Sunday 27 February 2011

On Sundays, the Bedsit is Full of Edges

Night just fallen, 6:11pm. Blue light heading toward full darkness. Across the street, the yellow windows of flats are muted under the rain-splash on the windows. There is the sound of water dripping somewhere.
Silent in the House of Bedsits. A strange nervy atmosphere as if I shouldn't be here, an agitated haunted air.
I imagine I can hear the sea.
It sounds like the small hours.

Thursday 24 February 2011

The White-Out Days, Beginning to Fade

That curious curving into spring; the lengthening days, the bright gloom of the skies, and midwinter, now seeming decades ago.
I walk a new way back from work now, down a shadowy street between a car park and the backs of the buildings along the seafront. A forgotten, half-industrial place. Glimpses of stairs and iron railing, street lights embedded in to the wall leading to a locked door.
Then pass the Regency Tavern, and that nameless square that leads down to the seafront, then up, onto Preston Street with all its restaurants and fast food joints. Come out opposite the Aberdeen Angus Steakhouse. Up onto Western Road, and it's still light.
I watch two homeless men argue outside the newsagents.
And here in the bedsit, watching the 6:00pm sunset on the houses opposite, a colour like spring, and the blood of childhood grazes, and cartoons, and the warning lanterns left on railway tracks on the covers of 1970s paperback books of train disasters.

I went down the beach today at lunchtime, continued drawing a small A6 picture of a man walking down a set of steps under street lamps and through woodcut-like woods. It was only later I realised I was drawing the entrance to the woods back in Burnside in Scotland.
People scattered over the stones.
I talked with the man on the seafront stall where I bought a cup of tea.
I watched a dog play in the water.

Monday 21 February 2011

The Woman from the Wardrobe (Last Night's Nightmare)

She walked out of the cupboard in my room, dressed in some kind of long robes, lots of scarves and fluttery ribbons, ragged and wrong. I lay in my bed and watched her. She turned to look at me, and I realised that she was not meant to be here, in my room. She smiled, and it was not a nice smile, cold and insane. Staring eyes.
She turned and vanished.
Alone in my bed, but the incursion had left behind echoes.

I woke up, and, confronted with the emptiness of my room, I opened my eyes, and watched the wardrobe with a vaguely superstitious caution.

And fell back to sleep again.

Saturday 19 February 2011

The Less than Pleasant Month before March

February is like a lump of dread stuck in your throat,
The weather is white and bright and gloomy, and I can't remember the last time I saw anything but the sky being that flat amd sickly no-shade.
It seems to have rained constantly, a thin headache-y rain that wets you through, a lukewarm soaking.
The air is freezing though.

Here in the bedsit, the man next door is playing music of some undefined genre. Earlier on, he was playing bongos as I tried to have an afternoon sleep on the sofa. February seems to make hangovers worse. Another two and a half pint hangover today has lent this Saturday a gloomy air of desolation...

Ah well.
Day off tomorrow.

Sunday 13 February 2011

The Perfect Gloom of Particular Sundays

The peculiar gloom of Sundays, I can feel it now, 7:08pm on a Sunday night, sat in the (very tidy) bedsit, a cup of tea on the arm of the sofa, and the sounds of rain outside.
I call it the peculiar gloom of Sundays, but it should really be the gloom of particular Sundays.
Like this one.
A steady drizzle all day. Not cold, not wet. Just wet. Mildly wet. A grey sky. One monotone shade of grey. Earlier as I walked the roads by George Street with Em, I noticed the wet, brown branches of trees seemed spiky and painful, the definition of a weird discomfort, wet and unrestful and Sunday-ish. It isn't just the weather oif course, though, apart from the nauseous heat of deep summer, the last of winter is my least favourite meteorological condition. That great sword of Damocles that is WORK hangs over Sunday too. In less than four hours I shall go to sleep. In about twelve hours that alarm will go off. I often awake before the alarm, but only just. I lie there in that dark hour before the alarm goes off, and this is the worst part of the week. The absolute apotheosis of Sunday gloom is, in fact, on Monday morning. Or could it still be called the last of Sunday night.
By the time I get to work, or WORK as it seems now, it won't be the weekend any more, and WORK will just seem work again. There will be the usual jokes at the coffee machine of how the 'weekend went by far too quickly' and 'we only left an hour ago'. Often, it is me who is the perpetrator of such 'amusing' asides. But really, it is the best I can manage on Monday mornings.
Sundays in summer - well early summer, spring and autumn, are easier. The days are longer and one can forget Sundays by lazing on the beach and reading, or going for long walks through the countryside. Sundays like today just seem to be infectious somehow.
Trawling YouTube for more Castrol GTX adverts, showcasing their creepy music and dream-like visuals, I came across another comment that seemed to further underline these adverts petrol-station gothic. The comment was, simply, that these adverts reminded the commenter of  'rainy Sundays and late nights'.
I can't quite recall how that was meant to fit into the rest of this post. Maybe it wasn't. It may be a rainy Sunday but it is hardly late. 7:24pm now. I really should turn off this laptop before that magical and malevolent internet side-effect of time-consumption kicks in. This is particularly noticeable on Sunday nights, when suddenly, you realise that you have spent four depressing hours on the internet, looking at nothing in particular and now it is time for bed, and that great sword of Damocles and WORK really is about to descend, and-
Anyhow.
Sundays.
Nobody ever really likes them do they?

