Thursday 30 December 2010

Last Words from 2010

Probably my last post until next year.

There were sudden bursts of sun today that I could see from the fourth floor of the call centre. Probably warm enough to sit outside at lunchtime, but that could well just be me.

The man next door seemed to be playing a flute earlier.

2010
What a strange and busy year.

Wednesday 29 December 2010

The Apocalyptic Nature of the Nowhere Days Between Christmas and the New Year

Back in Brighton now, in those strange dead days between Christmas and the New Year.
First post-Christmas day at work today. Outside of the window, the horizon vanishing into fog, buildings disappearing into the white. Made the call centre building seem like an impossibly high tower. A call centre for the apocalypse; putting money away for acid rainy days, a customer service team for Armageddon...
Strangely warm too, and this, mixed with the fog fading everything, as if the buildings have committed such grave offences against the season, that December must make the disappear, combines to give the days a dream-like feel... Ghosts of Spring, and not spoken to anyone, apart from Em, since I returned. Only got back yesterday, feels like years, a decade of yesterdays, and before Christmas seems generations back, an infinity of myths and legends ago...
(...walking the Old Shoreham Road after dark, afraid of the sea, walking by the Engineerium, listening to 69 Eyes, Destroyer 666 and Svarte Greiner, walking the freezing blackness, waiting for the snow, for the alarm in the mornings, counting the days down till Christmas...)
Time-lapsed, and oddly disorientated, I think; it is nine years next month since I started work at the petrol station, and in a fever of failed maths GCSE delirium cannot work out if nine years would be closer to a quarter or a third of my life so far...

Monday 27 December 2010

Mild and Anxious Weather

A gloomy day today. Grey, moribund skies, windy rain flung at the window. A thick and monochrome light in the spare room I've been sleeping in here. Maybe I should turn the light on, but I always find something a bit depressing about turning the light on in the day, no matter how dark it gets.
I can hear some kind of bird outside, singing away, lost in the wind.

Return back to Brighton tomorrow, and then the day after, back to work. Back to that old cycle of work, sleep, work, sleep, weekend, work, sleep ad nauseum. Not that we get a proper weekend. Working those extra four hours on a Saturday, without a corresponding four hours off in the week is a killer. I keep thinking of Philip Larkin's line about 'leading lives of quiet desperation'. On the other hand, I should be able to pay off my credit card next week, which will be good, and still have more than enough to live on for January until pay day.

The dead days of the year, between boxing day and new years day. Where do they belong? Kind of belong to Christmas, and kind of to the new year. Nowhere hours. The weather today seems to reflect the nowhere-ness of this week between. I'll take a walk this afternoon along the hopefully deserted beach. I can imagine I'm the doomed protagonist of 'Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You my Lad'.
Actually he wasn't so much doomed, as cursed to spend the rest of his days in a state of nervous agitation, jumping at the most mundane of things; a scarecrow in a field, a coat hanging on a door...

...which is kind of how I'm feeling at the moment. A kind of low-level nervous agitation. I'm not sure why. I'm not even sure there is a reason. A sense of foreboding hangs over me, a mild superstitious dread... The kind of feeling you have on the morning before a really important job interview perhaps... or maybe more like the feeling you get if you're at home and owe the landlord rent, and its been a few days late, and you know the landlord is coming around sometime, and you're trying to relax, and you just can't... I wake in the mornings when it is still dark, and lie there, half asleep, feeling purposeless adrenalin turning my stomach.
It is all rather annoying, particularly as I can't find anything (touchwood) to be really concerned about.

1:16pm now. Still seems to be raining outside, so not sure my M.R.James inspired walk along the beach will happen. Rain keeps being flung at the windowpane behind me. It sounds horrible out there. Well, unless the rain does, ease, the afternoon will be spent trying to ignore that implacable feeling of edginess that hangs over these days.
Maybe I'll just go to sleep instead.

