Slightly Hungover on the Night before Deep Summer

Deep summer begin tomorrow, that impossible and timeless season that precedes autumn. In August, there can be nothing else but summer, any other season seems a ridiculous and long lost myth.
This summer, thanks to the ceaseless rains of June and the ambiguous hours of July, hasn't seemed very summery. It still feels like it should be May. The whole idea that it is the last month of summer tomorrow is ridiculous.
There is a sudden moment of panic as I ponder the increasing momentum of time, and if autumn goes as fast summer, we'll be at Christmas, and then New Year, and then... ad nauseum.

It was Al's birthday last night, which was held in a couple of pubs in Lewes. Lewes had that feel of deep summer about it - that hot and stranded feel that summer holidays off from school or university used to have. The first pub we went to was called The Snowdrop, so called because it was the scene of Britain's worst avalanche disaster back in 1836. Eight people killed, and fifteen buried. After the Snowdrop we went to another pub which I want to call 'The Greys' but isn't because 'The Greys' is in Brighton. I kept drinking half pints of an 8% ale called 'Caligula', and it was no surprise when I woke up with a hangover this morning.
At Lewes Station on the way back, I ran into Jen with her boyfriend. I've not seen Jen for ages. I went for a coffee with her back in - what, March? April? Before that it was back in December when Em and myself met her and Pam for a drink in some pub I can't recall in Hove. Because I was slightly drunk, I kept calling her new boyfriend the name of her old, old boyfriend she was seeing whilst we were both working at Telegen. 'Why do you keep calling him Neil?' Jen asked. With sudden and growing horror (I hadn't realised I was doing this of course) I apologised profusely, and thought that, in future, I may well stay away from half pints of 8%ale named after Roman dictators.

A day spent dedicated to sleep today. Went round Em's place after Lewes (she couldn't join us as she was working) and woke up at about midday today. After a cup of tea, we went back to sleep for a couple of hours. We took a walk into town, had a cup of tea in the Pavilion gardens and headed back to hers to watch another epiode of 'True Blood'. At about 7:00pm I headed home, then had another hour and a half's sleep.
Now it is nearly 10pm and I've been barely conscious for my one day off from work...

The Dark of, Perhaps, 8'0'Clock

Autumn - like all times, can be approached an infinity of ways, different maps to reach the heart of different sections of the same city. Sometimes autumn is a countryside, and sometimes it only seems to exist ion childhood memories, or perhaps in memories of times before I was born.
This is the window onto the autumn I see now.
It is one of those evenings in autumn that follows a short period of time without seeing anyone else. This solitude is not unpleasant though does induce a kind of semi-hallucinogenic languor. I feel these white and crisp-cool mornings leading to afternoons where the sky takes time to look only vaguely troubled. In this image I see the figure of a man - not myself - though his memories and experiences are mine, he is not me. So often is the case in these reveries that the viewpoint is a first-person narrative, it seems almost startling that this is not. The man is shadowy and unclear, and though he is not me - his histories and feelings are. He spends his day in the rooms of a flat - on the second or third floor. The rest of the flat - or house - is empty, though I have the feeling that the others in the flat - or house - have only left temporarily. Perhaps only a matter of days. On this day it is a Friday, and the man in this old and empty house has spent the day drifting from room to room, smelling the attic-heavy air of autumn afternoons, and daydreaming in that always crepuscular and nostalgic October light. The tall narrow house he lives in, bordered by other tall, narrowed houses, is set on a street - perhaps on a hill - in an old and mostly ill-frequented part of a city. This is one of those cities - like London - that does not have an outside. this city is all internal. There are trees in the street that grow too close to the windows of the house, bathing all rooms in a kind of soporific dusk. The man can sit and watch the leaves fall, and has done so, through a haze of cigarette smoke and cups of tea. Night falls slowly, like treacle - and this image now jumps forward to the full and promising dark of, perhaps, 8'0'clock. The man needs to leave the house - perhaps for more cigarettes - perhaps for milk for those cups of tea that will take him to midnight and into the small hours. Ah, the small hours of October, those ox-hours of spirits and city winds that seem to sound more like black hills in distant countries than brick and stone and angle. These hours are not here though, not in this reverie.
The crispy cold freshness of the air. That cold clarity that tastes like polished glass, and that always-autumn smell of smoke, somewhere in the distance. He walks to the late night store that will sell him cigarettes, through empty streets lined by tall trees obscuring tall and narrow houses like his own. He comes to the shop - set in a small parade of other shops, and pauses. There is a fish'n'chips shop -open, a hairdressers -closed (the ghostly chairs, the sinister sinks) and there is a convenience store. He pauses and looks at his destination for a while. Below the awning of the shop is a selection of groceries. Beyond, the yellow flurescent light hums above tins of baked beans, ageing newspapers (that mornings stories, already old) cans of Coke, chocolate biscuits, cigarettes and, of course, pints of cheap milk. Between the tobacco advertisments on the window, the man glimpses the proprietor, a middle aged Asian man that he knows as Mr Ahmin. This has always puzzled him. He has never spoken to mr Ahmin, except to order cigarettes along with his pints of milk for cups of tea, but somehow knows his name. The wind gets up a bit, pushes up a flurry of leaves across the road. Under the street lamps they look like mice, or perhaps, more sinisterly, like rats.
I don't know where this image of autumn comes from, probably a mixture of daydreams and memory. I should like to think it is some kind of premonition of an autumn to come, but I am afraid it may instead be a yearning, for the autumns of this decade -and the last, most of them anyway- seem too quick and juddering. Nervous passages, stuttering paragraphs, where there should be libraries, stretching with unhurried movements into, what at least seems to be, forever.

