Last Hour of June

Soon be a midnight of the year-
The willow-month may settle
behind quiet graves, as a

churchyard moon in a night-blue
sky drifts. July is drunk
and sways at the bar

with pints of gin and paths
by rivers flooded with hogweed
and lead.

-an hour before midnight

Strange Man-Dressed-as-Baby in Lynching Ceremony Mystery

I met up with Em at lunchtime today, and after procuring for myself a meal deal from Boots, headed to the Pavilion Gardens to eat said food.
Halfway through the meal-deal, there was some kind of commotion. A large group -twenty or so- consisting of holidaymakers dressed in shorts and Hawaiian-looking shirts seemed to be quite excited about something. Many of them had A4-sized pieces of paper, some of which seemed attached to clipboards, giving them a surreal 'office-outing' type feel.
As Em and myself watched they all rushed en-masse to surround a figure lying on the ground. The figure was a full sized man dressed as a baby, in an adult sized romper suit, complete with dummy, and making accompanying crying and gurgling noises. This caused even more excitement to the strange holidaymakers who surrounded the figure now rolling about on the ground. It looked, as Em pointed out, quite, quite sinister and more than a little disturbing, as if we were witnessing some obscure lynching ritual, a Brighton version of tarring and feathering perhaps.
The gathered holidaymakers then began to sing 'London Bridge is falling down' at the man dressed as a baby, who looked pleased at this. The excited holidaymakers then moved to some other part of the gardens and I lost sight of them.
There was, however, another group of excited and Hawaiian-looking holidaymakers who then turned up and the whole ritual was repeated again, as disturbing as the first time.
This time I noticed that there were two or three women, dressed in red shirts with the logo 'Red Letter Days' on the back. Wasn't this some kind of company that specialised in balloon flights and Grand-Prix driving experiences? These women were taking photographs of the excited Hawaiian-looking group, who looked so pleased their broad smiles seemed in danger of splitting their faces.
Lunchtimes this week have been just strange.

A Reverie for Old Rainfalls

Used to drift on the afternoons, a big absence, an amnesia. I remember windows, and wallpaper patterns, and something that reminds me of an attic carpet. Wake late, stay up till the early hours. The summer of 1997, 25 years old. £50 a week to spend on cigarettes and albums. I must have spent the afternoons sleeping, dreaming away the days till the second year of uni began again.
Sometimes there would be rain and storms.
A thunderstorm, and sat in the playroom watching the storm, the rain on the corrugated plastic roof above me. Heavy driving rain, cigarettes, Silk Cut and cups of tea. And there. In the open door leading to that long, green garden, a Rottweiler. We looked at each other, both startled for a second. both of us leapt to the door at the same time. The dog barking, and I put my shoulder against the door. All my strength to close it because the dog wanted to get in. Angry, joyous barking. Locking the door. Comfort-click of the key. Run up three flights of stairs to my room. Dog barking at Rich next door, snapping at his hand.

Miss the petrol station rhythms sometimes. Those rainy afternoons that littered the years from 2002 - 2007. Darkening skies, and a series of customers so predictable and expected, you could set your watch by them; taxi drivers, white van drivers, the harried mother who always bought 10 silk cut every day... and in that unconscious rhythm a kind of peace. Drawings on the counter, whatever I wanted to play on the stereo, and on those rainy afternoons that tipped the year into autumnn, the houses on the horizon of Hove Park became a distant unreachable mystery.

The beach is yellow and full of pebbles and I avoid it. I don't know why.

'A Deeper Kind of Slumber' by Tiamat on stereo.

In the autumn of 2000, my first year in Brighton, there was a deep luxuriant darkness. I remember catching the 49 bus back from town to the Moulscoomb estates where I lived. Sat on the upper deck of the bus at the front. Why do I always remember it being dark after work then? 5:30pm void, and there were lightning flashes, and nobody I know now had moved down to Brighton yet.

Landings, hallways, corridors, the table by the front door where the post is gathered. No-one ever has anything but official looking letters from banks and the council tax office.
I must go outside in ten minutes.
Seagulls.
Somebody shouting.
More like talkking.

A pile of books on the shelf above the kettle.
An upended chair above the wardrobe.
An empty pot noodle carton (spicy curry) on the floor.

There are curtains that I can draw against the 'cooker' and the sink. The latter consists of a grill and an oven that cannot be used at the same time as the hob above. The grill will set off the fire alarm at the slightest provocation.

I used to drift on afternoons.

Weird People in St Nicholas Churchyard

At lunchtime in St Nicholas Churchyard, reading John Burnside's excellent 'Living Nowhere', eating an expensive 'meal-deal' from Boots and wondering, idly, what on earth I could do to make myself feel better about turning 40 next year.
A warm-ish day. A few clouds in the sky, pleasant enough to be out in, though not as high-summer hot as recently.
Walking up and down the main path through the churchyard is a tall, raggedy man. He looks down at the sort-of-cobbled path. He walks slowly, -then in a sudden burst of manic energy, takes three or four very quick steps forward whilst bringing his knees as high up as possible. He then resumes his treacle slow walk again, before repeating this odd manoeuvre, reminiscent of some of the movements frequent in people with certain types of schizophrenia. He continues this strange and jagged method of locomotion to the bin at the entrance to the churchyard, where he fiddles about with something inside the bin, before walking back up again.
I am aware of some shouting in the mid-churchyard distance. I look up and see a group -two or three anyway- of 'skag-head types'. The churchyard is well known for them. Or was anyway. Five years ago I was mistaken for one of them. This was when I was living in my studio flat on Buckingham Street. It was a Sunday and I had awoken with a dreadful hangover and an all consuming need to avoid my landlord, the sinister Dr Ra, whom I knew would be visiting at some point. I had elected to rest in the churchyard which was only a short few minutes walk away. The fresh air did not help my hangover. I lay down in the long grass between the tombs and entered a light and nauseous sleep. I remember being aware of voices. People. I squinted at them. Three 'emo' type teenagers pointing at me. 'Look' one of them said in a slight awed hush 'he's definetly a skag-head!'.
I fell back into my hungover sleep again, and by the time I had woken and returned home, the sinister Dr Ra had long gone.
Anyhow.
There were two or three skag-head types in the churchyard today. One of them, whenever somebody walked by, would shout at them the strangely sinister and aggressive line 'have you got the time on you?'. Nothing else was said, but the words were delivered in such a way as to promote an air of menace and possible violence. People responded with wary 'o-clocks' as they hurried down the churchyard path, and past the man who was still doing his strange possibly schizophrenic and repetitive walk.
As I finished the last of my meal deal, I ruminated on the possible reasons he could have for asking for the time in such an aggressive and confrontational manner, but could come up with none, save that it may have been some kind of test -or perhaps some code- to ascertain whether or not the passers by may, or may not, have been able to supply him any heroin.
Of course, he might just have been annoyed he had forgotten his watch.
Then there was a strange growling to the other side of me. The sound was like a cross between an old fashioned aeroplane, a small dog and an excited child. The growl continued, the pitch dropping towards the end as the growler, presumably, ran out of breath. With some trepidation I looked up to see this growler.
It was a businessman, walking along under the pleasant churchyard trees. Middle-aged, suit and tie, and a small bag that looked as if it might have contained lunch, perhaps sandwiches.
The growl faded away, and he continued walking, and the skag-head shouted at him if he had the time, which he ignored, as he also ignored the jagged-walking man, who, it must be said, also ignored him.

I then walked quickly back to work, and as I left the churchyard, all three of them happily ignored my hasty exit.