Sunday 26 December 2010

Old Stories found in the Attic

Looking through old stuff in the attic, I came across three stories I had written a long time ago. I was quite pleased as almost none of the stories I used to write exist any more, certainly very few from the 1990s, most lost over numerous house-moves as the years have gone by.
There were three stories I found -or pieces of stories- I can't tell if two of them were part of something larger or not. As far as I can remember -there are no dates on them- these would have been written 1991 - 1992, so I would have been nineteen or twenty.
The first one 'Early Summer Evening' is undoubtedly part of some larger project I never got around to continuing.  Nothing much happens. A woman called Amelia Drummond gets off a train at a quiet station. She walks through a nearby village. That's it. Still, thinking about it, the name 'Amelia Drummond' immediately dates this story to 1991 I should think. I was studying my art A-level (which I failed) at Uxbridge College, and had an unrequited crush on a girl with the same surname.

...a white metal fence, the paint peeling with time (showing the blackened material beneath) held back the bushes that vied for the attention of passengers and staff alike. A row of houses, whose red roofs were just about visible above the green, stood silent and watchful, and for the first time, she wondered what road they were in. She had lived here all her life and this was the first time she had ever thought about it...


I wonder if I had any plans for continuing this three page vignette? I was always coming up with plans and ideas for novels, none of which were ever continued. I have some vague memory of writing 'Early Summer Evening', toward the end of my one year stint at Uxbridge College, so this would have been late spring 1991 I guess... Still, You could probably have guessed that by the title.

The second story I found was later. I can tell this by the fact that the words on the paper are more faded than the first story. I used the same printer, and the ink faded over the two or three years I used it to print stories up from the word processor on my Amstrad CPC 64. You could only write 1500 words before all the memory was used... I would date this story to somewhere in 1992.
This one was called 'What Dreams Await The Ones Who Watch?' and, despite the fact this was written over a year later, people leaving a train at another deserted station. I attempt to describe them; 'the four of them were poets, writers and artists, even a musician or two'. Which, if I'm not mistaken, may well add up to more than four people... I particularly like 'even a musician or two', which somewhat puzzles me. Why or two, and why even... As if musicians were a rare and endangered species. Well, this trip to a deserted station has two musicians. Maybe. Maybe only one, definitely a musician or two though...
There is also a mathematician it seems as well:

Victor came next, a student who was able to make maths seem like poetry, his flowing equations transmuting feeling and emotion in their base formula. His wild mind able to comprehend and gleefully use the fact that logic breaks down on the sub-atomic level.


While Victor may well have been able to 'make maths seem like poetry', I obviously had no idea what I was talking about. Where on earth that last line of the above quote came from I dread to think.
So, our four characters, two of whom may or may not be musicians, leave the station, which is set upon a hill, and look down at a deserted village...

...dark neglected places give birth to desolation. The Desolate scuttle down twilight haunted paths and celebrate in the rain of a winter day. They laugh over snowmen built in the clearings of claustrophobic woods. Only they understand the crooked smile, and the fevered stare these snowmen have.
Spiders come to deserted places. Breeding spiders, feeding on desolation, on the darkness, on the memories left in places. Memories left breeding, breeding into ghosts, playing again and again, whether there is an audience or not.
Like fungus and mould.
The decay of desolation.
Breaking things down, then building them up, so no-one can remember what they once were, so everyone can only see the Now of it. Where once was a door is now a prison...


After this strange feverish epiphany, our characters run back to the station in a state of panic, board a train and 'never see the lonely, unnamed station again'. What a strange story. I wonder what on earth I was trying to describe, back over the summer of 1992 when I was twenty years old. Why snowmen? If I had said scarecrows, I could understand, but snowmen..? Did I find snowmen partiocularly creepy in my just-post teenage years. Then I start rambling on about spiders. Snowmen and spiders. Then fungus and mould. Oh dear.
The last two lines are strange. I was obviously trying to describe some kind of idea. Unfortunately I have no idea what.

The third story I found is called 'The House Where Time Decayed'. The strangest thing about this tale is that I have no memory of writing it, nothing at all. It doesn't sound vaguely familiar. Judging by the faded ink, I would say, again, written when I was twenty...