The Churchyard at Twilight

Standing there in that odd twilight, unleavened by near street lamp or electric light. Behind us, a plaque on the wall of the graveyard, saying that below where we stood were buried 'portions of the remains' of a woman found dismembered down Lovers Walk in 1832. This was one of a series of dismembered bodies that Brighton has thrown up from time to time on its dark internal tides, and led, in the 1930s, to this town being nicknamed 'The Queen of Slaughtering Places'.

Behind us, on the haunted lawns of Preston Manor, there were marquees set up, as if in preparation for a fete. We only saw one person there, a security guard, or perhaps an ill-recognised ghost.

Back in the January of 2005, I spent a night ghost-hunting in the church here with Flo and his fiddle teacher friend Rohan. We saw nothing, but it was an interesting night. I remember coming here with Joe and Andy in the snows of December 2009, then with Jen and Lizzie in January of 2010.

After we left the churchyard, we wondered across the now dark Preston Park. In the shadows around us were the vague and excited forms of teenagers, giddy at the freedom of the tidy-park darkness.

We took the steps up Lovers Walk, and wended our way back home.

Death Poem Ramble

I cam't remember winter, or autumn.
Stranded in these near-deep summer days,
only the seagulls are real.
Relatives I have not seen for decades die,
an uncle described by the Kidderminster
Shuttle as a 'Lovable rogue', and an aunt,
the last time I saw over the summer of
1994 (I had bought the album 'Ceremony of
Opposites' by Samael, though I can't
remember in which town.)

It makes me think of March, and that phone call
in Hastings, telling us Flo had died.
A ramshackle market on a white-windy day.
Death is a spider, or a tiger, and I try to
watch the television in a room where, behind
the sofa, something creeps.
Dried out Brighton and songs I've not heard
since the light blue autumn of 1997.
There is sleep and work and sleep.
A plastic insect toy sits on a shelf of

unsafe books and ignores a plastic elephant
I found by the sea.

The Late Night Locksmith

As I lay in bed last night, attempting to sleep, I found I was being disturbed by noises on the landing. I thought that these were 'passers-by', residents going to and from their rooms on other floors. The noises continued, and I gradually began to emerge from the slow sinking into sleep I had hoped for. A girl's voice. The same girl in the bedsit who held a somewhat noisy party a couple of months back. A man';s voice too. I had the feeling that they did not know each other. The sound of drilling and machinery. 'I only stepped out of my room for a second' the girl said, 'turns out to be the most expensive pee I've ever taken'. Other people turned up - from the floors above mine I think. I heard her explaining to them how she had got locked out of her bedsit when she was going to the toilet. They asked her why she had not rung the landlord. I couldn't make out the reply. There was more talk. The locked out girl commented on what transpired to be a locksmith's work 'It looks all very melodramatic'. I think the locksmith grunted. The people from upstairs invited her up to their room for a bit. She seemed to know them and displayed an appropriate level of gratitude. The locksmith continued with his work on the landing; drilling, and now some kind of loud hammering. The work stopped, and I heard him hammering on the door that leads to the upper floors. The girl came down. There must have been an exchange of money. She thanked him. He stomped off down the two flights of stairs to the ground floor, slamming the front door when he left the house. I resumed my attempt to get to sleep.

Suburban Woodland Mysteries: The Tall Fence in Three Cornered Copse

Three Cornered Copse is a narrow strip of a wood that runs from the tip of Hove Park right up to the edge of the Sussex Downs near the windmill, and that ever-busy ring road that half-circle Brighton. The wood, on both sides, is bordered by the gardens of suburban housing.
I wonder why the owners of the house whose fence is in the above garden needed it so large? Why were they trying to block out any sight of the wood from their house and garden with such definiteness? they were far more likely trying to shield their house from the wood - or rather, people in the wood. Perhaps Three Cornered Copse is well known for harbouring gangs of teenage vandals, prowling the woods at night, and threatening home owners on both sides of the trees?
Whatever the reason the height of the fence gave this section of the path through the woods a beguilingly sinister air.

The Street Lamps of Southside

Six years ago, I began dreaming about the street lamps of Southside.
These recurring dreams began shortly after the return visit to Kinloss over the Scotland holiday of 2005, when I revisited old childhood haunts; Southside (the sergeants married quarters) Burnside (the officers married quarters) Forres, and our house there at the base of the Black Woods.
The dreams began shortly after I returned, and recur every few months or so. The dreams are startlingly similar. In them I am entering the Southside housing estate in the first hour of darkness. I am often coming from the direction of Abbeylands Primary School and Burnside. The street lamps are tall and elegant. I am euphoric to be back in Southside as darkness falls and with the street lamps on. I am also worried in case I am not meant to be here. Often in these dreams I am searching for something, some mythical 'heart' of the estate. There are changes too - there is a cafe in the centre, a river runs between the houses, or the houses are surrounded by sand dunes. The sense of euphoria and anxiety is superseded by an even stronger feeling, that of of implacable and over whelming mystery.
I'm not sure why the return visit to Scotland would have triggered off these surprisingly invariable dreams. Before the visit to Scotland, I would dream most of the nearby Burnside housing estate, where I lived from 1981 - 1982 (the Burnside dreams took place mostly on briught summer days) Street lamps, in my own personal mythos iconography are, of course, incredibly important... Look at how many times I have drawn them over the past god-knows-how-many-years. They are heralds of the night, scions of mystery and atmosphere, twilight made manifest in technology. Even now, the sight of a street lamp at dusk, in certain locations and kinds of day can hold a near hypnotic thrall over me. It was in Southside that I was first allowed to play outside when the lights came on. I remember that joy, that freedom, and in that first night playing outside, a sense of overwhelming and incredible mystery. The essence of the night itself distilled into the playground our house in Abbey Crescent looked out upon.
Yesterday I was at work and typed in 'houses in Southside Kinloss'. The above photograph came up (it was on an estate agent website). The houses under that leaden sky, that street lamp, dull glow in muted light, and scattered over the ground those fallen leaves... It was an odd experience. Time seemed to falter. It was rather like having deja-vu but knowing I had been there before, because, contained in that photograph was all the resonance of the mysteries of autumn afternoons. A fragment of a feeling from childhood, a stone thrown into a still pool, rippling with a kind of pleasant violence. What I was experiencing was, of course, what Proust referred to in 'Remembrance of Things Past' when he tasted the Madeline cake. In this case, it wasn't a taste that sent me back into my own history but a photograph. My feeling, at the time of looking at the photograph (and the feeling only lasted a few seconds) was one of something being explained -as if something had come to light, as if I, through viewing this photograph could now understand something. This sense of revelation did not last though, but now, a day later, I can still almost taste that sense of ghost-story mystery inherent in the autumnal afternoons of childhood, and this encapsulated in a photograph of a terraced house under a grey sky behind a broken street light shining in the day.

