A Smell of Winter

That strange folded smell of autumn grows stronger, and I realise what it is now. Not the smell of autumn, but the smell of winter.
It tastes of cold playgrounds under grey skies, of streetlamps glimpsed on a distant hill as night falls, perhaps from a call centre, of the icy taste of the bones of leafless trees click-clacking together, of long afternoons, and a certain kind of woodsmoke smell, of coffeeshops in the early morning, entered before a long train journey, of attics holding fragments of your own past, of nights that sweep above you, vast and elongated as the sleep you wish you could fall into, and of course, of snow.

Inevitable really that this sudden icy-snap will soon visit Brighton. Bright light of the snow-silence, slipping to work on ill-salted pavements down gentle slopes that now seem steep inclines.
I remember the ssnow of last December.
The silence of the streets after dark, deserted as a city in a warzone.

I must go into that night outside soon, leave the gloomy comfort of the bedsit for that sharp and waiting air.
This morning, when I walked to worked, there were patches of ice.
Dull mirrors that soon melted, leaving only a ghost -a smell of winter- through these ever shortening days.

Typical Bedsit Evening

The evenings fly by. It seems I am eternally at the poiny of going to bed. This time now. Another day at work hanging over me, or, rather, I hang over it. Floating above the valley of cold mornings.
When I left work tonight - just over five hours ago now - there were numerous police about Churchill Square shopping centre. Many of the shops were closed. A helicopter in the sky. I could see no cause for the presence of all these police. Expecting some threat that never materialised. Only later when watching the 10'o'clock news that I heard about the fear of another student riot.
When I got back home... what did I do? I may have watched the news. I wanted to hear about the North / South Korea incident. Islands bombed, threats of war.
Reminded me of the book I'm reading at the moment, about the 1950s horror comics, of how the (then) war in Korea influenced such titles as Horrific, Weird Terror, Haunted Thrills...
I didn't hear Korea mentioned once.
I listened to some music for a while 69 Eyes and Spiritual Front, and read a couple of short stories from Best New Horror Volume Five, first published in 1994, which I found in London on Saturday for £3.00.
I watched the rest of the Doctor Who story The Stones of Blood, and then I watched some of the extras on the disc. One of the extras 'looking at the making of the programme' had a familiar face turning up. A journalist for some science fiction magazine I've never read. He used to go out with one of my housemates. Autumn 1996, my first term in Worcester. The house I lived in was so cold that one day when he had stayed the night we went down the pub at lunchtime just to escape from the icy inevitability of the afternoon... I remember his first article he had published in the magazine. His girlfriend showing me. Some newsagent in Birmingham? Worcester? Can't remember now.
The time between then and now is the age of an adolescent.
After I watched Doctor Who, I watched The Apprentice, and drew in my sketchbook, covering myself in ink.
And now the evening is done, I must set the alarm and go to sleep.

The Churchyard Summer is Another Country

A rare lunchtime missive, as I have had to pop home to recharge my mp3 player...
A bright and cold day.
Exhausted with a strange kind of euphoria.
Walking back here, the day smelt kind of crumpled; old attics, firesmoke, dust. Something gamiliar, yet knew. This smell has been haunting this autumn - well, now turning into winter.
Summer is another land now.
I remember lying in the churchyard along the Old Shoreham Road on too hot summer days after signing on, listening to the wind through the trees.
Another fifteen minutes and then I must head back to work.

Someone Dreams of This

I think I might choose to walk forever, if I could, through endless autumn landscapes on the verge of dusk. Sleep in hedgerows and fields and eat food stolen from half-abandoned cottages, tangled wood and lost gardens.
And dream, perhaps, of working on the fourth floor of a call centre, where the sea outside the window is always grey and seems so very very far away.

The Morning after a Nightmare

The view from my window, about ten minutes ago, just after 8:00am.