Building Card-Mazes under Storms

The hot sunlight of the very early morning combined with my need to escape the bedsit -even when just woken from sleep- led me to St Nicholas Churchyard shortly after 8:00am. I was quite happy sitting on a tombstone in the shade of big old churchyard trees, drinking a Diet Coke, and wishing I could laze about in the churchyard all day. Summer had, it seemed, arrived.
Though this last was not entirely untrue, by the time afternoon came, we were shown the other side of summer. Skies darkened in that tense and ominous way that precedes a storm. An afternoon night. Rumbles of thunder - deafeningly louder when out by the lifts at work - then flashes over the sea - a yellow electric taste - the storm had arrived.
Despite a few forked lightning flashes over the sea, the storm was not as impressive as hoped for.
Summer storms seemed much more frequent when I was a kid back up in Scotland. I remember one time, deep in the summer holidays, in that strange deep-ness of summer that seems both remote from the beginnings of summer, and far from the school-sad end. I don't remember what year it was, but it was when we living in Forres, probably either the summer of 1983 or 1984. I have a vague memory that it may have been before our annual holiday down to England to see family.
Strange days they were; hours of packing and un-realness, plans for the fortnight in Wolverhampton and Worcestershire drawn up with my sister, as serious as plans for a war. Days that belonged nowhere.
This odd memory. I remember myself being alone in the house, but given my age, this seems unlikely, and only felt I was alone. I was in my room, at the back of 89 Drumduan Park, and there was a summer storm come. A storm far deeper and heavier than today's pale though diverting imitation. I remember through my narrow window, the boiling clouds, an angry and frightening vortex of bruises, and below them, the omnipresent Black Woods we said were haunted. Our house - the whole of Drumduan Park - the entirety of Forres - lay under those troubling trees.
I remember my room as being very tidy - a luxury, which further gives credence to the possibility that this was a before-holiday time - there was probably some reward / punishment scenario depending on the tidiness of said room.
A clean and hoovered carpet, all my toys and games and Doctor Who annuals neatly in my cupboard. I remember the carpet. I had chosen it myself; a red-lava abstraction, deep-sunset squares, the shade of dream-dusks and coal-fires.
I was playing cards, or rather, I was building card houses, -but thats not quite true either. I had neither the skill or patience to build cardhouses, so what I was doing was building card-mazes. One storey labyrinths, hearts and diamonds and clubs and spades precariously leant against one another and against the base of the wall below the window. Kings and queens and jacks and strangely sinister jokers as roofs. In this new storm-born night, I would imagine this other night in the maze I was building. These miniature corridors, haphazard tunnels, and wide yet tiny rooms. Hallways of temples in unexplored jungles, abandoned spacecrafts crashed on unmapped planets. Flashes of lightning flaring across the room, the black and serious shadow of the woods staring down - more some single entity than a collection of disparate trees, and as a soundtrack to all this, those continual peals of thunder, rolling down those long and haunted afternoons.

The memory is not connected to any other events, and every time there is a storm in summer, I always think of it. I don't know why.

Ghost Stories from the Typhoid-Bedsit

Like the protagonist of some Edwardian ghost story, I find myself haunted, not by a spirit (except that which in folklore might be termed a genus loci) but by a place. Through the long hours of work, through lunch sat in St Nicholas Churchyard and the hour-and-a-bit in the launderette, I find the shadow of the bedsit falls over me; the typhoid-yellow light, the sickly beige walls, patches of white paint inexpertly applied over holes in the wallpaper, the rain-stained curtains, and the window frame that rattles like angrily-thrown dice any time there's a slight breeze.
I didn't sleep well last night -as I tend not to do here- I fall asleep okay but wake up at 4:00am and don't really fall back to sleep again. As the inimically tense nature of the bedsit exerts itself, it seems an absurd idea that anyone could sleep here, as absurd as sleeping out on the landing, or in the hallway. The bedsit does not feel private enough for something as intimate as sleep. It would not be possible to hide away from the world here. I hear the man next door as I write; turning the tap on, unscrewing jars, and at night, his snoring often disturbs my sleep.
When I leave work, I reluctantly head back here, knowing that any motivation I had had during the day for any artistic project will be leached away within - well, seconds of stepping inside. I am exaggerating of course - but the idea of doing a drawing here - or a painting - or anything apart from these odd asides in Bridge 39 seems as absurd as sleeping.
It is all academic anyway. I do, at least, have the finances to leave this place when I wish to, and it should only be the end of summer before I can happily close the door to this place. Despite what I say, this place has seen me in good stead; it is cheap, I needed to move somewhere desperately after leaving the nightmare flat in November 2009, the landlord was fantastic about waiting for housing benefit last summer when I was unemployed, and despite the thinness of the walls, everyone who lives here seems remarkably quiet... but my dislike of being here is not a rational thing any more. When I leave the bedsit for one of my twilight walks (that last for hours, all the better to avoid being here) I breathe a sigh of relief - seems I can breathe again - as if the air in the bedsit is tainted somehow; thicker, laced with a soporific narcotic whose side effects also include a sense of unspecified anxiety; an almost imperceptible air of foreboding...
I am exaggerating again of course. It is not that bad, but if this were an Edwardian ghost story, then what would the denouement be? Would I discover as in Blackwood's 'The Listener' that a former resident had succumbed to some old fashioned fever here? Maybe it would transpire that this place was what once used to be termed a lunatic asylum - perhaps for the criminally insane and my bedsit was once a cell for a curiously deranged murderer? Perhaps, in some fit of claustrophobic possession one stormy night, I tear up the floorboards, and in the space between the first and second floor might I discover the bones, perhaps, of some eloping nun?
Far more likely, and through some train of events that would not be fully explained, I might turn out to be the haunting, and that I would be condemned to haunt this typhoid-yellow cell for the rest of eternity.
What a hell that would be.

A Rum and Unheimlich Sunday

Went round Andy's flat after he finished work last night at 10:30, and ended up drinking rum till 5'0'clock this morning. I crashed out on his sofa, and woke up sometime before midday feeling very hungover. I fell back to sleep again and finally got up off the sofa at about 2:00pm. Andy got up then too, but poor Andy had to go to work, and I had a hungover afternoon and evening to myself...
Leaving Andy's house I was struck by the sudden oven-heat of the day. Where had this come from? Yesterday was the usual white and drizzly gloom, lukewarm and sick, but stepping out of Andy's house was like walking into the middle of summer. Hungover-hungry and riddled with hungover-indecision (I ended up buying some 50p cheese and onion rolls) I headed home.
Fortunately the bedsit was kind of tidy, and after finishing my unhealthy snack, I got into bed, pulled the covers over me and went to sleep for a few hours. It was a strange sleep though, shot through with dreams I can't recall now, and I kept waking every so often, with a sudden conviction there was something incredibly important I had to do, but couldn't remember what. This amusing, but irritating anxiety eventually led to me getting back up at about 6:00pm. I was still hungover, and felt oddly out-of-synch with my body, and, despite the fact I had spent most of the day sleeping, utterly exhausted.
I sat on my bed for a while, and wondered why my bedsit was so uncosy, so unhomely, so unrelaxing. There is a great word in the German language that sums up how the bedsit makes me feel, and that is 'unheimlich' (sp). It translates, I think as 'unhomely' but there is also a string flavour of the uncanny about it too... but it does sum up how the bedsit makes me feel, very much ill-at-ease and uncomfortable in an oddly haunted fashion.
I ruminated on such thoughts for a while before deciding to head over to Em's place, who is at her nephew's christening in Worcester for the weekend.
What a revelation.

After a shower (thanks Em) I lay on her bed by the window reading 'Living Nowhere' by John Burnside, and drinking a cup of tea and cocunut juice (not from the same cup). The window was shut, and the noises of the street seemed far, far away... Compared to the bedsit it felt luxuriantly private.

I left her place reluctantly to find a phone box to call her. It was very surreal being outside. The air was thick with that still, heavy heat most often associated with August. It was 9:00pm and still light, and the pubs and bars down Western Road were packed with drinkers... and the usual vulgarians that Brighton attracts. I saw one such specimen stagger up Western Road with those curious 'spidery' movements they do when drinking. Barechested, ridiculously sunburnt, he spat on the pavement and took a swig from his can of Special Brew.