The Hallway, Leaking into my Dreams

The hallways and stairs of this house of bedsits begins to leak into my sleep. I woke last night -it was just getting light- to the sound of voices on the stairs. A loud conversation in what seemed to be a Mediterranean accent. Prodded me from sleep. 'Fuckers' I thought. Fell back into sleep again, but those voices crept into my dreams; I was in the bedsit, there were loud voices from upstairs. A knock on their door. I was in my room. Voices raised in consternation. 'Do you know what it's like to have kids?' - and this in defence of the one making noise. Was this a dream, was this real?
I am unsure. I woke up tired and have not really woken up fully all day.

Psychic Furniture is not Built to Last these Days

Somebody from work has left. They left suddenly and without warning. No reason for me to know anyway, I didn't know them at all. It was somebody I saw most days, a piece of the psychic furniture of work. then; gone. I think I said about five sentences to the person who left all together.
It is strange when a piece of everyday life is taken away suddenly, whether a person or a building or even a television show. I am reminded -suddenly- of News of the World. There it was, quite happily telling tales of celebrities on Sundays and now: THERE WILL NEVER BE A NEWS OF THE WORLD AGAIN. Things slip into the past, become memory, and every time there is something taken from the present, there is that reminder; things change, time moves on, and perhaps more sinisterly; nothing lasts, not even the psychic furniture we take for granted.

Encounters with Security Guards and their Secrets

The Sainsburys down North Street at lunchtime. I was buying a Yorkie bar and a £1:00 sandwich from the self service tills. There was a long queue toward the normal tills. I don't know why no-one used the three or so self service tills. After paying, I, for once, remembered my receipt. An older security guard came up to me. 'Can I see your receipt?' he asked me in a voice that immediately made me realise that he had failed to become a policeman. He looked at my receipt - grunted - gave me back my receipt and walked away.
I wonder what I had done that made him suspicious?

I had a late call that took me until about 7:10pm. Everyone else had left the call centre. I was aware of a sudden silence descending, and also that there are noises in that silence. I pass the photocopier and it seems to breathe. The buzzing of the fluorescent lights is loud as summer night insects. I step out of the call centre and press the button for the lift, and realise that I am confronted with that presence that must always come when a building empties. The lift takes a long time to arrive. I remember; the coolness of the air, the door closed to the call centre proper - I could see my desk silent and guilty - an empty mug, my file, the folded up poster of Esben and the Witch that I haven't taken home since I bought the album back in February.
I breathe that hushed intimation of other spaces, other corridors, other levels. I kiss those
stairways opening up in new annexes.
This is the secret geography known by all security guards, all night-watchmnen.
I stepped into the lift, eager to be heading home.
I was in a new country without a map and feared becoming lost.

Slight Dream Coincidence with Joe

Got woken this morning by a text from Joe at 6:58am. Loud buzzing waking myself from the dream I was having about a man who had just sold his flat for 27,000 pounds, and was worried he did not have enough money to get married.
I blinked myself awake, and blearily read Joe's text:
'Just had dream. came to Brighton stayed at pauls flat. old woman lived there, you had won 50,000 pounds, i was jealous'