Woke from a nightmare last night at about 1:30am. The nightmare so affected me that I lay there in the dark convinced that something supernatural was going to occur. Perhaps the curtain over my kitchen area would suddenly spring up of its own accord. Maybe I would glimpse a shadowy figure sitting on the darkened sofa. What would happen if someone knocked on my door, standing out there under the creepy green light of the landing..?

I was in a room (possibly at my Nan's old house in Wolverhampton) with Em, the Doctor (as played by Matt Smith) and two other people, I am not sure who. I think one of them was a woman. The Doctor was comforting Em. She was rather frightened as we had accompanied the Doctor on a few adventures and had already had a few terrifying encounters with alien races. Probably. She was asking the Doctor how he coped with being in such close proximity to death. I came into the room as he was telling her something about the Daleks. I interjected at this point and asked him what was the most frightening thing he had ever faced. I immediately knew this was the wrong time to aske this as he was comforting Em.
Later. Mysterious messages began appearing on windows and mirrors. One appeared to be part of the contract. Written in condensation, and signed by myself, and also Richard Motley, who I used to work with at Telegen. I observed that they looked like contracts with the devil. I warned everyone else about them but they had vanished. The Doctor pulled back the curtain drawn against one of the living room patio-style windows. There was a large message here. As this message here mentioned David Tennant, this would seem directly aimed at him. I was glad that other people had seen it. I postulated the theory that the writer of these messages might be p---, an old friend of ours. A sudden glimpse of a terrifying face in the darkness outside. Pale skin, staring eyes, glimpsed through the letters of the message. No-one else can see him.
The atmosphere in the room by now is one of utter dread. I miserably wonder how any of us are going to sleep this night.
Someone comes up with the idea of turning the light off, God knows why. We do so and the room is plunged into utter darkness. A sudden realisation that something outside the house is trying to get in. We must turn the light back on. We cannopt find the light switch or it does not work. Rising panic and anger at the Doctor who is unable to get the light switch working.
Something is in the house with us.
I wake up.

Nothing particularly terrifying about the dream, but there was just something so weird about it all...

There were other dreams last night, but none as terrifying as that, nor as dismally appealing as the winter dawn creeping over Brighton I saw as I pulled back the curtains to the outside world (see above).
I was a little nervous in case there were words written on the windowpane...

London in November

 Leaving Brighton by train. Grey November skies over this early Saturday afternoon. The city looking tattered and tired, as all cities do, when seen by train on under a grey November sky.

 Our room in the Sami Hotel, somewhere in Shepherds Bush. Em pointed out that this room would probably be advertised as a 'studio flat' in Brighton. A basement room, where, in the bathroom, a high up window looked out into another room we couldn't see. The hotel was on the Uxbridge Road. I could walk back to my adolescent years from here, I thought, back through Hayes and Hillingdon to Ickenham and Uxbridge. Buses came back with 'Uxbridge' as their destination. I wonder what it would be like to return there in November.

 The banks of the River Thames, some time on Saturday night.

 There was some kind of Christmas market on the banks of the Thames. Merry-go-rounds and stalls selling mulled wine and roasted chestnuts. In a graffiti covered underpass, skateboarders with serious faces gathered. The presence of the nearby market turned a threatening environment into one that seemed safe and cosy. I wish I had taken a photograph of them.

 Sunday morning and the view from our room. I like these strangely nondescript places 'dreary but meaningful' to quote Fritz Leiber. Forgotten angles, obscure courtyard. A London shadow. No-one thinks about these places. If I hadn't taken a photograph of it I probably would have forgotten it by tomorrow morning.

 I seem to be looking quite guilty, as if I have been caught in some conspiratorial conversation with the lamp. Why I would be looking guilty or even suspicious I don't know as it was me who took the photo.

 There was a painting in one of the twisting corridors of the hotel. A Chinese looking ship (is it called a 'Junk') under a green sky floating in a green sea. These photographs remind me of the 1970s. In my memory they seem somewhat ubiquitous. A childhood fragment. Perhaps this was why I found the painting so eerie and enthralling. A timeless dreamlike atmosphere. A sinister serenity. These paintings would be considered, at best, to be a piece of 1970s kitsch, and at worst, talentless trash, and it was actually a real painting, and not a reproduction. Lost on an obscure wall in a cheap hotel in Shepherds Bush, the painting had all the quality of a haunting, hanging there in the permanent twilight of a short flight of cramped stairs. I wonder who the artist was?

