Unmappable Places in the Dark

It's a normal night out there, like any other night, but it wasn't always this way. Back when I was a kid at Kinloss in Scotland, Hallowe'en was a big thing. Preparation for the big night would - or seemed to - last all through October; school projects, ghost stories, furious conversations over costumes and masks. There was a genuine excitement about the night. This was in the late 1970s / early 1980s, before Hallowe'en really 'took off' in this country as it were. I've always thought that the reason Hallowe'en was so big up there was because of the 'Americans on the airbase', though I don't really remember many Americans on the airbase really. I wonder if Hallowe'en was some kind of survival of old folk beliefs, superstitions passed on through generations of transient children.

We lived in estates owned by the ministry of defence, just outside of the base. Southside - the estate where we first lived - was a labyrinthine collection of houses, alleys and playgrounds. On Hallowe'en night, the streets were thronged with children in cheap plastic masks bought from the VG just by the old monk-haunted abbey. It is hard to explain how exciting Hallowe'en was back then - how important it was. The ritual of trick-or-treat ('...or smell my feet or give me something nice to eat...') the way the very air in the preceding day seemed altered, threaded through with something cold and alluring and almost magic(k)al... As I moved through my years in Kinloss, my response to Hallowe'en deepened. We moved from Southside to Burnside (the officers married quarters on the other side of Abbeylands Primary School, just south of the woods we said were haunted by a werewolf...) and the rituals of Hallowe'en continued. Spectral children under the white lights of Burnside, the path that led from the houses to the woods lit by lamps everyone avoided, wet leaves flung against the bulbs like moths, and the water from the burn that ran on the edge of the trees trickled in a silence that was not mentioned. Bags filling up with sweets of various descriptions - the occasional house with buckets of apples - Samhain games - and monkey nuts, more than anything else the taste of Hallowe'en, breaking open browny-yellow shells, October seeds, tasting of attics and old books and something all consuming and addictive.

Then the streets would empty, and still excited, we would reluctantly head home, count up our treasures in bedrooms and living rooms, allowed to stay up later than normal.

Something would the happen to the streets outside.

We would know, but we wouldn't see - who would dare go to the windows of our bedrooms to look outside?

We would feel that change as we all lay in our beds across the estates, still too excited and full of sweets to sleep, lying in that deepening October darkness in the silence of the houses. We would all feel something slip from the dark country that surrounded the estates, from the trees by the railway line we said was haunted by the Black Phantom, from Rabbits Hill, a sandy knoll glimpsed from the far reaches of Southside, creeping from the fields around the abbey, from the too-near sea, salty home of cursed treasure and dead pirates, from the untrustworthy sandbanks. Songs of drowned boys and girls who didn't hear the warnings.

It would slip into the maps of places that we would know, altering the streets and the geometry of daytime places, imposing a new night-land order, an occult cartography for something old and certain, unnamed and definite, something transient, like the children who would live on the estates until their fathers would be, as mine was, posted elswhere after a few years.

We would hear it perhaps in the wind, would imagine it walking a few alleyways down, in the shadows cast by a dead street light, or as footsteps in almost silent, swing-creaking playgrounds.

This imagined darkness would slip up the passage behind the gardens of Easter Road, swing on the ivy of the deserted house we called 'The Executioner's Home'.

Lying there in the dark, safe-and-not-safe, we would be certain that outside now belonged to them, to ghosts and darkness and monsters, and something old and invisible, the reason, perhaps, that Hallowe'en was even invented in the first place.

The unmappable places in the dark.

...and falling asleep, the outside, haunted and perfect would be an impossible and beautiful, unimaginable place.

Who would dare walk there now we would think?

I'm on the edges of being 40 now - 5 months away - and I walk back through the Brighton darkness lit by too many lights that chase shadows away from corners. Pubs and bars offer prizes for the best costumes, and people dress up as celebrities and television show vampires and smoke cigarettes on the street in an evening that's too warm.