Photographs of Last Nights Walk to the Petrol Station

The bedsit window. About to leave. It was about 8:45pm when I left for my evening walk.
Up my street, just left the house of bedsits.
Twilight gathers.
St Annes Well Park.
The alleyway from St Annes Well to cromwell Road.
The shops at Seven Dials. Slightly blurry.
Put my hand over the wall of the bridge I crossed and took this photo of the railway line. Too high to see over it otherwise. A railway country, a remote state. Like landscapes in the clouds seen from aircraft.
Back when I used to live at Wilbury Crescent, I would often stop here on my way back from the old call centre to buy snacks and tobacco. For some reason, this newsagent always had an atmosphere of near unbearable tension, as if whoever was working there was waiting for some dreadful event to happen...
Lyndhurst Road. Suburbia. Houses, streetlamps, cars. I like walking through here at night. Always something slightly secret about it.
For a while there were no street lamps here. With the railway to the left and that wall to your right, it was, for a while, wonderfully eerie walking through here when it was dark...
'The Morning Bridge' as I christened it, -as I discovered it walking to work at the petrol station one still dark morning. It is a footbridge across the railway track that ran behind our old flat in Wilbury Crescent.
Across the bridge. When I used to cross here in the still black mornings of the petrol station winters, I would always imagine a black dog waiting for me here...
My old flat at Wilbury Crescent across the road. The dark upstairs. Next door was where that broight first floor light is shining from. Well, I say 'was'. It still is next door. I'm not though...
Wilbury Crescent. A better shot. My old flat is the one directly underneath the street lamp. My room was beyond that dark looking balcony.
...a mess of industrial estates, car dealerships, old churches that now hold gymnastics classes for children, houses and tall street lamps... always quiet here at night...
...through the industrial estate just past Wilbury Crescent and Hove Station, looking into dark, remote lots...
...these places look skewed at night, a fragmented space...
...another empty dream-like shot of a twilight industry...
...coming to the end of the industrial estate behind...
...and up to the petrol station where I worked for five and a half years, from 2002 until 2007...
It was good to catch up with Mike again who was working there when I was working there -before me in fact. Strange being back at the petrol station. Had been refurbished inside so looked really different. It still had that same timeless and remote feeling in it though, oddly lulling and a little disquieting.
Across the dark forecourt when I was leaving. Mike was shutting up for the night.
The car wash where I once accidentally locked the ex-boxer and Brighton celebrity Chris Eubank inside.
Just past the petrol station. This was the sight that would greet me as I prepared to walk along the Old Shoreham Road back to my flat on Buckingham Street when I lived there... there is something, I always find, so nocturnal and implacable about this view, as if the street lamps are some kind of personification of the vast night behind.
Back to my street again. The white street lamp heralds home...

Thoughts whilst falling Asleep last Night

As I fell to sleep last night, a thought disturbed me. If I reached out with my right hand -and sat up in bed a little- I could touch the door of my bedsit. For no reason at all this thought bothered me. Through half-opened eyes, I regarded the door with suspicion, and as I lay there, within touching distance of the door, I then began to think: what would I do if there was a knocking on that door?
And in the darkness of my room, half asleep, this was the most terrifying thought of all.

Stairwell of a Sewage Works Fairground

I left Em to her college work at midday and walked over to Andy's flat for our pre-arranged coffee before he had to leave for work. Andy had completely forgotten that we were meeting for coffee and was, in fact, still in bed. I was slightly hungover from the three (all of three!) beers I had had the night before, and nursed my headache-y head with a cup of coffee.
I began to drift on the sofa, watching the curtains of his basement flat glow and fade with the movement of the sun behind clouds. It was not long before I slipped into a dreamy shallow sleep on the sofa. I only remember one dream, or rather, one image from the dream. Kind of hard to explain though. It concerned a large underground shaft, dark and dripping with subterranean moisture. Running around the walls of this shaft was a kind of stairway, running round and down and down and down into that infinite blackness the shaft vanished into. The stairway itself was situated in a kind of 'canvas-corridor', made of tent material. The stairway - and the shaft - belonged to some kind of nocturnal carnival or occult circus, a sewage works fairground... That's all I can remember though.

White Sheets of Rain

The four hours at work pass by in a sort of no-time. relatively quiet so I read The Guardian but mostly stared out of the window.
The rain is back, great sheets of bluster and wet. Watching the seagulls from the fourth floor, I noticed how buffeted and thrown they were, like bits of surprised litter cast this way and that. They could barely control their flight.
The horizon of the sea vanished into greyness. The breakers of the sea were almost hypnotic, like wounds in the water, the colour of remembered moons.
It took an hour to wend my way back home; charity shops and reading 'Terrorizer' in WHSmiths, Sainsburys and the pound shop. I'm sure something funny happened in the pound shop, but I can't remember what now.
My god, that last sentence must be the most boring I've ever written.
Days like this are boring though. Maybe that's not such a bad thing; hours extend and stretch, as languid and unhurried as a yawn. Sounds shimmer and fade, become a soundtrack to the thought of approaching naps and preceding cups of tea...
...but before the pleasures of sleep, I have to tidy the bedsit. Again.
I can hear the sound of the gulls outside.
They sound so far away.

A Yearning for Houses Beyond the Railway Line

Settling into the summer-ritual of a walk just before I go to sleep at night. I leave the house around 9:00pm, and arrive home about 10:30pm - when I'm not with Em of course. The route does not usually vary that much; that serpent-wind up around St Annes Well Park, then onto the Old Shoreham Road, or the Parallels of Lyndhurst Road, then across the footbridge over the railway line (I used to call it the Morning Bridge, as back in the petrol station days I used to walk this way to work and only see it in the pre-dawn blackness of winter mornings) and finally down that seductive curve of Wilbury Crescent, and then wend my way back to the bedsit again.
I slow down as I pass 35 Wilbury Crescent. Look up at the old flat. I cannot ever imagine having lived there now. I have walked by so many times that the building has been sucked dry of any resonance for me. The lights are always off, the flat is always wreathed in darkness, though someone has moved into the downstairs flat. It struck me the other day that I'm still grieving for that place - in as much as you can grieve for places. I've never moved on from there - and it's two years and a half years since I moved out from there! I might inhabit different rooms and different houses, but I still long for that living room, that vast view out of the window at the huge sky and the trees of gardens, the railway line, the houses beyond.
Deep in the yellow-heights of summer now. The Brighton streets are clogged with English-language students and holiday makers. In the pound-shops and down the Pavilion Gardens, the North Laine and the beach. There is an odd vibe out there tonight. Brighton doesn't feel quite English somehow, as if the city has been transported to some hitherto unknown Mediterranean island. So many people, and an oddly excited -but slightly corrupt- vibe too.
I'm not even going to go out for an evening walk tonight. Think I'll stay in the bedsit and dream of darkening autumn suburbs... or equally waste too much time looking at the covers of old horror comics on the internet...