 Looking back as we left the hotel.

When I first saw this on the Saturday going to the hotel I was quite excited, and entertained many ideas about what a 'Shepherds Bush Medieval Centre' might contain - some exciting museum full of displays about the plague in West London? Exhibits of torture instruments from the middle ages? The next day I saw that I had been sadly mistaken. It was not the 'Shephered Bush Medieval Centre' but the 'Shepherds Bush Medical Centre'. What was the designer / sign writer thinking of with that gothic lettering against a black background? Not the kind of thing to inspire confidence when visiting the Doctors... This curious choice of typography and design was not without precedent however. There was a dentist across the road whose logo appeared to be a severed tooth.

 Tube train view. One of the commonest views in London, but one which never seems to lose a sense of power. This is London.

 We walked from Camden Lock to Kings Cross by Regents Canal. These buildings were strange, as if made in an old factory in some remote region of the Soviet Union in the 1970s. What would it be like to live there, looking out over the water of an oddly boatless stretch of canal?

 I find sights like this strangely appealing. A set of ramshackle steps leading down from a nowhere road, scattered with the last of the autumns leaves. I like the forgotteness of it all.

 Across the canal, two discarded office chairs by a street lamp. Who had put them here? Why did they need a street lamp here? The whole place seemed so abandoned. I wonder what it would have looked like at dusk, when the lamp had just come on and night had begun to fall?

 '...it seemed unusually bleak and suggestive; almost beautifully ugly though in no sense picturesque; dreary but meaningful'. Smoke Ghost, Fritz Leiber

 Canal water in November seems hypnotically cold.

 The pipe looked like a tentacle of some Lovecraftian monstrosity, stretched through this brackish, industrial water...

 The basement of a bookshop, somewhere between Kings Cross and Oxford Street. All bookshops should be like this. Didn't find any Thomas Ligotti, though did pick up two copies of a small press magazine called 'One Eye Grey' which 'retells traditional folktales and ghost stories in a modern London context'. One of the magazines even has a story about Brighton in it. I also found a copy of 'Zap Comix' from 1975 or something.

 London as twilight falls.

 From the train at Gatwick Airport.

Back in Brighton, about two and a half hours ago.

The Glittering on the Hill

The streetlamps on the hill glitter when darkness falls. What would it be like to stand under their twilight and watch the call centre from miles away?

Things Which I Thought About at Work Today

1: (A doodle amongst my work notes. The back of a man. Another man dressed as a clown with a top hat on stopping him, laying a placating hand on his shoulder. A crooked streetlamp to the left. A smoky cloudy sky. Bare branches of winter trees).

This doodle led me to thinking about...

...a Welsh mining village. The village adheres to strict rituals descended from the ancient art of Clowning. Rituals and ceremonies involving various clowning exploits keep the balance of the village. Inside the mine, miners are dressed as clowns. Something bad might happen if the clowning rituals are not adhered to. The clowning regulations dictate every aspect of village life, even as far as how many children families may have. A man wants to leave the village. He is stopped by an elder clown, who implores him not to betray the clowning rituals.

2: Another doodle, abstract and cramped. I called it 'Junkyard Moon',  This doodle made me think about an industrial dockland / harbour. Of approaching this dockland / harbour by boat. Detritus in the water. Something to do with Malta, 1976. A similar feel.

3. On a distant hill seen out of the window at the call centre, I noticed three or four very early street lamps. This was about 3:30pm. It got me to thinking about where these lamps were, some distant road, next to rain-sodden woods. A strange serenity in these thoughts of bleak distances at twilight.