I finally found a phone box that worked by Waitrose. Well, it didn't work actually; it took my 60pence and gave me no dial-tone, but I got Em to phone me back there. Public phone boxes are weird and unpleasant things. This one -as they all do- stank of piss and vomit, and the glass of the windows seemed to be being attacked by some kind of virulent mould. Above the phone itself there was a prostitute's card advertising a 'pre-op transsexual full fantasy wardrobe' .

I was glad to leave the phone box.

I headed down the beach, thinking a quiet walk to the garage by the swimming pool would be pleasant. Despite the gathering darkness, the boulevard, beach and lawns were packed with people. The thought of too-many people was decidedly unpleasant, and the hangover-exhaustion was kicking in again so I came back to the bedsit instead, to a dinner of

smoked mussels, boiled potatoes and mayonnaise.

And now, hopefully, the last hangover-indecision riddle of the day to solve; a last cup of tea or just straight to bed?

Another cup of tea I think, just to give me another half hour of weekend...

A Corridor through Old Space

This morning, I was thinking about a story I wrote about ten years ago. I can't remember what it was called, but I do remember that I had set it in my fictional dark counterpart of Worcester called Clovelly Heath. The tale concerned two students at Clovelly University, trapped in the claustrophobic ending of their relationship. In the story, they had stayed late at night after a lecture, and in the empty buildings of the unversity had discovered a new series of impossible corridors, stretching on into forever. In the story the male character had managed to escape, and looked back into the cursed corridors only to see his soon-to-be ex-girlfriend, still lost within the corridors.
Which is where the tale ended.
The story was not particularly original. When I wrote this story it was only a year after I had read Danielewski's 'House of Leaves' for the first time. In that work of understated genius, the interior architecture of the house would shift and stretch into impossible forms. There was a stairway, for instance, that was deeper than the earth itself.
Anyhow, at lunchtime, I found myself walking by the old call centre, Telegen, as I made my way to Resident Records down the North Laine. The windows I passed were oddly black, as if the interior of the building had been filled with a dark viscous liquid that stopped any light escaping. I couldn't quite see what was causing this. As I approached the corner of the building - where the fire escape that leads -or led- into the main call centre was, I saw that it was open. Intriqued to see the interior of this place where I turned my head to look inside... only to be confronted by something both startling and oddly familiar.
Instead of the cavernous interior to the call centre that I was expecting, there was, instead, a corridor. The corridor stretched through what used to be the call centre. I only glanced in for a second or two before I had passed by. Someone had built a corridor, white walls, white tiled ceiling, closed doors on either side, through the old call-centre, a new space cutting through the inky blackness.
I didn't see where it led, nor if there was anyone inside, still looking, after ten years, for a way out.

The Possessed Sea

Between phone calls at work, I glanced out at the sea. There was a sudden shift in the water - or rather, in the nature of the water. The change was hard to define, but the water seemed suddenly deeper somehow, and a different colour, a night-green, and this night-green was slashed with the black of shadows.
I imagine this striking change was due to the sea being choppier than normal - certainly it did not seem like the placid waters of the English Channel. Under the rainy, lowering skies -it seems to have rained continually for weeks now- the ocean took on a more threatening aspect, like a premonition of a storm, or a feverish illness.
With the horizon vanishing into this summers constant white void, the sea took on an oddly disquieting dreamlike quality.
I took another call, and when I next looked out of the window, the sea had reverted back to its usual unremarkable self.

Wednesday on the Rosary of Summer

At St Nicholas Churchyard at lunchtime. Troubled skies threaten rain, but deliver instead premonitions of autumn. Wind disturbing and disquieting. The kind of day that seems to bring the noise of playgrounds on the air, a phantom-breaktime in spectral schools.
The light under the trees is dark, and the air is suffused with a damp and drizzly sorrow. The taste of the breeze is that of a curious desolation; a gravelly path, lined by scrubby bushes at the base of an unremarkable mountain under lukewarm leaden skies. Perhaps that school again, and that playground, -but when the children have gone, or where they have never have arrived.
(littered with damp leaves and splashes of rain)
Em and myself crouch on a tombstone opposite the church. Down the path from us sat on a bench, are three street drinkers playing some nostalgic song on a tape player. Something from the 1980s I can't quite recall.
The churchyard has always been here. There have been an infinity of lunchtimes like this melancholic hour. The churchyard might remember them all but I doubt it. They are probably lost on the wind, where they drift like the noise of those distant and sorrowful playgrounds.

Cynical Midsummers Day Poem

Endless grey seas, endless grey skies.
Skirting the edges of sleep, always,
and never for long enough.
If there is no drizzle, no lukewarm
sickly rain it is a blessing.
The night now start drawing in.

Rats Crouched by Seas (a reverie for unreal autumns)

Later than September, or October. November then, or perhaps some other month that lies behind November, like a shadow, or a follower.
A geography of an interior urban-occult landscape; tall and narrow houses set far back from the road, hidden behind bushes and decades-old trees. Wet leaves caught on branches flung down by the wind.
Under the lamplight pools, they look like rats, crouched by miniature seas.
Raining of course. It always rains in this unreal season.
Walking the Sunday roads, watching the roadside river, the puddle-seas around blocked up drains, this Hades-entrance clogged up by sycamore leaves.
I think of that undersea city; a sewage-pipe Atlantis, a R'lyeh of overflow drains and Victorian plumbing.
Closer to the tiny parades of shops these unwatched (but watching) suburbs always lead to, the front gardens of the houses grow smaller. Fade away till they are swallowed by the bricks of the house.
We are left now with an architecture of steamy pipes and the smells of cooking. Yellow light from the front room kitchens spilling out onto the pavement.
In the night-rain, the light is like liquid.
Only shadows move in these rooms, and I could turn to watch them but I do not and walk on.
My footsteps are lost in the tides.

A Dream of my Grandparents House

I am back again. The house is empty. No-one new has moved in since my grandparents. All the rooms are empty, but as with all dreams about the house, it is haunted. On a cushion are our two old Yorkshire Terriers, Bracken and Bess. Bracken is alive, but Bess is dead, but both are ghosts. It is hard to remember the logic of a dream. Perhaps Bracken did not know he was dead, but Bess did. Bess's eyes drawn and staring, an unpleasant glance betraying a canine and unpleasant knowledge, a bloodshot experience. I am pleased to see them and stroke both their heads. I know that their appearance as these spectres is an effect of the house. An empty attic, somehow situated on the first floor. Brick walls. Darkness gathers in the house, shadows that pool like water. Outside there is still sun, but it is a deep night in here. Fear, nostalgia, and a kind of euphoria grip me; shall I stay in here as it gets dark? There is a sudden image of the gate of a wooden fence, a feeling of terror and panic. The front door is locked. I am trapped in the house and must escape through the garden, if I am to escape at all.

Random Fragments from a Psychic Southside

We arrive in the middle of the night. Asleep in the darkness of a new room, suddenly afraid of 'ghost-crabs' under the bed.
All I remember.

January 1978, and we arrived in Kinloss, North-East Scotland where my Dad had been posted. We were due to live at a house (66 Abbey Crescent) in Southside, the Sergeants Married Quarters.
We lived there for three and a half years, when we moved to the nearby Officers Married Quarters at Burnside.

Everything that happened at Southside happened in the 1970s. This is obviously untrue. We left halfway through 1981, but I cannot, somehow, comprehend anything at Southside happening in the 1980s. I find it easiest to remember Southside as a winter place, remember it always in darkness, under snows and ghost stories and cold.

Southside was set in an 'L' shape. Looking at Google Maps it seems relatively large - three times the size of Burnside - though it is hard to tell. Memory dictates not that it was huge, but that it was labyrinthine. A warren of alleyways and obscure playgrounds and short uts, a secret geography.