Nine Lines for A Fictitious House

In a house where the trees grow too close to the windows,
the shadows in the hall clock seem set to late winter
afternoons, even in the depths of summer.

In a room upstairs, the street light through the
branches stutters across the carpeted floor
like a drift of birds, dancing over old photographs

of strangers.
There is a kingdom in the chimneys.
I tap the wall to topple its throne.

Akathisia for the Common Man

Barely skimming the surface of sleep last night, or so it seemed. A dip beneath the surface of unconsciousness and straight into pale and feverish dreams, none of which I could remember when I woke.
I got tired of lying in bed, and got up before the alarm this morning at 7:15am. After a shower I forced myself to continue reading John Burnside's 'Living Nowhere'.
The walk to work. Hospital-warm day. Grey skies cover the sun, and the rain at lunchtime was as tepid as last night's sleep.
The sea was still throughout the day. No movement but for what looked like some lifeguard exercise; boats and fiugures in the water, bobbing in fluorescent jackets. I squinted my eyes to pretend they were sea serpents but could not quite believe it.
Walked back from work through the car park behind Family Investments. Went with a work colleague. Never been this way before. The dark underneath of concrete, sloping pipes and a secret world of doors to the Churchill Square shopping centre. Petrol-tainted sleep, Castrol GTX engine oil dreams.
There is a section in 'Living Nowhere' which is nothing short of genius. One of the protagonists, after the death of a friend, slips through a gap in a churchyard wall with no plan, and spends the next seventeen years drifting, from one casual job to another, through nowhere towns and a secretive British countryside. When he tires of one place he leaves, always wishing to be anonymous and unseen. Nothing to hold him down, nothing to mark him by the mere act of observation.
Sometimes -often, this summer- when I am in the bedsit the most - I feel like slipping through this metaphorical churchyard wall and into my own unobserved country. Walking seems to settle the disquieted air I breathe these days like nothing else. I am sure that when I move out of the bedsit - which seems an irrational and inexplicable impossibility - I'm sure I shall feel more settled. As it is the intense inner restlessness of this summer continues.
I sit facing away from the window, and it feels that the hallway is leaking through the gap under the door.
The House of Bedsits appears to observe - unnerve me - and fixes me here, like a haunting, or a photograph.
However, I am rather pleased at something; I bought 'World of the Dead - The Zombie Diaries 2' for £5:00 in CEX on the way home.
Slow moving flesh eating zombies will help me relax I'm sure...

Generating an Air full of Edges

After a quick scoot around the charity shops this morning, and briefly meeting with Em this afternoon, I headed back to the bedsit at about 3:00pm. I spent the next couple of hours taking photographs of my artwork. I managed to do 35 all together. It is, hopefully, my intention to upload them all onto another blog, though this will all depend on whether or not blogger will allow me to upload photographs. We shall see.
So the afternoon turned to evening, and the bedsit worked its usual maleficent magic on me, and by the time that it had reached 7:00pm, I could no longer stand the atmosphere of edginess in here and fled the house. It is almost like being a kid again, and going upstairs to the creepy room (only creepy because it would be night-time and everyone else would be downstairs, far far away). At first it would be okay, and you would get on with whatever things interested you as a kid. At first you would ignore a growing uneasiness, a swelling feeling of cool disquiet... To acknowledge such a thing would surely make it worse, so you would carry on playing, and the feeling of spookiness would grown and grow, until you could no longer stand it and would have to flee for the safety of the living room and 'That's Life' or whatever else would be on the television. The bedsit is beginning to feel a bit like that, only instead of an eerie feeling of encroaching supernatural incursion, which would be interesting, the bedsit tends to generate a feeling of dull and desolate panic. A melancholy that intimates nothing will be okay ever again. As soon as I leave the bedsit, the feeling lifts. Usually after a short while.
I went down the seafront. The air was heavy and hot and complicated, the promenade full of foreign students playing football, and a massive greenhouse set up for the Brighton and Hove beer festival this weekend. I sat on a bench for a while, and watched people in the water. Summer holiday happiness. A man fishing off to my right. The sky was all violet, layered with fading purples. Summer twilights seem to last forever.
I went to the petrol station down by the swimming pool, rang Em and met her after college. I walked her back home and then came back here. The bedsit isn't too bad when night falls -even if the nights in summer don't really feel like night-time - more like a dimming of the sun rather than the sun being switched off.
Back to work tomorrow, my six days off now sadly, and far too quickly, at an end.

A Wedding, Deja-Vu, and Shakespeare's Tomb

We leave Worcester for the short trip to Stratford for Em's youngest brother's wedding. One of Em's other brothers in the car, his wife, their child. On the way to Stratford I become momentarily excited as we pass through a village called Inkberrow - the home of And Also The Trees. Flashes of green lanes and Tudor buildings, trees and sky. I crane my neck and try to glimpse of a 'Virus Meadow', or maybe the petrified orchard in the song 'Blind Opera'. Then I remember, that song was about the orchard being destroyed; 'and the winds in your bare ribs utters still the tunes of lovers in the geese vee'd skies'.
The wedding takes place in the church where Shakespeare lies buried. After the service Em and myself slip out back to see his tomb, and the strange inscription that ends with the warning that 'curst be he who moves my bones'.
There was a thin rain after the service but by the time we arrived at the reception, this had, happily, been replaced by a pleasant summery warmth. The reception took place at the bride's parents, in a marquee in the grounds of their house in the Warwickshire countryside.
When night falls in the country (after a dazzling and unexpected sunset - see above) it comes like some dream-like thing rising from the ground, as if the darkness is a by-product of grasses and fields and trees and meadows.
A dazzling and pleasing array of family and speeches and champagne and tables scattered with tiny blue jewels. Plates of roast beef and roast potatoes and bread rolls. The DJ playing songs from the 1980s. Em remarks that the songs he plays only ever seem to be played at wedding. Wedding time is different from normal time though. Sat around table cloth laid tables, drinking daytime alcohol in unfamiliar suits, there is a certain shifting of time. This may no longer be now, may not be the wedding you arrived at. Look around, could this be not 2011 but 1971, or maybe 1931..? Wedding time is forever, and afterwards, feels as unreal as time spent in an odd faery-land.