A normal night, just like any other.

But I think about the streets of Kinloss, of Southside and Burnside, and the woods and the abbey. I suppose there are kids up there now, trick-or-treating in the same places I did. Rituals passed from transient children to transient children.

I wonder if any of them will lie in the dark up there, after the streets have emptied and hear something, perhaps in the wind, maybe imagine it walking a few alleyways down from their safe-and-not-safe bedrooms, passing in the shadows cast by a dead street light, or as footsteps in almost silent, swing-creaking playgrounds.

Maybe one of them will pull back the curtains and see a ghost of myself, passing quietly, nearly unobtrusively by, still trying to map out these unmappable places in the dark.

Monday after the Clocks go Back

First Monday since the clocks went back yesterday. Always strange, that first evening in that elongated day, when darkness comes an hour early. it feels like something has gone very wrong with time, and yet, simultaneously, it feels like a strange relief too.
Sitting in the floor of my room, 7:45am, a cup of tea on one side of me, a hairbrush on the other. Despite the fact that it should feel later than it does, it feels like this is, maybe 5 or 6:00am. I don't feel as tired as I normally do, but any extra energy caused by an 'extra' hour in bed soon wears off.
So silent this early in the morning. My typing sounds like rushed footsteps, and aside from the humming of the laptop (like a distant sea) - and, yes - the sounds of one of the workshops opening downstairs, it's silent. Hold on - now there's some kind of vehicle passing by
So, not really silent at all then.

Still and Silent Animals

A grey and rainy day. Sheets of drizzle so light they felt so barely wet. Beads of water on the lenses of my glasses that are already scratched and cracked.
Walked with Em today from Shoreham into Bramber along the river Adur. A line of trees in the distance under leaden skies. Silent rams in fields staring at passing Yorkshire terriers. The water of the river cold and still, a current that didn't seem to flow.
Earlier that morning, lying on the bed, listening to certain sounds out of the window; that of a single dog barking, a strange and lonely sound, some Black Shuck lost in the labyrinth of gardens outside. There was a bell too, a church bell, a sound I most associate with Worcester and summer and staying in Joe Bird's living room. There it seemed to chime for summer and warmth, here the bell is tiny and piercing - a bell to toll in winter, those dead and dreaming hours, those ghost story days. More and more trees are looking empty of leaves. There is a pleasing bleakness outside now.
We found an old church somewhere on the walk today. A Norman looking church - not that I know anything of ecclesiastical architecture - out on the banks of the river. It looked like a building from an M.R.James story. Close your eyes and you could imagine yourself on some turn-of-the-century Suffolk Close; 'si tu non veneris ad me ego veniam ad te', oh whistle and I'll come to you my lad... 'quis est ist qui uenit...'
On the other side of the graveyard there was a small field - a paddock really, full of silent miniature horses, who didn't exactly regard us with disdain, but didn't regard us at all.
They didn't even look at us, didn't even notice we we were there.

Malaise

The occult comic strup coincidences continue. Last night I began a new piece, showing two clown figures stood on the steps of Lovers Walk, near Preston Manor. I did some this morning after my first post of the day, and only stopped when Em came round and we walked to Portslade to look in the charity shops there. In one such charity shop - the one I used to always look in when I was signing on over summer 2010 - I found a book called 'An Authentic and Faithful History of the Atrocious Murder of Celia Holloway' whose body was found, of course, down Lovers Walk.
As the early afternoon progressed a great malaise of spirit came down. After Em had left, and faced with a new and sudden desolation that had leaked into the afternoon, I decided the only way I could possibly cope with this wa sby going to sleep. In this I was only partially successful. I kept waking up - jolted into consciousness - by dreams, accompanied with a feeling of unanchored dread. At twilight I gave up on the thought of sleep. Had a cup of tea instead, and watched it get dark outside, watched the old angles of windows just across the back lane from my window.
The silence of the flat impressed me. No sound, no cries, no taxis, no fireworks. I moved through the darkness of the hallway in a kind of peace.
I went for a walk, nominally to get gas and credit for my phone, which helped me feel a little better. I walked nearly to Portslade again, then zig-zagged through the suburban streets between New Church Road and Portland Road, up and down, up and down.
Back home now, and Andy is back from work.
I sit on my bed and listen to the door rattle in the frane.
But only slightly.