Time seemed to drip off the bricks of the house, as if the house itself seemed to be sweating, like an overworked horse in the depths of a hot day. The drops of time seemed to gather in stagnant pools around the peculiarly old house. Some of the puddles seeped into the cracks of the paving stone, and were absorbed by the earth, which the roots of the house fed upon, consuming its own waste again and again.


Well, lets quickly skate over the dreadful line about a horse sweating... My god... and anyway, remember, this was actually 1991 or 1992, why on earth did I put in a metaphor about a work horse? Anyhow, despite the fact that what follows the overworked horse analogy isn't much better, there are a number of similarities with 'What Dreams Await The Ones Who Watch', namely that strange obsession with an almost metaphysical decay.
The unnamed narrator enters the house and encounters a number of vague phantoms. The nature of these phantoms is incomprehensible; a figure sitting in total darkness on a chair, a teenage boy on the stairs with his 'head twisted backwards' and a Victorian woman whose eyes 'were more like the eyes of a dog than a human, and I was reminded insanely of a dog I dreamt of when I was a child'.
This last spectre passes through the narrator:

...my skin stretched into tiny slivers, and I felt the fevers of the past that had killed this house run sweating through my veins, and when she had gone, I found myself shivering, crying cold tears, crouched trembling on the bare wooden floorboards.


...which is where the story ended. I certainly made no attempt to make my stories comprehensible at all. Maybe that was the point. I tell you what though, despite the cringe inducing awfulness of the writing, I quite like them, if only for the fact that back then I was writing. I can't remember the last time I tried to write a story, or whatever these pieces I found in the attic are. Ten years ago? It really could be as long as that.
At least I was trying to do something back then.
More than I can say for now.
I blame that sweating and overworked horse....

Boxing Day Christmas Message

Well, I had hoped to put up some photographs from Christmas Eve's wonder amongst the sand dunes on Perranporth beach, but my connection is so terrible, that it actually took 20 minutes to upload one photograph, so I don't think I'll bother. I would like to say I'll get around to uploading some in the new year, but I am far, far too lazy.... so I probably won't.

Was a good walk amongst the sand-dunes though - up to St Piran's Cross, a huge crucifix out in the middle of nowhere and centuries old, looking like some lost Black Sabbath album cover. Then walking through the out-of-season caravan park, which I always think should feel more eerie than it actually does - all those empty windows, and places where people can hide and all those ghosts of lost summers. It does retain a slight dream-like feel about it, but seems most serene and unfortunately not mysterious. Then along and over the sand dunes themselves, the place where I thought I saw a mysterious 'dwarf-shadow-ghost' over the autumn of 1999, the miniature cliff I scrambled down to escape the dunes when I got lost after dark there with Bracken the Yorkshire Terrier in that same autumn. Perranporth doesn't change much. Makes me almost wish for my old walkman and the tapes I was playing at the time. The tape I remember playing the most was 'Rebel Extravaganza' by Satyricon. Not listened to it in years. Probably not since then. I never particularly liked the album. At that point in black metal history where musicianship was turning too technical and un-atmospheric - almost like the caravan park, you could say. It was one of the tapes that Andy recorded for me on those late 90s trips to Middlesbrough.

Christmas Day yesterday, which was somewhat overshadowed by a dreadful headache, which meant that a) I couldn't eat very much Christmas Dinner and b) spent most of the day asleep trying not to be sick. I have no idea where this particularly ferocious headache came from - no alcohol since Saturday night, and I don't normally get headaches, certainly not as bad as this one was. It did mean that I didn't even really enjoy the Doctor Who Christmas special, as I was far too concerned with the potentiality of throwing up. After Doctor Who I retired to bed, feeling both too hot and too cold. My hypochondriac mind soberly considered the possibilities of swine flu and meningitus and other sudden life threatening illnesses. When I woke up though I felt better and went back into the living room to watch the Royle Family Christmas Special with Mum, Dad and Nan. When everyone had gone to bed I even managed to watch episode one of 'Frontier in Space', a Jon Pertwee Doctor Who story, part of the 'Dalek War' box set that was a Christmas present, which is looking very good so far. No gentle sentimental science-fantasy here, its all very serious galactic empires, martial reptile races, thuggish alien mercenaries and space ships carrying cargoes of flour...
No sign of the headache this morning happily.
Might try to take Misty out for a walk along the cliff top path later.