Em and myself sharing a tent in the adjoining field. I am woken at some point in the night by something pressing against the side of the tent. Some animal munching away on, well, probably - hopefully - a discarded apple. I elected not to investigate.

Bacon sandwiches and tea in the morning, then, too-soon, on the coach at Stratford and the seven hour or so journey back.

The journey back was interesting though - particularly that part into and out of London (we changed at the soulless Victoria Coach Station). Coming in, London just seemed to appear from nowhere. One minute there was countryside, and the next buildings. The first area we went through was Golders Green, peaceful and leafy and dotted with 'Kosher Supermarkets'.

Had an interesting moment of deja-vu as the coach swung into Victoria. It started off with a 'this is familiar' feeling, which grew in intensity, but was accompanied by a half-image / feeling of a family in a darkened room having dinner. Hard to explain, but it was as if this feeling / image was something I had been thinking about 'before' when this moment had 'previously' happened. As is so often with deja-vu, there was the accompanying feeling of revelation -that moment of, when being asleep of 'ah! This is only a dream!' and waking up. With deja-vu there is no waking up though, and the moment passes, and even though deja-vu can be 'rationally' explained, you are still left with the feeling that you have been afforded a sudden and inexplicable glimpse into a wider mechanism.

South London was ragged and obscure. Boarded up shops, and the faces of pedestrians out of the window were strained and harried. Waste grounds of disused factories and poisonous looking fast food kiosks - themselves warily abandoned in the sunny nothing of Sunday evening. On the wooden boarding of one such establishment were scrawled the words 'white leper first Armageddon war chilled'.

It took a long time to travel through South London. There would be sudden stretches of industrial looking countryside -pylon states, industrial estate republics- before being plunged back into an increasingly leafy and more pleasant suburbia.

I can't remember when London ended, but soon enough, the dry yellow light of Sussex was unmistakeable. Then there was London Road, Preston Park, the Old Steine... finally Pool Valley coach station and the end of the journey.

Back in the bedsit now, an hour and a half left of Sunday, but I'm not too sad, as I remembered to book tomorrow off.

Drifting on a Late Saturday Morning

An hour and a half before leaving for Stratford.

A fresh summers day, hot though. Took a walk down by the canal with Em to feed the ducks. The light in Worcester is different to that in Brighton. Clearer and sharper, and less suffused with that curious and often unpleasant holiday-town sickness which Brighton sometimes has. Everything here is more languid and overgrown. The sound of clocks ticking in the kitchen do not so much strike the hour as whisper it. From the window to my right, indistinct sounds drift on the barely-there breeze.

Three minutes have passed since I started writing this.

The Horologists Nightmare

Last night, the cathedral bells at midnight, ringing in the muted darkness of the unfamiliar spare room.
Before, a walk through the pre-midnight hour of Worcester, through the vaster, older darkness of streets older than Brighton. The sky higher, an imagined space of stars.
In the post midday hours of today, across the bridge and back into St Johns. Houses where I used to live, trying to find bits of my past - twelve, thirteen, fourteen years later. A continual series of recursive autopsies into the past, a post mortem of place rather than events. Time itself is an inconsistent constant laid over it all. A haphazard clock, ticking randomly. An horologist's nightmare.
Sun, rain, wind and something restless everywhere.
Off to meet Joe Bird in the Plough at 8:00pm... The first time I was there, autumn 1996... and so on and so on...
The smell of ironing, light blues music from the stereo, and the taste of rain. Old summers and time ticking on its troubled unceasing way.

A Second July in Worcester

The light is different in Worcester - wetter somehow - and the clouds in the sky are thicker. The bits of sky behind the cloud, glimpsed between the white is of a near-autumnal blue.
Out of the window in the kitchen there were trees in the distance, nodding in the breeze in a way that does not happen back in Brighton.
Met Em at Birmingham New Street at 1:30pm. The three hour train ride up was a lulling affair, hypnotised by the passage of the countryside out of the window. Strange greys and summer fields made restless by the wind; the pale undersides of leaves, revealing themselves with sudden violence. Glimpses of shadows within tiny clusters of trees. Miniature woods in the muddle of fields, islands amongst dull yellow seas.
Waking in the quiet of Em's flat this morning, difficult to rouse myself from dream-heavy sleep. A sudden quiet over Brighton, as if sobered by the rain, but I'm not sure whether it rained last night or not.
The last time I was in Worcester in July was 1998, thirteen years ago. I actually remember this week back then. I spent the days reading the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying in the garden of 136 London Road, drawing in my sketchbook. Ruth had left for Poland for the summer, Al had moved out to Happylands, and Joe had left for the West Country after his few days working at Lark Hill Station, a job I was to take over the next month.
It seems impossible that that summer happened in the city I'm in now. The Worcester of the 1990s and the Worcester of the 2010s seem to occupy different space as well as different time, and yet, still be the same place. I suppose because I am a visitor here now but once this would have been home.