Southside was surrounded by a high green fence, and surrounding Southside was farmland. A railway track ran along the southern length, behind out house at 66 Abbey Crescent. The sound of the trains could be heard all over Southside. The mirrors in our bathroom used to shake when the train passed by. There was a craze for a certain suoerstition during one period, that it was bad luck to have your feet on the ground when a train was passing.
Jump on anything, any piece of playground equipment or fence, just get off the ground.

Summers so far north in Scotland were dark-less. A few short hours of twilight-light in the small hours and that was all. I might have gone months without seeing night-time. Early to bed and wake long after the sun had risen. The coming of autumn and the lengthening nights were a big thing. Sat on the roundabout on the playground our house opened onto. Late August. Sombre conversations that the days were getting shorter, that soon we would be out to play when the street lamps came on.

I remember the first time I was allowed out to play after dark, when the street lamp first clicked itself on; that deep, satisfying red warm-up hue. It signified the night. Dancing round one of the lamps with Carl and my sister chanting 'the lights are on and we're allowed out to play'.

Long winters and endless snows, the playground deserted and sinister. Sat on my front step with Carl telling rude jokes and ghost stories, being too afraid to venture far from the house. Losing my Action Man Space Ranger helmet in the snow, being afraid of the punks on the swings.

The landscape of the playground. In the centre a wooden slide, underneath there were benches you could sit on. A concrete tunnel. A roundabout. Climbing frames. Clusters of logs that we said were haunted by something called 'the beaming eyes'. The swings. There was a rumour that there was a girl 'who had swung all the way round'. This idea terrified me, as if this feat had wrung some impossible change on the victim, as if the swings were alive.

Concrete ground.

Injuries aplenty.

My room at the front of the house, my first ever room with posters of the Loch Ness Monster and tales of true hauntings. For some reason, a picture of a 'poltergeist incident' with a floating drum seemed particularly terrifying. Falling asleep and dreaming about top trumps horror cards and Rom the Spaceknight.

I remember Sharon, our next door nighbour-but-one saying how she liked to sit in her living room and try to watch it get dark.

It is only over the last five years or so that I have started dreaming about Southside. The dreams are all remarkably similar. I am entering Southside at dusk, trying to penetrate to the heart of the housing estate, which is somewhere near where I used to live, even though we lived on one of the edges of Southside. The geography is often different; rivers run between the houses, there is a cafe, or the houses are surrounded by giant sand dunes. The street lamps switch themselves on and I feel an overwhelming joy that I am back at Southside under the light of the street lamps, and also afraid that I am not meant to be here because it is MOD property and I no longer live here.
I wake up before I come anywhere near Southside's mysterious and unmappable heart.

Uictor Est Caligo

Rained all day.
This last week has been a triumph of meteorological gloom that is absolute, even to the extent that it has started to remind me of the first lines of Edgar Allan Poe short stories; so all-encompassing, so over-the-top in their melodrama that one cannot help but be impressed.
Couldn't help but stare out of the window at the sea all day. There was no colour out there, nothing but rain flinging itself at the windows of the call centre. The horizon of the sea softened into a sickly white, and the distances of Brighton fading into a carnivorous void that was nonetheless completely without any kind of drama or tension whatsoever.
Sat in my bedsit now. Still raining outside.
Days that remind me of living in Forres, dark Sundays in a house overshadowed by the Black Woods on top of the hill. In the cosy living room with series of books (often Fighting Fantasy) or comics, watching Star Wars or Battlestar Galactica on VHS, drawing superheroes on pieces of paper, and everywhere that still-gloom of Sundays sinking into everything.
At some point, often after dinner, I would go to my room, forgotten through the long and headache-y afternoons. My room would be a cold and unfriendly place, abandoned during the day. There was always something a little spooky about returning to a bedroom after having no0t been in there the entire day, particularly if it was just getting dark, and out there, up the slope of the garden, the Black Woods looking down.
As I walked back tonight, I watched the rivers of water run beside the pavement, rushing ionto the drains and into the undercity, and I am home now, and it is still raining out there.

Looking for Toothpaste

Nothing worse than the alarm in the mornings. Lie in bed for an hour before, half-awake, knowing that that infernal vibrating and beeping tune will go off. Keep checking the time -40 minutes, 20 minutes... 10 minutes...
Then the alarm.
The bed is the most comfortable place in the world.
Get dressed, then down the landing to the bathroom. Have to push the bathroom door hard to get it to shut, then scrape the lock across. More harsh sounds. The trickling water has little in the way of power. At least it is warm this morning.
Then back to the bedsit room; Put on the kettle, look for the hairbrush, look for the toothpaste.
I dread looking for my toothpaste. It is one of those mysteries that I never think about after 8:30 in the morning when I leave the house and start the walk to work. Every morning, without fail, the toothpaste will be in some new and puzzling place.
This morning it was behind the television, nestled amongst the wires and scartleads.
I have no idea why.

Seagulls and Guilt

White-grey days to sun, and the sun on the sea looked warm. A green sea. I wondered what it would be like to fall in the sea, out of sight of land. Sink among the calm tides under the new-blue skies. Fall asleep under the waves, and wake on the shore.
Walk back home, sea-soaked, for a cup of tea.
At lunchtime in St Nicholas Churchyard, a seagull kept watching me eat my sandwiches. I was at first annoyed, then worried about the safety of my sandwich -that beak looked wicked-sharp- then finally sorry for the poor thing.
No fish to hunt, just bits of crisps and sandwiches to hope for.
Didn't get any though.
I felt oddly guilty walking back to work.
An almost supernatural tiredness this afternoon, creeping up through phonecalls and 5pence coffees from the machine. A doodle I was doing showed a man fast asleep in a comfortable looking bed in a dark room.
This, it must be said, did not make me feel any more awake.

The Girl with Yellow Teeth

Last night, before I reached the walled garden, I was stopped on Western Road by a half familiar woman. I say half-familiar because I have a curious inability to remember faces, even well known ones. Conversely, this means that strangers often seem familiar.
I stopped. She was young, twenty maybe, and as soon as she opened her mouth to speak, the bright-yellow of her teeth served as the inevitable warning signal;
'What it is right - I'm really worried - I locked myself out and I need... (don't remember what she said next) ...I just need to catch the bus, so I need 63 pence-'
I interrupted her.
'Sorry, I aint got-'
But she walked away. I heard her go to the person behind me; 'What it is right - I'm really worried...'
I walked on myself, leaving me to puzzle why the four words I said to her were, for no reason at all, spoken in a sub-Cockney accent.

The Walled Garden

Came across the walled garden at twilight, in those little-explored streets between Portland Road and the seafront. Empty roads, and the spill of willow-trees over a high fence, a man walking his dog, vanishing into the nightfall corner.
I don't know what the building is. It looks curiously Mediterranean, but this could just be an effect of the warm summer night. Around the building, the gardens are hidden by a high and curving wall. Clustered branches silhouette themselves against the darkening blue of the sky. Their curious spiralling nature makes them look like tentacles.
I wonder on the garden itself, that hidden space below the trees. It is this wondering that makes such spaces so mysterious; are they tangled, are they neatly kept, is the ground here covered with leaves, discarded autumn-skin over always damp earth?
I pass the building by, leave it behind, reach the seafront just before dark. There is a bright full moon. The reflected moonlight looks oddly artificial, as if the result of a giant celestial lightbulb. I sit on a bench and drink a can of diet-Coke, watch the boats seemingly drift on the horizon. The pale deck-lights are as unreal as the moon. From this distance they look like the heads of miniature street-lamps, bobbing on the waves.

Restless

...probably because I am now waiting to move out of the bedsit, and cannot really do anything as yet, and nothing is as yet planned. It is here where I am most restless, waiting for sleep, waiting for that alarm to go off in the too-early bright summer mornings.

At lunchtime Is at in St Nicholas Churchyard and continued reading 'The Canal' which is proving to be quite entertaining. Three women sat over the other side of the path from me, scattered amongst the tombs on their coats and blankets. They all faced the same direction -toward the dead lamp in the dark corner- as if they were an audience for some curious experimental art performance. On a larger tombstone, an incongruously smart and dreadlocked hippy crouched, watching the women. Perhaps he knew them. I imagined him to be a security guard, or perhaps a bouncer, at this strange, imagined art performance.