Well, back to Brighton on Tuesday, then back to work on Wednesday. At least it is only for three days before I have three days off for the New Year weekend.
And then.... back to normal, and whatever 2011 brings.

Friday 24 December 2010

Driving Back to Cornwall

Outside of Brighton, the snow has an edgy, grey look. Swept to the sides of the road, blanketing embankments. Bits of hedges poking through like guilty bodies. Remnants of a badly concealed murder.
Passing through nowhere towns, fascinating provincial backwaters. Hairdressers with punning names. Tiny towns that seemed full of nothing but takeaways and Indian restaurants.
The motorway. Nothing but that long perspective into the distance. Grey skies. No colour anywhere. Listening to phone-in shows on the radio. One woman complaining about her 'jag' being pelted by snowballs. A police officer talking about 'ice-assassins'. Juvenile delinquents packing stones into snowballs. Mob attacks on the streets of provincial backwaters... The regular interruption of the news, a darker tale haunting the day, an architect who has disappeared in Bristol, keys and phone found in her house, no sign of her though.
The five-legged stag on top of a gate leading into the grounds of some vast country manor. Five legs to stop it, from one vantage point, being seen as a three legged stag. Apparently. On another gate a lion. A high wall barring entry, and over that wall a click-clacking area of leafless woodland. Snow on the fields, and the hedges that cut the white a velvety almost liquid black.
Night falls about an hour before we reach Perranporth, the road cutting through country unleavened by street light.
Ten minutes past midnight now. Sat on the bed in the spare room. When I first spent a night here, I was twenty seven years old, way back in 1999.
Leaving Brighton this morning, somehow, seems even further back.

Wednesday 22 December 2010

10 Uninspired Notes Three Days before Christmas

1:  Can't reply to any posts at the moment. I have no idea why.
2.  Listening to 'Spirit Caravan'
3.  It has got considerably warmer today.
4.  Bought the short stories of Aleister Crowley today for £2:99
5.  Walked up to Preston Manor yesterday, but failed to arrive there at dusk and got there too early.
6.  Am not feeling Christmas-sy in the slightest. Even less than usual.
7.  Even though 'Christmas-sy' is not a word, the way I have spelt it still looks wrong.
8.  I have got to pack for the return to the familial home tomorrow.
9.  The creative drought is STILL continuing.
10. I suppose the days will start getting longer now that midwinter has passed. Like midsummer, I am never sure whether it is on the 20th or 21st. Maybe even the 22nd?

Saturday 18 December 2010

Saturday Ennui

It is now 12:30pm. I really must go outside. It looks sunny out there. The first Saturday I've had to myself since August at least, and I can't think of a thing to do.
Ridiculous.

Industrial Freezing Slush

The first day of the Christmas holidays for me - not back at work until the 29th December. Am sat in my bedsit, listening to the man next door move about (he seems to be making a cup of tea) andd trying tow ork out where the man in the other room next door comes from. I thought at first he sounded middle eastern, but now think he may well sound more eastern European.
A very gloomy day today. The street lamp across the road is still on. The sky is a blank slate of grey. It snowed last night -a little anyway- though it is now raining. It hasn't quite washed the snow away though, but seems to have formed some kind of industrial slush, which will no doubt freeze and make the pavements impossible to walk on.
There was snow exactly a year ago too. I was on the first day of my Christmas holiday then too. I met up with Joe and Andy at the Meeting House Cafe before wending our way to Preston Park. I bought '2166' by Robert Bolano at the charity shop at the end of London Road. We ended up in the Prestonville where I drank tea instead of pints. I can't remember why now.
I hear the rain dripping against the window.
It seems so cold out there.