Fragments of a Trip Alone to Stanmer Park

The wind is violent through summer-trees. Outside of one wood, I look back at the darkness inside. I nearly fall asleep on the grass after lunch. I see no-one for hours, only a solitary cyclist. White paths, tree-darkness, spinney-islands. I watch the clouds rush past, cover and uncover the sun. The wind through the leaves is like a hissing and an earthquake, the collapse of something huge.
I remember coming here in my first year of Brighton, with those people I knew from Southampton days; Jim, Mick and Dave, and their friends too, people whom I'm not sure I would even recognise if I saw them now. Later on I would come here with Paul, before he was lost to schizophrenia, then Andy and Joe and Al. There is a photograph of Joe and myself leaning against a cart by a barn somewhere about. The cart and barn are still there, nearly three years later. Then last year, coming here with Em, but this is the first time I have come alone.
Waiting for the bus back to Brighton, the endless rush of cars, the bright and violent sun, the wind dropping, and the air tasting of asphalt-jewels and petrol.
The bus was busy and full of students.
I stared out of the window at the road that led to where I first lived when I moved to Brighton.

Forgotten Places

The rain is back, heralding my ensuing six days off work with a too-familiar white gloom. I sit in the bedsit, having just finished a portion of cod and chips, feeling full-up and sleepy. I remember last summer. I could sleep for days at a time.
Looking at Googlemaps tonight, during that last hour of work, at those forgotten places of my history; Southampton where I studied illustration from 1994 - 1996, and Harrow-on-the-Hill, where I took my first foundation course in art and design, 1991 - 1992 (I dropped out in the Easter. It was strange looking at Harrow-on-the-Hill again. I've not really looked at it online before. I remember the steps down from the tube station. The photographs were taken in autumn, and seemed to describe a cool and beguiling place. London does autumn well, unlike Brighton.
Southampton seemed to be full of roundabouts. I remember my first few days of living there, that panicky feeling of not yet knowing anyone in the city, and not knowing the city at all. Living in a house down Clovelly Road before other house-mates moved in. Impaled Nazarene albums and Silk Cut cigarettes. I remember watching the second episode of the X-Files in that house, being startled by a knocking at the door. Two shadows against the frosted glass. I knew no-one there, hadn't even had a conversation yet in the city. I turned the light off, unaccountably afraid of these strangers, who were no doubt after some long gone previous tenants.
My room is humid, as if this House of Bedsits is located in some jungle region, perhaps in Vietnam or Brazil. I could almost imagine this, were it not for the too-Brighton sound of buses and taxis. The primordial caterwaul of the seagulls though would not, however, be out of place in a jungle environment.

In the Twilight-Midnight of this Far North

There is memory and there is resonance, and though these two states, these two countries of the internal, are similar, they are not quite the same. Nor is it true -though it is rare- that one cannot exist without the other.
Memory is the constant, and is always there, even if it is an absence, or an uncertainty. Memory is the retelling of facts, a reference book entry -or to be more inaccurate given the unreliability of memory, a Wikipedia passage perhaps, complete with grammatical errors, point-of-view passages and edit-wars.
Resonance is rarer, shiftier, utterly inconsistent, and yet, paradoxically, more to be trusted because it is not about facts, about balancing the equations of what might or might not have happened six years ago. If memory is about the facts of what happened, then resonance is about the atmosphere of what was produced around those happenings.
The memories of a holiday six years ago may be summarised as follows:
Two weeks spent in a rented 17th century farmhouse in Scotland visiting various places; Loch Ness, where I used to live in Kinloss and Forres, Fort William, Cawdor Castle, Brodie Castle, Elgin, Randolph's Leap. Books I read there include 'It' (again) 'Our Lady of the Forest' 'Alien Animals' 'Scottish Ghost Stories'. 7/7 happened over those two weeks there, I bought 'We Live' by Electric Wizard, the second Witchcraft' album, Danzig's second album (again)...
This is the resonance;
(Out in the garden in the twilight-midnight of this far north)
-deep yellow, a falling, a green, a hallway, and the wind through the trees in the distance, sleeping and expecting, a glance struck in the corner of a room that was mahogany dark, the ether-ea of ghost stories, swept through fields of unnamed wheat, hidden rivers and the woods walked beside hiding inside their night-time, and other rivers, falling, and there is a light green too, Snickers Bars and cans of Guinness, 'Sunny Road' by Emiliana Torrini, the summer unfolding, threatening and promising to reveal itself, a pathway about to unwind under July to some shifting distance, on the corner of that field, a figure crouched over, untwining itself to be shadows and bark and twilight, the air new and ancient and intimate and strangely familiar, the creaking of a boat and drifting on memories that don't feel mine, crows and woods, and blue squares of night at the windows, a nocturnal shift and lake monster photographs that seem to hide themselves in empty cupboards and locked drawers, phantom Red-Setter dogs, and a fragment of being followed through these feather-light paths past too-deep weeds and woods and winds and a breeze through a 1930s mornings centuries before, vanishing into the sea, and the landscape here is secret and dangerous and beguiling, and this is the countryside where people might vanish-

But even that is not quite enough. Words fail, judder to a halt - like trying to paint a colour in black and white perhaps - but this monochrome colour-web catches more of a time than memory, on its own, can ever hope to do.

Is there resonance here now? -For that's the other thing about resonance, this essence of a time, distilled and purified, is never noticed at the time. It is only later; months, years, sometimes even decades, that resonance might make itself be known, if at all. Often a smell, more often a song, and we are back there, not only experiencing the time again, but knowing it, in a way that encapsulates, distills and purifies its very essence.
Resonance is a true sixth sense, an almost occult state that seems to warp concepts of linear time.
I wonder what resonance there may be now then, on this warm July night, after a spectral sunset, sat in my bedsit, listening to Emiliana Torrini's 'Fisherman's Woman' album, as I did in Scotland six years ago?