Saturday Morning, Not at Work

A rare Saturday morning to myself as I have the day off work. Sat on my bed with the blackout curtains drawn. Alone in the flat as Andy is at work. So quiet here, but in the quiet there are noises. I cannot quite work out what the noise is. It seems to be coming from next door, behind me. A kind of cross between a saw and an operatic voice. All gone silent now, as is often the way when you concentrate on such things.
Trying to listen to 'Suicidal Maniac' by Suicidal Tendencies on Youtube. Remember buying this album back in 1987 from Virgin in Wolverhampton. I played it at my Nan's house and instantly fell asleep. There is a photograph of me somewhere, clutching the record sleeve, happy in oblivion, that my parents sneakily too.
The record, apart from 'Suicidal Maniac' was a huge disappointment.
Such a relief not to be at work this morning.
The flat feels -inexplicable- like Christmas, the taste of those days that precede the day itself, a mixture freshly carpeted hallways and rumours of flat and grey skies outside. Afternoons spent walking over sand dunes at my parents house, nights spent watching M.R.James adaptations on the television.
Strange to think that a month ago we were in a heatwave, and now I can feel December gathering somewhere very close.

A Spurious Late Night Coincidence

Flicking through a magazine 'Comics Heroes' I bought another day. An article on Spiderman. Recognise the name. One of my flatmate's boyfriend from the first house I lived in in Worcester. I remember him. Pints of Guinness in lunchtime pubs because it was too cold to stay in the house on Bransford Road. Talking about Sapphire and Steel, and being menaced by teenagers. I hadn't thought about that last conversation for years. Remember his first article published in SFX. His girlfriend showing me a copy in WHSMiths in Birmingham New Street.

A spider is dead on the floor. It crawled up to me as I was sorting out a pile of comics. It crept away from me, settled down at the base of the bookcase.

Getting late now.
Autumn ticks on.

A Placebo of Hyperthymesic Occultist Comic Strip Autobiography

Sat at work before lunch, doodling ideas for the ongoing autobiographical comic strip project - this time based around my time as a student as Worcester, as opposed to previous attempts concentrating on childhood memories of ghost hunting. What has been interesting is the amount of coincidences that seem to be happening based around the idea. No coincidence particularly striking, and don't get me wrong - they ARE just coincidences. The other day I was thinking about a specific concept - of how memory doesn't just re-create something, but forms something entirely new - some things intensified, others glossed over, a sense of intensity given to events that were at the time very mundane. I get home from school (uh... I mean work...) and Andy has bought a book by Oliver Sachs (I can't remember the title). I open the book and the page falls open at a quote by some philosopher I can't now remember explaining (in a far more eloquent way than I have done above) of how memory just doesn't recreate something, but... etc etc. Yesterday I was again pondering over memory, and of how the 'past' seems a constant 'presence' in the present - certain shafts of light, or sounds, or smells will trigger off an almost total immersion in a past event, a kind of 'virtual reality memory'. It sometimes seems as if life is kind of split between the present and the whatever part of the past is currently occupying my imagination - and then, in a magazine in a breakroom, I come across a condition called Hyperthymesia, and, according to the ever reliable source of Wikipedia...

'...the two defining characteristics of hyperthymesia are 1) the person spends an abnormally large amount of time thinking about his or her personal past, and 2) the person has an extraordinary capacity to recall specific events from his or her personal past...'