Oddly intense dreams last night, of people I once knew, and now do not any longer. I dreamt of Paul, lost now to schizophrenia and the mental health care system. He was asking me why we had forgotten him, and did we want to know him any more, to which I replied that we certainly did, but he had not contacted us for so long and we did not know how to contact him any more.
In another dream, I was talking to Paula Marron, whom I attended Langley College with. This was 18 years ago now. I think, in the dream, I was at Southampton. I was telling her of the mutual people we had been at college with I was still in contact with, and she was doing the same. I wonder where she is now?

Summer is here, the sun is hot and the sea looks unreal. The streets are full of vulgarians and unamusing drunkards. The launderette is busy with holidaymakers, and the air in Brighton feels strangely dry and lacking. I'd like to walk by a canal for miles and miles... perhaps the Grand Union out of Uxbridge and adolescence, into whatever countryside I never managed to reach at the time.
These days are restless.
I'll think I'll head to the sea at twilight.

The Space between Tenants, just Starting to Grow

I sit in the midsummer nearly-dusk of the bedsit, and wait for darkness to fall. That haunted air is back in this room -this house- again. A strangely bright and lucid haunted air, it is a disquiet that comes in the brightness of summer days and evenings and not the dark watches of the night.
It feels like I shouldn't be here - that I should have caught a train somewhere, perhaps this afternoon, but have not, and returned to a place that now belongs to someone -something- else.
It came on quick this evening, as I crouched on the floor over my laptop, a sudden feeling of something shifting, almost an audible click in the air.
I looked about me. There was a curious air of serene but untrustworthy expectancy. Everything seemed still and watchful. Memories of bright and dusty late August sunlight. Dust-swirls in old summer rooms-
I remember now. 'Sun-dappled'. That phrase was what, -well, it didn't trigger this feeling off exactly- but certainly focused it. It was from a story I was flicking through I hadn't read for years, by Terry Dowling, called 'Scaring the Train'. The scene comes a couple of pages in. The protagonists, two childhood friends in Australia in 1962 spend their summers performing train-scares; '...it was anything from running to a spot on the track moments before the locomotive reached it, to doing an oh-shock-horror!, freeze-frame, hands up, wide-eyed terror reaction or a classy matador flourish before leaping aside'.
The scene I was reading comes as the two friends watch the results of one such prank from a safe distance that was set up in advance. They are looking through their binoculars at the distant railway track after the train has left. The track is about a mile away. They sight a 'solitary figure standing by the tracks at this end of the cutting'. This figure seems to see them looking and waves at them. They drop their binoculars and look at each other before looking back again:
'(the figure) ...was gone, of course, which completed the fright perfectly, had us scanning the intervening fields, noticing the pockets of shade like our own, patches of tree-shadow, the gloom in wind-dancing, sun-dappled copses, sockets of darkness where other watchers might now be watching us.'
A marvellously evocative passage and one which goes some way to explaining what I mentioned in the Songs from Hanging Rock post yesterday as summer being the season most apt to produce a resonance of supernatural terror.
Anyhow, it was this quote that led to my bedsit-nerves. I'm not sure why. It certainly had me 'scanning the intervening fields' of these bedsit-lands anyway.
I can make a pretty reasonable guess as to why the bedsit lately seems to have developed this nervy agitated air, that is I hope to leave here for somewhere better come the end of summer, and when you've decided to leave a house or a flat or a home, it begins to adopt a feeling of belonging, again, to someone else. Begins to reconfigure itself into the space it was when you first encountered it. Empty of possessions and (your own) memories, a blank space in which anything might happen, or anything might have had happened.

That feeling, I must have mentioned somewhere before, of having moved house, and having to return as night falls to the old house, for one last task that has to be done. The old house belongs to something else then... a liminal space between tenants, haunted and edgy.

Dusk is progressing now, and the bedsit is beginning to lose that edge of curious panic as night starts to swell.

Rain-Heavy Heart

It rained the entire day, a constant soaking rain, relentless but without the recompense of drama that accompanies really heavy rainfalls.
It has been a gloomy day, stultifying in its absolution.
This is not, surprisingly, always a bad thing, as long as we do not have too many of them. The occasional foray into summer gloom is to be welcomed, even if the days become strange and disconsolate things.
I met up with Andy at the entrance to St Anns Well Park, shortly before running into Chloe. We descended into town, ending up first at Argos, and then at the cafe in the North Laine I only ever go in with Andy. Coffee was pleasant and lingering, but Chloe had to get off to a dog training appointment (she trains dogs) and Andy and myself could no longer put off facing the weather waiting for us outside.
It hadn't improved, in fact, wouldn't all day (its 10:49pm now, and it is still raining). There was no point being out, the rain was that cold kind that hangs heavy on your heart, and the shops were closing - it was 4:00pm after all. We both wrote off the day, and I left Andy to walk back to his flat outside of mine, and returned with that rain-heavy heart to the bedsit.
I have never known a place as this to generate a disquieting air of dissatisfaction. The bedsit was messy, which never really helps. I had soon tidied it, though it must be said that the bedsit always teeters on the verge of harrowing disorder. I wish I could be tidy, but it seems inimical to me to be unable - despite my best efforts - to do so.
After the bedsit had been tidied, and after dinner - well what to do next? I couldn't think of any DVDs to watch, and anyway, watching DVDs while it is still light outside is just wrong. For a while I tried to read some of those old horror comics I had bought in London a month ago, but I was trying to fool myself I was enjoying them. I tried modelling for a while. I bought some Fimo modelling clay yesterday as an experiment. I approached it with a rather naive optimism, but my attempts at fashioning a figure were clumsy and without merit - or even much in the way of enjoyment. Despite this, I had fashioned some strangely elongated figure with a huge beak / hook for a head. It looked like something a six year old might make. Never mind. I wasn't really bothered by this, but was quite excited at the thought of baking it hard and then painting it. I put it in the oven, and ten minutes later, investigated how it was doing. Opening the oven door, I was greeted by a waft of smoke. The model-thing had got stuck to the bottom of the oven (are you supposed to put them on foil or something?) and was burning away merrily. Alarmed at the thought of the fire alarm going off, I soon switched off the oven and scraped the clay thing from the bottom.
I would need to find something else to do.
I stared out of the window for a bit, watched people walk up and down the street under umbrellas and scarves and hoods. It looked like winter out there again. I listened to the whole of 'Watershed' by Opeth - a metal band whose sole inspiration seem to be gloomy Sundays such as this one, and also 'Fallen' by Fields of the Nephilim. The latter made me think nostalgically about gloomy rainy Sundays when I was working at the petrol station.
Finally it was time (at 8:30pm) to meet Em at Brighton train station, whose day in London was similarly wet. The planned Hyde Park picnic had soon transferred itself to a cramped pub.
I had a cup of tea and a shower at Em's flat (as the shower on my landing is, again, not working) and came home. It was about 10:20pm when I left Em's house so it was fully dark. It was the best I had felt all day as I walked slowly up Brunswick Square, past all the Edwardian buildings. Some of the houses were hidden behind the black-clutch of scaffolding. There was something peaceful and deeply mysterious about them. The soundtrack to the film 'Suspiria' was playing on my headphones.

It suited the short walk home perfectly.

And now I sit on the sofa, collapsing into the broken-spring space below the sinking cushions, and think about sleep.

It sounds like the rain has stopped out there.

ps an apology; sorry I have not commented back to anyone of late, my laptop is still not allowing me to post comments. I don't know why, it really is most annoying! My apologies then, Na, Ruby and Ingrid - I'm not ignoring you honest!

Songs from Hanging Rock

Sunday morning, twenty minutes before midday. Awake for a couple of hours. Only a short trip to Sainsburys for the Sunday Times (an article about Mervyn Peake was not as interesting as promised).