Dogs with Beards and Standing Stones

Went to the dog show today at Hove recreation ground with Em, Al and Claire, and now I am dog-tired, hohoho.
Before the dog show I went with Em down the beach where there was a 'Paddle Round the Pier Day' or something. I think people have a race around the pier in various home made boats, but I didn't see any of the contraptions because the race took place at 9:00am in the morning.
I was fast asleep of course.
There was however a miniature fairground of sorts - ferris wheels always look good, BMX bikers who were oddly impressive and a tent in which an American sounding rock band were playing.
The dog show was far better.
It seemed to be a far more provincial affair, small with only a few stalls dotting the outside, selling various canine oddities. And lots of dogs of course. Dogs are always good. Particularly if they have beards.
We met the woman who went to school with And Also The Trees again (I met her for the first time at the dog show in St Anns Well Park last summer) and sat about on the grass, drinking pineapple juice and trying not to melt in the sun.
After the dog show we wandered round the recreation ground for a while. I had never been in before, though passed by hundreds and hundreds of times. I liked a very narrow strip of woodland at the western edge of the park. It ran the length of the park and was no wider than the length of my room. It was wild and tangled with undergrowth, a path snaking haphazardly through. Little obscure places like this always fascinate me.
Well, we are stranded in summer now. A few days of heat and it seems like summer has been forever and will be forever. The air tastes constantly of metal, and the nights bring a pale imitation of darkness. Most of the people on the streets of Brighton look like they are on holiday, and the bars are continually packed. Actually the last is a lie, but I couldn't think of anything else to add. Went to the Good Companions last night for Andy's birthday and the place was pleasantly quiet and chilled out.
But it feels like all the bars are packed. They are down Western Road anyway.
For little apparent reason, these last few days have strongly reminded me of the summer of 2005, I'm not sure in which capacity though. I had been on a rather excellent holiday with Mum and Dad back to Scotland where I used to live. This had kick-started a number of imaginative shifts, namely an interest, after over a decade of no interest at all, in comics, horror comics especially, and a deeper fascination with all things Fortean. The latter due to reading a number of books on the paranormal up in Scotland. I have always been interested in the field of course, but being back up in Scotland, where my interest in 'ghost-stories' really began seemed to fan the flames even more. Anyway. I returned back to Brighton after the holiday, and I found that I began noticing previously ignored places in Brighton and Hove as potential sites for mystery, namely that walled wood on the Old Shoreham Road that is actually the grounds of a school. I remember the wind blowing through the thick leaves when I used to pass by at night.
I suppose my contemporary reading matter had made me more aware of the mysteries and possible 'ghost-stories' inherent in summer, and this summer has fragments of that feeling too. A vague daydream-y notion that Brighton and Hove seems a far more mysterious and interesting place than normal, that there may be pockets of shadows and intrigue and arcane possibility which were not previously noticed. Or something. Not explaining myself very well here tonight.

Case in point though. Last night, before the pub, and going to meet Em after work on Dyke Road, I passed a building I had passed by numerous times before. Some kind of business / office type affair, just off Davigdor Road. Anyway, outside of the building was now some kind of installation next to the pavement. This seemed to consist of a single, needle-shaped standing stone, slightly yellow, and taller than me. I had never noticed it before. I could imagine some old seventies television programme, or maybe a lost Doctor Who story, about a business corporation who find such a stone underneath the building. Unwittingly displaying it as some historical artefact, they unleash buried elemental energies, which manifest themselves in lots of deaths, sub-Exorcist style possessions, new-age philosophy and cheap but effective psychedelic special effects.

Anyhow.

I'm tired now and must go to bed, even if it is only 9:42pm.

I watch 'The Haunting' first though -the original black and white version of course.

Or a cup of tea. Indecisive and tired.

Heat

'After work, I'd stay in town, drifting... anything to avoid going back to that ugly little bed-sit... I would walk the streets till I was tired enough to go back and drop straight into oblivion the moment my head hit the pillow...'
-John Burnside 'Living Nowhere'

After I had finished work, and to avoid the bedsit more than anything else, I took a walk to Brighton Marina. Up George Street and its air of slightly desperate and decaying decadence, memories of 2002 when I moved to Kemptown for a couple of years... Pass by Flo's old place of course. The first time I've seen it in daylight since he died back in March. Gap in the curtains of what was his bedroom. Some kind of tartan covering, a plant, snake-like and tropical in my memory. That deeper darkness behind though. Layers and layers of caught-up silence. It still feels like no-one lives there.
Bought four A4 canvases at the Marina then headed home along the seafront. The seafront was packed with people, holidaymakers mostly. I was glad to be back on Western Road. Almost. Bare-chested men with beer bellies and sunburnt faces, trumpet players on stilts, a gaggle of children clustered round a skinhead father.
I've got the curtains drawn against the summer outside, and in the yellow 3:46pm twilight of the bedsit, I wait patiently for nightfall.

Exhaustion

Fell asleep watching 'Carrie' last night.
Fell asleep in the churchyard at lunchtime to the sound of skag-heads arguing in St Nicholas Churchyard.
Great yawns throughout the day like an abyss. The call-centre is far too hot.
I feel I could sleep for days. I am in the shadow of comas.
A punctuation of oblivion, punctured, one hopes, by dreams.
It is summer now.
The air is all heat-crime, seagulls and a lack of night-time.
The nights are thin and pale things, a barely darkness, a tenebrous fallacy.
Exhausted.
I could fall asleep now until tomorrow.