4. A new art form. This would be based upon the concept of smells. Certain smells bring back memories - almost our strongest link to the past. Would it not be possible to arrange for a narrative of smells? One smell might bring to mind a distant forest, another might bring to mind the image of a murder, another the image of a summers day. It would be up to the viewer (or listener) to decide upon the connection, if any. Kind of like an  instrumental album.

A Creative Droubt

Rain all day, as if flung at the windows of the call centre. No distance anywhere, just a void where the horizons used to be.
Cold rain too, the wet on my skin strangely reminds me I have bones buried there.

(in the earth, those drifting churchyard summer days, and the ghost-tides through the trees by the railway line
i never heard a train there)

There seems to be no inspiration these days for anything creative or artistic. Another void. Frustration wells up here. I get my sketchbook out when I get back home from work and feel like never picking up a paintbrush or pen again. I doodle at work. Cramped things I throw away at the end of the day. I haven't taken my guitar out of its case for months. Not since the summer. The thought of loading up my word processor overwhelms me with an almost narcotic lethargy.
A terminal indolence.

There is always that fear though, and we've all had it; what if this is it, what if this is it forever?
Do creative blocks last forever though? Can they? In the middle of this one here it feels they can, and do, but I would say that wouldn't I?
Everything passes. Everything turns to dust.
Even the blocks that house this creative drought.

My god, its quiet outside tonight.

(i remember those last weeks of summer, walking to work in the bright novelty of mornings, hot already, feeling as if someone was flinging down buckets of summer onto the pavements)

November Fragment

November is absolute.
Daylight is seen mostly out o the window at work. By the time I leave, night has fallen.
These are not the soft, romantic days of October, nor the summer-touched glades of September.
November begins winter.
First of the factory months.
All orange and black. When I go for evening walks now these are the only colours I see. An autumnal monochromatic vortex.
Stars up in the sky seem cold, and the window in the window frame rattles at night.
Night never seems long enough, and as the mornings darken again, it becomes increasingly difficult to pull myself out of bed.
I avoid the sea like a superstition.

Path of Green Lamps

White pre-winter days. Only ventured outside briefly during daylight hours; a few charity shops, CEX, Replay, Sainsburys. That special kind of rain that nowhere late-autumn days have. Thick yet sparse. Chills you to the bone.
That white sky.
That emptiness about us.

Night falls so quickly now, dropped from that white void like concrete.
When I left Em's house it was full-dark. Only a few hours of pale washed out daylight now. Only five or six weeks away from mid-winter now.
Warmer than the afternoon.
Even the pavements had dried.

Went for a walk after dinner, out onto the Old Shoreham Road. Went up the side of Hove park, near the petrol station. A row of green street lamps lighting a path through the darkness. Spectral halos, sinister pools.
Street lamps are there to provide atmosphere, not illumination.
The green lamps made the darkness thicker, more palpable.
More full of ghosts.

Lost my direction in the suburban labyrinth beyond Hove Park.
New roads walked at night.

Back in the bedsit now.
That strange and heavy dread that precedes Monday.

Sleep and then the week begins.
Again.

A Mysterious Super-Villain with Special Laser Rays

The man next door continued playing his guitar all night, and only stopped for bouts of protracted coughing.
Glad of the peace and silence, and unnaccountably tired, I went to bed at 10:30pm. I woke up shortly before midnight. The man next door had started snoring. The walls are so thin that the sound reverberated around my roo, and kept me awake until the small hours. I almost wished for the guitar playing to come back again. He sounded like some great, grumbling legend of a hellhound. I eventually conceded defeat and went to sleep on the sofa on the other side of my (tiny) room. I could still hear him, but somehow fell into a very cramped sleep.
He eventually stopped snoring, but only when he woke himself up with such a violent fit of coughing that the room next door began to sound like some sinister World War I tuberculosis ward.