A grey and drizzly day. Em is in London, and Andy, despite plans set last week for a country walk, is not answering his phone, his phone set to voice mail, leading me to ponder on a day in the bedsit.

Perhaps I should wrap myself in unseasonal scarves and coats, and make a pilgrimage to those Brighton and Hove sites that seem as desolate as the day -Hove Lagoon, the Marina, Preston Park...?

There is a slight breeze out there. The window rattles in the frame, slightly anyway, and the humming of the fridge is the only thing I can hear.

I had a cup of tea around Em's last night, but the strange exhaustion of the past week, culminating in the apocalyptic tiredness of yesterday necessitated me staying in last night. I had intended to get to sleep early, but the novelty of being in the bedsit, with my accompanying assortment of DVDs led me to staying awake till the small hours.

When I did eventually attempt to sleep, it took me a while. Perhaps I had slept too long in the afternoon. In my half-asleep state, the bedsit, or rather, the building the bedsit is located in, took on a startling and haunted air. By 'haunted' I suppose I mean a feeling, a curious air of desolation and disquiet, an uncanny atmosphere of unrest. It felt alien and strange to even be attempting to sleep in such a place, as if I had all my belongings in, perhaps, Brighton train station, and I was attempting to sleep in the cold wind that always blows through that un-private agoraphobic space.

My state of imagination was not helped by watching 'Picnic at Hanging Rock' just before attempting to sleep, and the power that film holds was only strengthened by the fact that I was not really watching it, but glancing at it every now and again in between half-hearted reading and flicking through magazines, and that awful habit of mine of rifling through Internet pages, not finding anything interesting but doing it anyway.

A halfway state of mind.

I have watched 'Picnic at Hanging Rock' numerous times, an Australian film, it relays the events of three schoolgirls who disappear in the eponymous locale of the title under mysterious and never explained circumstances. I am no film reviewer -or indeed any kind of reviewer - any attempts I have made at such endeavours usually lead to a quick abandonment - so I shall not go into any great detail. However, nothing much happens in the film. It has all the lucidity of a half remembered dream, pareidoliac faces on cliff faces and rocks, vast blue skies, almost cosmically, mundanely, terrifying, and a tight sense of panic falling in over everything. Despite nothing paranormal actually happening in the film, it is probably the finest cinematic evocation of the supernatural.

One image struck me as being particularly haunting last night. I probably won't even be able to find the scene again. It wasn't really even a scene, just one of the numerous landscape shots that liberally pepper the film. In the background there is one of the labyrinthine passages of rock in which the schoolgirls vanished, and in the foreground wild grasses and weeds, blowing in the wind. A little further back, there are some trees - or bushes, and under their leaves that deep, almost sea-green darkness you only get in the height of hot summers.

The wind rustling through the leaves, that sense of tragic mystery running through an unknowable geography...

Out of all the seasons, I have always felt summer to be the one that provides the most opportunity for supernatural terror. I am not sure why. Perhaps in summer, we penetrate that darkness more that in other seasons we leave unthought of - the deep wood, the remote lake, the lost field. In summer too, the very greenness of the leaves generates more shadow, a midday darkness in the height of the year.

Then there is the music to the film. As I went (or tried) to sleep last night, a certain passage of the film's music kept coming back to me, a heavy piano-led piece. I had always found it creepy, but last night, on the verge of sleep that wouldn't quite come, the music - or my memory of that music - was both fascinating and terrifying. As I lay there, it finally struck me why that passage was so haunting, because it seemed to be music actually from a dream. I have had, very rarely it must be said, examples of remembering music from a dream when I awake. The music that is remembered is always of an oddly spectral quality, verging on the literally nightmarish. Impossible to explain, this remembered music would bring to mind curious images; clattering stairways in Victorian schoolhouses, empty playgrounds under gray and stormy skies, ferris wheels at dusk, a sudden awareness of a previously unthought-of attic on a sunny windy afternoon, a winding road through a mountain under grey and leaden skies...

As I lay there thinking about all of this -and haunted music and haunted songs- that feeling of post-nightmare panic came over me (even if I hadn't actually been to sleep yet). You know the feeling that you get immediately after waking from a nightmare, an imminent terror at some encroaching supernatural incursion which is definitely going to happen. It never does of course, luckily, but there is that feeling that it is. We're all insane in the small hours. I can't remember who wrote that, but that line always stays with me. Alone in the night, our daytime-rationale proves somewhat less than useful.

I fell asleep and nothing happened of course. It's now Sunday lunchtime (12:37 in the afternoon) but about this House of Bedsits there still lingers something from last night. A sense, not of disquiet, but of a certain kind of desolation that is almost comforting. I turn my head to glance out of the window behind me, at the depthless grey skies, a triumph of gloom and Sunday made manifest.

I think about the stairs in this building, a spiral spine angling through the centre of this building.

The window continues to rattle in the window frame, and I can hear, barely, that curious crying of seagulls, as resonant and haunting in their own way as those songs from Hanging Rock.

Andy has just called, and I shall be meeting him this afternoon, in little over an hour. Our country walk abandoned due to the rain, but it does seem I shall be escaping the desolate air of this bedsit after all.

Saturday Resentments; an Afternoon in the Prison Cell Room

After three beers in the pub last night, and walking home, I got to bed at about midnight, and was soon asleep. Funny, it was only a couple of years ago that I could stay out drinking to the small hours, and then be at the petrol station for a 6:30am start. With 40 approaching far too fast (9 months away now), it seems that about 3 is my maximum these days.
It was light when I woke. There was some noise in this House of Bedsits. A young voice, like a teenage boy; 'I'm not happy leaving you here when a man with a knife comes to your door!'. I think the day may have jaded my memory on this one, or perhaps I dreamt it, or else I wouldn't have fallen back to sleep so easily. There was an undertow of voices through sleep, and it wasn't long before I woke again to the sound of knocking on someones door; 'Am I too loud?' -a girl's voice this time; 'I don't want to overstep my boundaries if I'm being too loud'.
There followed a litany of noises, forcing me further and further away from sleep and closer to my alarm going off at 7:30am. Banging doors, people trying to find the bathroom, people clattering up and down the stairs, bursts of music from Flat 9, just down the corridor from mine. I think it's Flat 9 anyway, someone's just moved in there. About a month ago, when they (she?) had first moved in, I returned from the hated Saturday morning shift at work to some kind of noise on my landing. There seemed to be someone hanging out of the window by the toilet, one foot on the sill of the window of Flat 9, banging on the glass, hanging two or three floors above the ground. Someone inside the room was shouting at them to fuck off.

The noises from Flat 9 and the three beers made work crawl by today. I hate those Saturday morning shifts. Slightly hungover (on three beers!) and exhausted, I came straight home after work, and fell into a deep and heavy sleep. So exhausted was I that I had to call off the barbecue I was going to at Ann's flat this evening.

There was a series of pictures in the Guardian today of prison cells at Wormwood Scrubs. They looked exactly like this bedsit, except there are no bars on the window of course... Hopefully I'll be living somewhere more pleasant and home-like by autumn, and then, just to sort out those bastard Saturday morning shifts at the call centre...

Silhoetted Against the Monochrome Dusk

Friday evening.
Curtains closed against the sun - is it sunny out there? I can't tell as my curtains are yellow too, a jaundice sunlight, slightly stained by the rain and winter.
The House of Bedsits is silent. Even the road outside the window sound slike miles away. A soporific distance, drowsy like afternoons when I was a child at my grandparents house in the countryside.
Could fall asleep here.
An image recurs to me throughout the day, of a black-and-white landscape of trees and semi-deserted, semi-industrial-rural spaces, fields and tight clusters of woods, and on the horizon, ragged ferris wheels, silhouetted against the monochrome dusk.
The air would taste of fire smoke and October, burning leaves and sleep.