Thursday 16 December 2010

December 2048

December rumbles on. Up the slope toward Christmas, an ungainly, lumbering beast. Time becomes split into lumpen blocks; work, home, sleep, Western Road. Waking in the ice-blue gloom of pre 7am. Dread at the thought of the alarm going off.
I dreamt last night of an unsafe bridge over a sunny canal. Walking over the steep slope of the bridge, being afraid I would fall.
A year ago today I was writing about the eeriest part of a winters day a title I had surreptitiously stolen from a line in Suzannah Clarke's 'Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell'.
A year ago.
I am finding the constant acceleration of time to be an increasingly disturbing concept. I was still working at Telegen, and had just moved in here. I can't believe I've been living in the bedsit a year now... though it seems far too long ago I was living anywhere else.
I haven't been very inspired lately to write these tales from bridge 39. The creative drought continues it seems, though I'm sure all get back into it in the new year. Well, I hope so anyway. tides and cycles, patterns and rhythms. I wonder what I'll think of these less than imaginative posts in years to come? this question leads to other thoughts; when will the last post in Bridge 39 be?
I have no intention of stopping, but, at some point, inevitably, Bridge 39 will cease... Will it just fade out like a television series past its glory seasons - like Doctor Who in the late 1980s or will there be some grand finale that ties up all the loose ends and various plot threads, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer?
Hmm.
I've never thought about this before.
Another certainty in life.
Death, taxes and the end of blogs.
Anyhow, I shall end this cyber-maudlinity - I have absolutely no intention of ending Bridge 39 until I retire - I am quite intrigued by the thought of blogs that span a lifetime.
Imagine, I might be writing this when I am 76.
You know, now I've just written that, I now know (I have every intention of being) exactly what I'll be doing at 7:30pm on the 16th December 2048.
I'll be reading this, well, if access to 38 year old posts are still available.
Twice my lifetime so far.
Brr... Given myself the chills now.
I wonder if I'll leave myself a comment?

Saturday 11 December 2010

Midwinter Days

There is no colour in these days.
The sea is flat and barely seems to move.
A cold grey rhythm.

I slept this afternoon, after work, and when I woke, in the last of twilight, the odd shape of the street light on my wall seemed an eye. Some sentinel sent to watch me. A watchman for the night; I am here again, and in these winter days I will not sleep for long.

The dark is full of foreboding.
4:37pm and it is night-time in Brighton.
If this was summer, night would be five hours away.

Friday 10 December 2010

Lethal and Lucid Witnesses

Lately I have been thinking of a book I have not thought about for a long time. I read it over the Christmas / New Year of 2001/2002. I bought it on a return trip from Cornwall back to Brighton. I couldn't quite remember what it was called, but I remember it affected me quite deeply. Held me mesmerised if you like. Which is strange because (until today) I couldn't remember a thing about it, even the title. Nearly. This morning, half asleep, half lost in dreams and waiting for the alarm to go off it came to me, The School of Night. Despite the fact that the book affected me quite deeply, I couldn't remember very much about it at all. A murder? A university town.
I could remember the finals sentence though.
Lethal and lucid witnesses.
It was those four words that had stayed with me over the years. Meaningless in themselves, but still they haunted me, as certain words do sometimes.
Over a cold lunchtime today, I wondered into one of the numerous second hand shops down the North Laine, and there - I recognised it straight away. The School of Night.
An odd coincidence. I flicked to the last page and read that last paragraph, those haunting words lethal and lucid witnesses.
And I put the book back on the shelf and walked back out into the cold midday hour of Sydney Street.

Tuesday 7 December 2010

Under Siege by Ghosts with Unknown Histories

The equation is desolation.
The bedsit feels wrong; an unsafe haunted feel. I should tidy up, but every time I am here, I take refuge on my bed and the television (bad reception, Coronation Street lost in snow) and wait till I can fall asleep. I wake in the dawn, waiting for the alarm, in that cruel beguiling winter light. A white harsh kiss.
Footsteps on the street sound cold.
The taxis passing by sound cold.
Outside the bedsit, the landing falls away from me like a corridor from The Overlook. A Brighton Shining. This House of Bedsits does not feel restful.
I sit cross legged on my bed now, a sheet wrapped around my shoulders. Some pretence at warmth, but I am not in the habit of switching heaters on.
There is some recompense in the desolation of December, and it is this; that there is nothing but December. No past (except in daydreams) no future... no time.
The walk to work and back, Em's flat, sleep, the coffee machine at work.
But this bedsit feels haunted.
Or rather, the landing, the stairways, the bathrooms, the toilets, everything inside this building but outside this bedsit seems haunted.
I am under siege by ghosts whose histories are not known.