There are further house of bedsit-mysteries.
When I returned from work this evening, there was a card on the post table in the hallway. This was from the police, and informed us there had been 'reports' of 'residents' in the street parallel to mine having a laser pen shone 'in their eyes'.
A laser pen shone in peoples eyes? This is all very strange. What could be achieved by this. It sounds almost like the stranger reports of Spring Heeled Jack from Victorian London. I presume that the laser is shone into peoples eyes from a distance, which I imagine is why the police had dropped a card around here. At least I think so. Is there a possibility that this mysterious wielder of a laser pen is situated in this very building? A super villain in this gloomy bedsit house? Does he (or she) sit in their room at the back of the house and shine lasers in the eyes of passers by in the road below?
This actually seems unlikely. The road in question is at the back of this house, and across the gardens are another line of houses before this now laser-haunted road. This would seem to require a great deal of accuracy (and luck) for this to be possible.
Perhaps the police have had reports of the 'Laser Wielder' running into here? Might he (or she) be connected to the mysterious crack that has made the second floor bathroom a prohibited area? Could it be the snoring man next door with his cheerful and annoying guitar playing?
Might I be the next victim if I continue to use the first floor bathroom? If you open the window in there, there is a good view across to the street beyond...

A Tuesday Night of a Slow Week

A night of interrupted sleep, bad dreams and rain. Half-nightmares of some kind of apocalypse. The air and land being infected. Walking on the ground causing people to melt. Ambulancemen turning up, unimpressed that I was not infected. In a house with people I work with. The owners are away - something to do with the apocalypse. We are barred from going upstairs by a barrier of polythene. I suggest removing this, but no-one think this will be a good idea but me. I say that if the owners survive and return we could return to them their house.

Waking up in the dark, and I remember the curtains of my room shining as if some fragment of the moon had become caught on it. Then the alarm, then getting dressed for work, then out into a landscape of bleak rain and flood rumours.

A grey day.
Nothing happened.

My window rattles in the frame. I'm going to have to stick my knife in it like I had to last winter.
I really wish the man next door would stop playing the guitar.

The bathroom is still not fixed.

The Mysterious Bathroom on the First Floor

The curious phase of renovation, that feels more like some kind of decay, continues in this house of bedsits. After the introduction of the Creepy Green Light a month or so back, and the recent painting of my ceiling -which left my room covered in a mysterious white dust - there is now a addition to all this architectural strangeness.
Upon coming home from work on Saturday afternoon, I saw that there was a notice on the bathroom door which read 'The ceiling in the bathroom is cracked and dangerous. Do not use. Please use the shower on the landing downstairs'.
A dangerous crack in the ceiling? What kind of danger might this pose, and how will the use of the shower increase this unnamed danger? I have visions of the shower somehow pulling the ceiling down on me. An explosion of dust and brick. Surely there would be more danger posed by those who use the landing on the third floor - maybe the crack might cause them to plunge a floor below? Perhaps there is a similar notice on the foor of the bathroom on the third floor? I do not know as the thought of travelling to the upper floors of the building fill me with a strange kind of fear. I have no reason to go up there, and the door that is closed against the entrance of the stairs heading upwards is always closed. A strange air of exclusivity. The ground and first floor do not have a door, why does the stairwell from the second to third need a door?
Perhaps everyone is using the bathroom on the first floor landing.
I used the first floor bathroom for a while over the summer, when the shower-head in my bathroom mysteriously disappeared for a while. It was quite a pleasant bathroom, large, and luxurious in a kind of sub-industrial way. I did feel like I was trespassing though, but as I was unemployed at the time, I could use the bathroom during the day when I hoped that everyone else might be working.
I didn't use the first floor bathroom this morning, afraid that there might be a clog of people -from the first, second, and possibly third or higher floors- all queuing to use it. As I left for work this morning I discovered this was not the case, though did discover on the ground floor, any number of manual labourers engaged in some mysterious errand which involved carrying large tools in and out of the front door. As I hurried out, I also heard Mr Ahmed, the landlord, in conversation with an unseen woman, possibly one of the mysterious residents of the grouynd floor.
I hurried out into the rain and got soaked.
So I had to use the first floor bathroom tonight. When I thought all was quiet (and there was no light on in the landings apart from the Creepy Green Light) I fled down the stairs to the first floor bathroom. It felt very strange -and quite wrong- to be on the first floor with my shampoo and towel. I hurriedly locked the bathroom door, and then realised that there was someone in the toilet next door. Were they hoping to use the bathroom after they had finished on the toilet? Did they flush that chain in a slightly annoyed way? As I stepped into the shower, I felt quite sure that the toilet user was gathering other residents of the first floor to organise some kind of bathroom-orientated lynching.
Casting such paranoid thoughts aside, I looked around the incredibly large and Victorian looking bathroom I was in.
Which now seemed very different from the time I had used it over summer.
First of all, there was something different about the windows. The windows, some kind of monochrome stained glass affair, seemed larger... More alarming were the windows (of a similar stained-glass type) that looked out onto the landing. At the top of these windows (the room is very very tall remember) there is now a foot high gap running the width of the windows. Can anyone see in if they are coming down the stairs? They would certainly be able to hear shower-sounds. I had never noticed the gap when I had been coming down the stairs before, but had certainly noticed the blurred and naked forms of bathers through the frosted glass.
But where had the gap came from?
It certainly wasn't there over the summer.
Even stranger, there is now some mysterious gap in the wall between the bathroom and the toilet, again too high (fortunately) to see through, but where did it come from? Who removed it and why? Do the people who use that toilet feel self conscious if there is someone in the bathroom (as I was)?
Perhaps they all come upstairs to use the bathroom on the second floor.
Some kind of bathroom based peace treaty to stop war breaking out between the first and second floors.
I wonder what the people on the ground floor think?