Baltimore is Twilight

For the last three nights, I leave the bedsit at around 8:30pm to meet Em from work. She has been working up at a new place so I meet her somewhere down Portland Road.
I walk past the charity shops of Blatchington Road during the pale sunsets. Sky turning violet to blue (In summer, darkness seems to rise from the ground, leaving the sky a relatively light shade of colour, even though the street lamps are bright).
Portland Road. Raggedy and strangely dusty. The coffee shops seem out of place heree next to the cramped 'Vacuum Centre', the fast food joints, and that odd and deserted building halfway down, looking like some abandoned meditterenean church. Against these pale twilights, Portland Road acuires an air of some obscure and possibly dangerous road in, perhaps, Cleveland, or Baltimore.
I have not been to either of these places, but these last three nights, Portland Road seems somehow as unreal.

Sea Serpents cast by Skies

My phone at work broke down at work today. Whilst waiting for this to be repaired, I found myself observing the sea out of the window. A green ocean today, and untrustworthy. There were lots of white foam and crashing waves, though it did not, at least, look a particularly tempestuous day. It was one of those days of small and fast moving clouds. Out near the horizon I could see elongated shadows of clouds move over the water. As I watched these, one of these shadows appeared just offshore. It moved slowly, a blackening of the water, a shark-sinister glide, as if it were hunting something. As it moved across the water, it struck me that it looked like a sea serpent, some dark and enthralling leviathan moving along the coast. Further out, similar shadows were gliding across the water, other serpents. For a few seconds it seemed as if the coast off Brighton were under siege by these nightmarish marine-myths.
Then my phone was fixed and I had to get back to work.

Worcester Trip 3: The Hills, (their colours running in the rain that came down all day)

Eight days ago now, and the narrative thread that immediately accompanies days is starting to fade, leaving only a series of still pictures.
Pale colours, washed away by the sound of the rain

(because it rained all day)
There was some discussion whether or not to go. I remember Worcestershire having days like this; continual heavy rain, soporific and deep. Grey skies like headache and sleep. But this was Bank Holiday Monday and we would be returning to Brighton the following day.

1. Malvern. Sloping roads. A bookshop where I bought nothing. In the tourist centre I buy a small pamphlet entitled 'A History of Malvern's Gas Lamps'. A supermarket. I consider buying four canvases in 'The Works' as there is no longer a branch in Brighton.

2. Foreboding. The skies deepen and grey ever more infinitely. The rain continues.

3. The lower reaches of the hills. I had forgotten how green the hills were. Deep overhanging branches and tangled leaves enveloping the hills in a kind of night-time. We are not sure whether the horse-head on the trunk of the tree is natural or carved. I stand at the top of the embankment, but in the photograph I am lost in the tones around me.

4. A sudden shock. I remember this place. The Fire Festival of April 1997. I remember that cliff-face. I spilt a bottle of wine walking up the hill to here. I remember feeling ill and headache-y even before I began my other bottle of wine. Where we built our fires is now overgrown. Fourteen years have passed by since I was last year.

5. The Summit. The fog comes down fast and we are soaked. There are other walkers in the white.

6. There seems to be a thousand steps down. We saw no steps coming up, why now, when we go down; -steps, and alleys and stairs, and gas lamps?

7. I can't remember the train ride back, but after the Fire Festival on a Sunday morning, I fell asleep at a bench here. Sick and hungover, I think it was Al who woke me from what could have been only five minutes of dream; I was in a darkened room with a woman who said to me 'here we are, kissing without touching again'. Al woke me, the train had arrive. I remember the bright interrogative sun of that day when I had only just turned 25.

I wish I had written this earlier, and I do not feel like writing tonight, eight days later, because I am sleepy and full up from dinner, but if I do not write this now I never will, because the memories are already fading, and even the blurry snapshots left are starting to fade.
Their colours running in the rain that came down all day.

A Secret Water Flows

Grey day, half rain. From the windows at work, the world is not summer. A pale-light air of a February perhaps ten years old.
The calm, disquieted sea,
the cool air of the stairway.

(and time all messed up, tasting in the air of that stairway a sudden shift of last December, snow-cold days leading up to Christmas, expensive coffee table books about horror comics bought from Waterstones, the burnt-cardboard flavour that saturated December)

Walking home tonight. The cooler air. A resonance that could not hunted down. Tipping on the edge of memory, watching a shadow just inside an October-dark wood. Who are you? An autumn ghost, but which autumn, when?
No matter, these autumns are all gone and it is only summer.

Nearly 7:00pm.
Dinner is finished, and I think about night-time walks through unmapped streets. Dockland shadow, a path through breezy grasses into overgrown coppices, a fallen down house in the English-summer depths of the wood, repopulating the abandoned spinnies.

I pass houses where there are always room to watch an autumn rain.

Grey day fading.
There were no waves on the sea today, but I saw balancing engineers repairing a presumably broken street lamp.
Pianos.
Footsteps.
Sighs.

Bridges set to twilight, and the river beneath, dark water flowing to a sea I've only glimpsed.

Abandoning Paper, Discarding Ink-Cartridges and Not Answering Phone Calls

Rained all day, from relatively heavy downpours to lighter drizzles, but there was no sign of the sun, or the sky. Yesterday was a too-hot summers day though. A few days into June and already all signs of spring are expunged. It was really the same with today as well. Despite the rain it was undoubtedly a summers day. There was that underlying feeling of jungle-heat, an uncomfortable feeling of illness-warmth. The rain, instead of being refreshing, somehow conspired to make you feel slightly feverish.
Wondered through the charity shops with Em along George Street. I bought a novel called 'The Canal' which might be interesting, even if, as the back cover states, it is a novel about 'boredom'...
I had a phonecall while I was in the Martletts Charity Shop which sent me spiralling into gloom. I didn't answer it - I recognised the number as being that of someone who had texted me a few weeks previously, asking if I would like to work with him on an art project. I didn't get back to him then either. The whole idea of 'doing something' with my art just, to be frank, scares me. The times before when I have worked with people on art projects - even when they have turned out well- I have just found too stressful to be enjoyable really, not because the people I worked with were stressful, or the work itself was stressful, just that I found it all too stressful. A burden if you like, and when completed, it felt like a weight had been lifted from me. I have laboured under the idea that I would end up 'doing something' with my art for about a decade now. This is probably not going to be the case. Strange I got the phone call today too. I was only thinking last night, on the way to the pub, that it was probably time to put the metaphorical ink-pen away. I've not really enjoyed drawing -even for myself- for a long time now. It just seems like a force of habit than anything else.

The rain, and the seeming end of any artistic ambition conspired to cast a shadow over me throughout the afternoon. I left Em's at about 5:00pm and wondered home where I drank a can of 'Euro-shopper cola' and fell into a fitful broken sleep until about half an hour ago.

Sunday evening. 9:25pm.

Never really got the hang of them.

I wonder whats on telly?