Thursday 10 February 2011

A Nostalgia for the Petrol Station Gothic

Just been perusing YouTube, and ended up looking at old Castrol GTX adverts. These adverts were strange things, and used to haunt me as a child. Back in a post last September I wrote about these creepy, haunting adverts. So, rambling through Youtube, I came across some of these old adverts. More exciting than the adverts themselves, or the discovery that the music is, in fact, a composition by Mahler, is the knowledge that the adverts seemed to creep other people out too...
One persons comment was as follows:
'haunting memories.victorian sundays, broken dreams of twilight future through an open window and darkened cloud'
This quote, please remember, was written about an advert for engine oil,  nothin which, you would think would remind anyone of victorian sundays and twilight clouds... These sixteen words sum up exactly how the advert makes me feel. It is, in fact, quite spooky... 
The whole thing gets even spookier when you consider that someone had used 'dream of fuel station decay over time' to reach this blog late last month. The two phrases are certainly thematically similar, and both evoke a similar resonance, one which strikes an incredibly curious chord with me. I wrote in the latter blog of how the phrase had reminded me something Thomas Ligotti might write. A tale of obsessive narrators being haunted by images of decaying petrol stations. Back in the post I wrote last September, I wrote of how the Castrol GTX music made me think '...of petrol stations in the countryside... lit by sunset, places of inimical mystery and dream-like resonances...'
Of course, Ligotti had  in fact wrote a story about decaying petrol stations. A tale called 'Gas Station Carnivals' which was about a character's half remembered childhood memories of, on family holidays, stopping at gas stations in 'isolated, rural locales... and often... at sunset'. Attached to these 'small filling stations' were the gas station carnivals of the title. Ligotti goes on to describe these gas station carnivals were always 'situated in the ample empty landscape alongside, or sometimes behind, a rural filling station' and consisted of miniature fairground rides which have never worked that stand 'dark and silent in... (the)...remote rural landscape'.
Andy, after reading 'Gas Station Carnivals' commented as to how the story had given him an oddly nostalgic feel, as if he could almost remember such things too. I knew what he meant. There was something powerfully evocative about Ligotti's story, a kind of feverish and nostalgic 'petrol-station gothic'.
Maybe its just me. After all, the 'victorian sundays..' quote was about an engine oil rather than a petrol station, but there seems to be some kind of underlying archetype here maybe, a new haunting, a new card, just discovered, in a tarot of ghost stories.

Tuesday 8 February 2011

The Day Stretching

It was, if I remember rightly, about this time last year that winter first showed signs of ending. Ah. Looking back, it does seem it was almost to the day. Well, a few days earlier. February 6th to be precise.
Today, of course has been similar.
Bright sun all day, and though the air was still cool, it was by no means cold. Almost warm, in the sun.
Anyhow.
It was upon leaving work tonight at 5:00pm that I realised today represented another marker in the year. The first time I've left work when it has been daylight. Well, far closer to daylight than night anyway.Walking back home, the air had that curious carnival or festival feel that springtime twilights always seem to have. I remember writing back in October of how I wouldn't leave work when it was light until next spring. Well, I might have got the season wrong, but March is only three weeks away now. Goodness.
Three months since I wrote that.
It all seems to have happened alarmingly quick. A week ago, I was noticing that it wasn't quite as pitch black as the week before, and here we are, seven days later and it is closer to day than night. 

Sunday 6 February 2011

Dislodging Bits of Time

Another restless day.
At the Marina with Em when darkness fell. Twilight at least. Creeping up around the boats and the bricks, and the wooden slats on the walkways. An old style darkness. Lost autumns.
A man sits on the steps of a closed shop, his head in his hands.
The wind blows, ceaseless.

Walk back along the darkening seafront. Sinister old Dukes Mound, street lamps amongst the trees and bushes, looking like they've gone feral, hunting for men amongst the rumours and the labyrinthine paths.
The crazy gold course closed. At night, a Stephen King place. Thinking of clowns in the tunnel, a hand popping up out of the holes. Plenty of places for shadows to scuttle, and the wind, still blowing. Still restless.