A Sudden Dread of the Sea

In a strange epilogue to my tale of the fire-extinguisher man yesterday morning, Em came across him too. She was heading to work at the same time as me (from her place) and said that she saw him on the other side of the street waving his fire extinguisher about, looking drunk and aggressive. She quickly got away from him, finding him quite intimidating, by walking up one of those roads that lead away from Western Road. While traversing this unnamed road, she heard the sound of the fire extinguisher hitting the ground behind her. This was, of course, when the fire-extinguisher had been thrown at me.

My dreams last night were full of reprints of old 'planetarey romance' comic strips I have never read, names I just vaguely recognise 'Adam Strange' 'Mystery in Space'... I kept waking up every now and again, then plunging back into these dreams of old comic strips I have never read. Odd really, I was never much into science-fiction in comics, so am not sure where these dreams came from. I may well have to visit Dave's Comics to see if there are any Adam Strange or Mystery in Space reprints....

The dreams did inspire the soundtrack to my twilight walk to be Alan Moore's 'Unearthing', in which the protagonist, as an adolescent, becomes immersed in planetary romance comics. Adam Strange himself is mentioned even.
It was a long looping walk, up across Dyke Road, and past Preston Manor, up near where Susie used to live. Quite lost my sense of direction. When it came time to head back, I cut back up to the Old Shoreham Road, because the thought of walking on the beach caused me a sense of apprehension. I don't know why, but it seems this past week has been accompanied by a strange dread of the sea...

Upon heading home I passed by a group of four trees guarding a pedestrian entrance to a cul-de-sac. The ground below them was pleasingly covered with leaves. A couple of people walked under the trees, and I thought, the trees, they just stay still. Watch us walk underneath and away, pass by, and always walking. Are the trees jealous or are they content -superior even- to be rooted to one spot, to know one place intimately, whilst everybody walking by might know a thousand places superficially.
Those four or so trees know that road when it is completely empty of people. Deep in the small hours. No-one passing by.
I will never know the road so empty because at least I will always be there.