Worcester Trip 2: Manufacturing Twilight at Diglis Weird (Last Sunday)

Last Sunday, meet the two Joes at the Commandery, accompanied by Eva the dog. Relatively late in the day, in winter it would have been getting on for nightfall. A barely sketched plan of a walk from the Severn, then by the river Teme and up into St Johns and back again.
Set off across the new bridge at Diglis Weir, then into new countryside I had not walked before.
Across the other side of the Teme was a path I had walked before - in a gloomy dawn of September 1997 with Ruth. I wondered, if I had been across there, would I have remembered the path at all? I remember the path took us past moored boats, across fields where I misplaced my wallet (we had to return for it) and some out-of-town supermarket. I did see some sort oif construction across the river I recognised, something like a train scaffolding, clinging to the bank and legs sinking into the deep and slow moving water.
Despite the side of the river we were in being new territory for me, it still felt oddly familiar. Perhaps these fields we were walking through had been one of those fields I had done bean twirling on over the summer of 1998 for a week? Perhaps, but the air around here began to remind me of autumn as well - not for any particular reason I could think of.
The fields -we could not tell if these were planted with crops or lying fallow- had piles of crates at random points, presumably to pack fruit or vegetables in. Down by the riverbank below us, some strange engine stood silent. A rather industrial looking device, what it did (a pump perhaps?) remained unknown.
Four of us got lost in a field, hemmed in on all sides by the River Teme. Looping, looping, looping, then back to where the engine was - where I couldn't work out how we had doubl;ed back on ourselves. The landscape playing tricks on us. On the horizon a shadowy figure appeared to watch us, then melted into grasses and trees, and turned out to be a fisherman.
A busy road nearby, but unseen, impinged slightly on our sinister idyll.
Out of the country and onto the road that led to St Johns. Tea and pints at some dead-air Harvesters where we sat outside with Eva. At the bar Joe was told that there wa no more ale, he went back outside to discuss this with the other Joe. The man behind the bar commented 'whats wrong with Banks's?' to what seemed to be a regular leaning against the bar.
We made our way back to the new bridge at Diglis Weir. A chaos of dogs and people. Eva trying to lead us back onto the walk across the fields again. Hope turning to disappointment as she watched us walk away. Gleaming dog-eyed sadness, but she soon recovered and caught us up again.
A slow meander across the landscape of the weir, past some huge and empty 'dock' where deep and silent water stood calm and entrancing. high up walls. Looking at our reflection below. Ragged grass and overgrown trees. Littering the edges, remnants of industry, and over the bridge and around here, a strange feeling of deep English twilights... even if it was far too early for twilight, it still felt like some older dusk was approaching. Places like this, away from the town and the street lamps seem to manufacture twilight, a night that rises from the ground as something almost tangible. The light growing heavier and softening. Joe Walmsley commenting on how 'dreamy' the air is here.
Em and myself leave Joe and Joe in a pub, and we walk back home, but we get lost beforehand in a labyrinth of old and newer buildings, all of which are empty as if some apocalypse has happened and someone has forgotten to tell us.
By the time we reach Worcester city centre again it is still day, and will be for another hour, but that feeling of twilight and autumn still persist.

Worcester Trip 1: A Return to Stone

I remember the last time I was in Kidderminster, January of 1994 - just turned. The last time I was in Stone - just outside of Kidderminster, and where my maternal grandparents lived, was sometime after that. I can't remember when though - sometime during my years at Worcester university in the late 1990s.
Em and myself caught the train back there on Saturday. A short trip from Worcester to Kidderminster, and only a couple of miles walk to Stone from there. A wander around Kidderminster charity shops, and then, another return back into the past.
I've written before about Stone, and my grandparents' house. This was the house where I woke from a nightmare when I was five, and saw a black, cowled figure at the end of my bed. A nightmare, obviously, but it still triggered off my interest in the paranormal. I say a nightmare, but I remember my aunt, telling me what her daughter -Ann- had said, that she had 'seen things too'.
I still dream about the house, and in my dreams it is always haunted. I would like to link back to earlier posts about it, but the laptop continues to operate in what may be described as a somewhat old fashioned way.

Saturday, a grey day. Lukewarm and humid. At least it was in Kidderminster. Wandering around the numerous charity shops with Em. Shopping centres and pound shops. A long street market selling cheap watches and batteries and hats stretched along the smaller-than-remembered centre of town. Many shops closed and concealed behind the market stalls. Broken windows. I don't remember it being like this, so dismal and shabby and oddly desperate. It felt like a town that was slowly being abandoned, and only those who couldn't leave would be left.
The record shop had closed. I remember buying 'The Return of Martha Splatterhead' by The Accused and the second album by Virus there back in the 80s. I found 'The Ladies of Grace Adieu' by Susannah Clarke in one of the charity shops for £1:50, which pleased me.
We left the town centre heading, heading up Comberton Hill, a name I remember from childhood (a toy aeroplane Mum bought for me here when I was 5 - strange memories surface). The hill was steep, and more familiar than I was expecting. A strange place though, narrow shops and that all pervading feeling of emptiness. I was reminded -again- of T.S.Eliot's 'half-deserted streets', that Saturday afternoon a veritable Wasteland.

As we left the town centre, we also left behind that sense of shabby disrepair, and moved through streets of relatively affluent housing. Set far back from the road the houses were mostly detached, and again, oddly empty.
I was glad when the countryside began, and we left those desolate houses behind.

Stone is on the road to Bromsgrove, and was alarmingly busy. The lukewarm aspect of the day had now vanished and a bright sun shone down. To our left a hedge, and on the other side of that, the sandstone-stained countryside of summer holidays and a year living here in 1977. Poplar trees and voluminous bushes, crop-fields and a sense of deepness in the countryside. This was -is- a landscape as dangerous and alluring as that depicted in the film 'Picnic at Hanging Rock' but this would be an English vanishing, a summer ghost-story. August-narrative, spilling away from the paths of June, the jungles of July and into the rainy autumns that always follow. When remembering, it is always autumn.
And there, rising from the ground a church spire, a line of red brick buildings, and beyond, a hill rising up, was Stone. From this distance it hadn't seemed to have changed at all.
We approached the crossroads; one tiny lane to the left leading to a wood where Mum said she used to play as a kid, back in the 1940s... and ahead, the road up to my old school, the churchyard, and to my right the entrance to Stanklyn Lane, my grandparents house and the past.
As I walked down Stanklyn lane it struck me at how little -if at all- the place had changed. The phone box was still there, windows covered with green mould and obscurity. The houses, set far back from the road seemed, maybe, larger, and posher than I remembered... a middle class village rather than the working class village I remembered. I remembered the mock-Tudor House though, opposite the gravelly track that ran up the line of houses where my grandparents house lay. I only went a little way up the track. There was a van in the drive of the old house, and they seemed to have replaced the windows. I remember looking behind me, Em down the drive from me looking as suddenly nervous as me. What would I say to anyone if they came out?I walked back, turned around, looking at the blank and faceless windows; the living room, the back room door, the first floor bedroom where Nan died on New Years Eve of 1983...
We headed up the hill, through the sandstone-embankments shadowed road, from the top of which, when I was five years old, horse-heads would watch us, sinister and distant in their high up field.
The barn was still there to the left, but the doors had been replaced. No dark and alluring gaps to try and see pigs through, as we used to. My god. the barn has probably been here centuries; whats thirty three since I used to walk this way to school?
I couldn't see the school, just across the lane from Stone Church. The steps leading up to it were overgrown with hedges and a sign warning there was no entrance. Behind the school and the church, the vast and mysterious woods I never entered and always fascinated me seemed as deep and entrancing as ever; stream-mazes, lost manors, and churches buried under leaves and branch... The coolness of my thoughts there, like breathing underwater, an ancient pool on a summers day, shadowed by daydream and tiny nights whose small hours are nonetheless intense and concentrated...
Across the still-busy road the new churchyard. I found my grandparents grave, and also of Ann my cousin. The mystery of names. I thought my grandparents surname was spelt Luit. It was in fact Liut. Gwendoline Liut. Gelindo Liut. My cousin's full name Ann-Marie Elizabeth Parry, 1973 - 1994... There was a poem she had written (embossed to protect it against the elements) lent against the tombstone, about her reflection in the mirror, having an independent, disembodied life. A strange and haunted thing, a line stays with me about 'her room the precise twin of my own'. The last time I saw Ann would have been October of 1987... twenty four years ago. A quarter century.

I wonder what she saw at my grandparents house?

After lunch we headed back down the hill, and into Stanklyn Lane again. We crossed a stile, and took a path across the fields, but there was no path, just a field of wavy grass, a crop of some description, so we stuck to the sticky red-soil edges. Eventually came to a small opening in a tiny patch of trees that led to a tiny stream. Across the dark and trickling waters, a few planks of wood sufficed as a bridge.

There was a call of wood-pigeons, and something drifting in the air, indistinct and effusive.

We walked back to Kidderminster and caught the train back to Worcester.