A cup of tea on the seafront, sheltering from the wind in beige lamp light, between boats and smoke-houses, the kiosks where they sell fish and crab sticks, jellied eels and mussels. Suddenly remembering something.
An inland place.
Early 1989, back in Ickenham and I was sixteen years old. There was some road-widening scheme in place at a major roundabout near where I lived. This necessitated a building site, where builders actually seemed to live, in mobile caravans amongst the bulldozers and the breeze blocks. During the day it was a building site, full of activity and industry. I don't really remember it during the day, but I remember it at night. Despite the fact it was next to Western Road, one of the busiest ways in and out of London, the building site was silent, a deep, reverential and sinister hush. The lights of the mobile caravan-style homes gave no indication to the builders I imagined living inside. In the shadows, machines lay discarded and malevolent and hypnotising. The angles of a bulldozer frozen with the ancient feel of a dinosaur skeleton in the natural history museum. As I walked by, I would entertain myself with stories; the builders who lived there being travelling cannibals, a tribe of neo-flesh eaters who would travel from building site to building site, anthropophagous manual labourers who would leave bones buried in concrete, never to be found.
The air of the sea front was somehow the same, the exact feel, the precise taste of a building site from twenty two years ago.
I think it was the wind that did it. The wind sometimes seems to dislodge bits of time, brings back memories the way that a windy day always seems to carry with it the sounds of children in playgrounds.

Sunday night now and back in the bedsit, as unrestful as the wind outside.
The single light bulb casts a fever glow over everything; the discoloured  patches on the wall, the chair I never use on top of the wardrobe, covered with papers. A box that once held something. I can't think what now though, an Argos cast off, a department store lamp that only worked for three months.
I hear the humming of the lap top and the fridge, and someone moves, somewhere in this house. The sound of movements that seem to be generated from the walls. A stone tape perhaps.
Maybe the wind disturbs the memories in houses too, and houses, I suppose, are ghosts of their own building sites.

Saturday 5 February 2011

Soviet-Era Hours

The brawling sea, ill-light and an inability to remember the colour of the sky. No sun. No depth. Nothing. The sky is a void of no-colour. No temperature either. Not warm and not cold. A lukewarm, lukecold unpleasantness. A sickness of the air. Like breathing after a night of chain smoking.
February is a country where the industrial revolution never stopped, never progressed. Late Victorian factories producing nothing but the thick miasma of these days. An industry of epidemics, like rumours of Polio, passed through thick and slow moving waters.
The skeletons of octopi, washed up on broken shores. An impossible driftwood.
I lay on my sofa this afternoon and watched it get dark. Drifting in and out of sleep. Out of the bedsit window, I could see the top floors of the houses across the street. On the roof, a cluster of chimneys growing darker, till finally they black shapes against the fading skies. I watched the lights of rooms be turned on. It reminded me of December, those long slow days leading up to Christmas, that bleak ritual of lit light bulbs in the barely-afternoon.
The man in the bedsit next door is playing music. A bass rumble that accompanies his opening and closing of cupboard doors and draws. Cutlery rattle, a dinnertime song.
February is best when night falls, because we can forget the hollow white light of its days, its hours that feel like a lifetime sentence of having to work in some mythical hellhole factory in some  brutal and forgotten Soviet era country, beset by blackouts and superstition and rumours, only, of revolution.

Friday 4 February 2011

Lost in the Iron Lung Days

A day robbed of brightness, an iron lung day. Breathing in February, the air all thick and white and slow.
From the window of the call centre, the sea was all grey and choppy. Foamy explosions marred by the cars and the road of the seafront road whose name I can never remember. Didn't see anyone walk down the steps to the beach.
Deserted pebbles.
The ghost of the dog that's said to walk the beach walks there alone today.

Walking back home tonight to the bedsit I felt like continuing walking. The gloom that the bedsit seems to generate is strongest not  when I'm here, but when I'm approaching here. I felt like walking anyhow. Through the gloomy twilight, and not through anywhere picturesque either, but an industrial landscape full of docklands, factories, abandoned waste grounds where crooked street lamps flicker morse code messages for the ghosts of detectives.
Walking to find a harbour that couldn't exist, even in these most fictional of places.

7:18, Friday night.
The House of Bedsits is silent.
I saw the cleaner tonight, when I returned. An old man, goblin-like, the ghost of all the old school caretakers who were ever weird when you were at school. I presume he cleans the bathrooms and the toilets, but I only ever see him on the stairs, walking between the levels.
I say hello to him, and he never replies.
Just smiles back and his mouth always seems to have too many teeth.

Tuesday 1 February 2011

February-Shock

The first of February is always a shock. January seems to last for so long, that I always start to think that there are no other months. Rather like August actually. Suddenly February 1st turns up, and the year has begun to lose its newness.
2011 already has a chapter done.
Welcome now to the infanthood of the year.
Finishing work at 5:00pm tonight, and upon walking home, the evening was considerably light. No longer pitch black when I leave work.
This morning, the day was clear of clouds, and the horizon of sea, watched from the call centre seemed to curve further toward Europe than the day before.
This afternoon though, all horizons were eaten by fog, and the sea was a depth-less white void.