The Fire-Extinguisher Man

Walking to work this morning, with my headphones on, and still half asleep, I passed by some kind of commotion. A person very near me. I continued walking, but curiosity got the better of me and I turned around, only to be confronted by a ragged looking fellow brandishing, of all things, a fire extinguisher at me. He looked to be your typical Brighton mid-thirty something; longish hair, vaguely alternative, with that special expression common to certain types of thirty something that denotes something along the lines of 'missed the boat'.
He had a look of attention seeking aggression im his eyes. Usually I would have walked on, but after a vaguely unpleasant week I had to curb a sudden instinct to ask him what the fuck he thought he was doing. I stared back at him instead, which led to an expression of imbecilic surprise on his face. He looked away.
I carried on walking, still seething inwardly at such characters having to live in the same city as me. After a short while of walking, I heard a metallic sound and turned back.
He had actually thrown the fire extinguisher at me.
Which made me even more angry.
The man by this time had, of course, disappeared, though I could hear him shouting nonsensical obscenities somewhere nearby.
I continued walking.
I imagine that it must be undeniably horrible to be a homeless drug addict / alcoholic -which I presume he must be- but its also fairly horrible to have a fire extinguishwer thrown at you before 9'0'clock in the morning, so excuse me if I don't have any sympathy this time.
With the incident of the heroin-man last Monday morning, I have a growing feeling of dissatisfaction with Brighton at the moment.
It just seems to be a bit of an immature place sometimes.
Still whats a city you live in if you can't dislike it occasionally?

Traces of the Zero-Point Carnivore

A grey fog, just down from the hills. A wolverine void. A zero-point carnivore.
They're like ghosts now, those buildings, and their vanishing precedes the night. Their fading is a premonition.
(and I hear the ghost of Emily Bronte's voice; forerunners of a sterner power, heralds of me? It only makes sense with the question mark. Different editions. Different time)
Time is different now.
17:00. The yellow numbers on the call centre display screens. The breaking of the headphones; removing the headset from the phone itself, breaking the day like a ritual.
Then past the lifts. Can't be bothered to wait with so many other people.
Down the cool sigh of the stairs. Glimpses of the church next down.
Out into the night, up the hill, walk by the homeless man with the dog, and the Regency Leisure Centre. Pink neon lights the only alive thing in the November night.
Ashen eyes, and grey movements. Everyone I pass by bears traces of that wolverine void.
If I saw my eyes in the mirror, I would bear traces of that zero-point carnivore too.
We all do when autumn heads into the November deeps.
...but I tend to avoid mirrors after nightfall.

Attempting to Defeat the Dead-Light

One of those days where you don't feel connected to anything, just drifting along, daydreaming about nothing. Work, then lunchtime suddenly, and at lunch a long meandering walk around town because I felt like expending some energy, then the quick fall down the afternoon to the valley of 4:30pm. Waiting then in the call-centre for night to come. Seems to come so quickly now, like some daily armageddon. A great concrete thing dropped from the skies, in what seems seconds.
My desk is in the middle of the call centre. I can see a few street lights on distant hills, and after night, the sea becomes nothing but a great void between buildings.
Watching the clock creep to 5:00pm.
Exiled from it all.

I had intended to spend the evening relaxing, maybe drawing, but after I had returned to the bedsit and switched on my lamp, I quickly realised this was not to be - for there was that familiar and dreaded -clink!- of the lightbulb going. Looking at the lamp, bought from Argos a a couple of months ago, I soon realised that replacing the bulb was not to be a convenient option. For one thing, the bulb is of a type I have never seen before, and for another, it requires a screwdriver to unscrew something holding in the bulb.
Easier to buy another lamp.
The thought of spending the evening under the awful dead-light of the single bulb was not in any way appealing. My first thought was to try and go to sleep, despite the fact that it was only 5:30pm, and wake up later on when, perhaps, I could watch the television and forget about the dead-light. This, unsurprisingly, proved impossible, and at 6:00pm, I leapt out of bed to head down Argos to buy another cheap lamp.
Argos was, of course, closed by the time I got there, even though it is late night shopping night. I headed to Churchill Square. British Home Stores. They would have lamps surely? Yes, they did have lamps, but very expensive ones for £40. I still wasn't in the mood for returning to the bedsit and the dead-light, but nor was I in the mood for spending the price of the 'Doctor Who and the Key to Time' box set DVD on a lamp.
Maybe I should go for a walk to avoid coming back home?
I caught the bus to the Marina instead. There is a big Asda there. They must have some cheap lamps there. I had some vague suspicion that I had gone to an Asda before looking for lamps and not finding any... but was that the Asda in Hove? This was the big Asda. They would have lamps. It might cost me £4 to get there and back, but I would still be back by 7-ish. I could still have a few hours without the dead-light.
Asda didn't have any lamps.
In utter desperation I bought two big candles instead and caught the bus back.
They're burning in my room now, on a plate on top of the television.
They, of course, make no difference to the horrible dullness of the dead-light.
Its been one of those days.
The dead-light is victorious.