(last night I dreamt of dark spaces in the street, and these spaces were portals to places that were lightless. In these lightless places, occult forces would react and merge, a chemical arcana, a non-chemical alchemy...Outside of these lightless places, layers of runes and sigils, symbols from an infinity of oppositing cultures to keep the occult forces trapped harmlessly inside)

10:05pm
We are falling clumsily toward midnight, and from the summit of that valley, the dawn is an eternal cliffs fall away.

Monday 6 December 2010

Vaguely Famous Soap Opera Actors and the Unimpeachable Hours of December

Winter is absolute, a perfect, untangleable equation. There is the call centre (that now well-known view out of the window, the church tower in Ship Street, the distant hill) the walk home ('Urban Outfitters' the shop that replaced Borders is one I shall never enter) the bedsit (a haunted desolate cold). These are the days of my 39th December, and it seems that this has all there been forever, and all there will be.
Winter is absolute.
December is forever.

I spoke to a vaguely famous soap opera actor today at the call centre. I can't tell you who he is due to confidentiality regulations, but his resume was long and fairly impressive. I had hoped he would have appeared in Doctor Who, but not to be. We talked about the 'disgraceful' funding of the arts in this country. I suppose it is disgraceful, but I only said that because I thought it was the kind of thing that one should say to vaguely famous soap opera actors.

Sunday 5 December 2010

Night by the Engineerium

The Engineerium, clinging to the edge of Hove Park. Locked gates at night, but the lights in the grounds seem as searchlights. We skirt the esges of the park also, past the old petrol station, the dog track, the supermarket. All closed now, apart from the petrol station I used to work in.
Lone men in Hove Park. A jogger, a dog walker, and a rather more sinister figure sat on a bench on the path lit by green lamps.
Walking through the darkness. A fog rolls in from somewhere. Lights from the Legal and General building make shafts of film-cliche effects in the thickening white. The windows of the said building are empty. Blank rooms that define devoid. Joe used to work here before before he left for Poland.
Icy roads, though the snow is gone.
Back up past Wilbury Crescent. I have spent as long not living there as I did living there. Playing with these kind of equations in my mind. Almost two years to the week that, via a solicitors letter, we were informed that the owner had died and we had unril the end of February to leave.
Dark old December nights.
Makes me want to sleep for days.

Saturday 4 December 2010

Rain

Kept awake by the rain last night. The sound of snow falling from the roof. Slush-falls sounding like some kind of earthquake. Thought at one point the bedsit was collapsing.
Woke this morning to find the snow all gone. A wonderful December gloom hanging over everything. Walking to work for my four hour Saturday shift this morning, the air smelt particularly ocean-like. A deep marine smell, as if to remind us the sea is still there.
I haven't been down to the sea for weeks.
When I left work at 1:00pm, the rain had become somewhat torrential. Little floods racing down pavements, washing away the ghosts of the snow. I think I much prefer the bleakness of the rain to the snow. There was some kind of student demonstration on. I saw about ten students shouting nonsensical statements being surrounded by about forty policement. Everybody seemed to be having a good time. I had heard that some students have been supergluing themselves to Burtons shop windows. This sounds like a very new urban legend to me. I hope not.
I thought all the Burtons had closed down years ago.

Friday 3 December 2010

Minimal Report


Three days into December.
Snow.
Cold.
Icy pavements are difficult to walk on.
Amusing websites about stupid comics.
'Best New Horror Volume 4'
Watching Jeremy Kyle because I have been on late shifts all week.
Watching 'The Armageddon Factor' at night (episode three now)
Kind of doing a drawing (see above).
Watching the crown of street lights on the distant hill from work as it gets dark.
The whiteness of everything.
(now fading, slush and rain pools, everything smelling kind of clean and dirty simultaenously)