Out of the Night #12

In a previous post I wrote of how, over the Christmas of 1983, when I was ten years old, I became fascinated by horror comics, after reading a small section about them in a book called 'The Encyclopedia of Horror'. In the book were reproductions of eighteen of these comics, one of which is shown above. These images fascinated and enthralled me, became a kind of personal arcana for me as childhood turned into adolescence.
Yesterday, after twenty eight years, I finally obtained one of the original comics whose covers were reproduced and so fascinated me.
It is the comic above of course, Out of the Night # 12 dating from 1953. The latter thought is cause to pause in itself. 1953. The comic now by the side of me on the sofa is 57 years old. The imagined child who once owned it, originally bought it, will now be in his mid - late sixties.

It only cost me £5:00,  ordered from 30th Century Comics in London. It isn't in very good condtion, as the front cover isn't attached to the rest of the comic. The condition of the comic isn't important to me though as long as it is intact (which it is) it is the mere fact of owning the original of an image which fascinated me in childhood.
Like finally seeing a landscape you have only previously seen in a photograph.
I remember this cover well, of thinking about it when I was with Mum, visiting someone who I can't remember, in the back roads of Forres. I found a correlation between the ramshackle graveyard pictured and its bright red sky and the air of old mystery around Forres. I remember being ill, some minor-childhood ailment,m and being off school, and poring over this cover, trying to decode the tiny reproduced words.... The eerie piping waiol of a strange old flute... and ancient graves yawned wide beneath a pallid moon! Thrill to a truly breathtaking story "Music for the Dead!"

...and where did this particular issue begin its life? At what store was it bought? How did it survive being thrown away? Was it lost in attics for years... decades even?
I'll never know of course.
Yellow, papery mysteries happily never to be solved.

Gloomy Monday

Last nights sense of strange melancholy slipped into the day, a gloomy fog that would not lift. Everything laid over with a light miasma, like cobwebs, of a strange sadness, a disconnectedness I could not quite place.
Disorientated too by the shift in the clocks. Home now. Emmerdale is on the television, and it all feels the wrong time somehow.
The painter seems to have been today, but I don't think the painting job is finished. Instead, the ceiling of my room seems to have been sanded. A motley skin of some pale disease, all white with beige patches. I imagine the painter will be back tomorrow. I do not like the thought of a stranger being in my private space when I am not here.

On the way to work this morning, I passed by a stumbling man. He was walking the same way as myself. He was forties I suppose, dressed in rough clothes and with an accent I couldn't place somewhere from the North of England or Scotland. I couldn't really tell. 'Has anyone got some heroin?' he yelled, still stumbling 'Has anyone got any heroin you bastards... I hate Mondays... What are you doing up you stupid, stupid people? I need some heroin...'
I gradually lost him as I speeded up my walk.

When I left work tonight it was full dark. I walked past what used to be Borders, stepping over the lights embedded in the ground. As I did so I was suddenly struck by an eerie thought.
Ten years ago tonight, at the very same time, I was at the very same place.
I remember. 6:00pm. I was meeting Jim and Susie for when they finished work at Spoils. A Post-Hallowe'en comedown drink. I was waiting for Jim, walking through these very same lights embedded on the ground.

The evening trips and stumbles on.
Everyone on Emmerdale sounds cheerful.

I think I might have another cup of tea.