...which, as a description of myself seems alarmingly accurate. Further internet searches reveal people who see life on two different levels, the present and the past, so days pass by on some kind of split screen. Obviously these are only coincidences, and nothing particularly special, but when I 'started' this autobiographical project, I decided that I wanted an 'occult' side to the project. By this I mean that, as an imaginative exercise, I would try to fool myself into believing that there was a 'paranormal' side to the project, that some kind of 'other' energy was present and being focussed in the work. Lets be clear though. I, in no way believe that there is any 'other' energy present or 'paranormal side' to these cartoons of myself at various stages in my life, but I wanted to see what would happen if I believed there was - or if I pretended there was some 'other' dimension to the project. The idea being that the end result of the project / comic would be far more 'effective' than if I just treated it as just another way to pass the time.

Lost Letters from a Phantasmal French Postal Service

Rain again tonight - though seems to have finished now - as well, I have to leave the Mews in a short while to meet Em at the train station as she returns from Worcester.
Found something on the floor of my room today - a tiny stamp, showing the face of a long haired figure, gender uncertain. I can only presume the landlady (who was checking windows and gas meters) might have accidentally dropped it. I keep it by the lamp that is balanced on top of the cardboard boxes by my bed. I imagine, like a sliver of ice, it might melt.
Reading a magazine at work I came across a condition I had never heard of before, the two main symptoms being a bizarrely detailed past recall of autobiographical events only, and an abnormal amount of time spent thinking about the past. I thought I bought the magazine home, but bought the wrong one home annoyingly.
I can't recall what the condition is called for the life of me... but it struck a chord with me.
I hear music from the house next door. The tinny noise of my i-pod. Don't know why it's playing.
A piece of red glitter at the base of the 'f' key on the laptop, a fragment from a Christmas decoration, or a wrapping from a present. Perhaps the same phantasmal French postal service is responsible for this as for the stamp.
Perhaps this flat is littered with tiny bits of lost mail.
I must prepare to leave. The night seems cold and dark and deep out there.
I am looking forward to it.

A Half Finished Drawing

It's all restless out there tonight, windy-rainy autumn evening. Peel back the curtains of my room and in the darkness - perfect pitch black- there are windows across the space between this flat and Drurys Coffee Shop, a bathroom, or a kitchen perhaps. I can't tell this deep at night.
Only ten to eleven, and it feels far later.
Alone in the flat - Andy at work, presumably - or disappeared and about to start a career as a mystery - and the wind through the open window rattles the door. For some reason - lack of knowledge and a superstitious misunderstanding of devices - I imagine the rain and wind out there responsible for my dreadful internet connection.
I talk with Em on the phone, in Worcester, returning tomorrow, and she says she is having trouble with her internet connection too. On the floor, to my right, is a half finished drawing of London Road in Worcester at night. A legendary place that I have written of dreaming about before. Em is only twenty minutes walk away from what
I am drawing.
I am in the bottom right of the picture, a pencil (waiting to be inked) avatar of myself. I can't tell whether I'm turned away walking up this unreal London Road hill, or toward me, coming forward.
I can feel the icy-cold beneath the paper, a trapped night from another town I imagine in which there is a part of me walking forever, like a haunting, like falling in love.
There are spaces in the picture where I would like to lay words, but my pen has been mute and I have filled notebook pages today at work with mute sentences and broken phrases. The two white spaces lie blank and accusing, perfect pieces cut from a forever unreal London road.

An Abandoned Experiment between a Church and Factory

I left the house at just gone 5:00 yesterday afternoon to get some electricity for the meter, and I ended up walking to Portslade, perhaps unsurprisingly given my penchant for twilight and autumnal walks.
I set off down Portland Road, and past the place where I meet Em when she works up this end of town, and into that section I have not walked since the unemployment summer of 2010. It struck me how much larger everything on Portland Road seemed to be. This needs some explanation as the buildings are quite obviously a lot smaller than Brighton. There was a huge billboard to my right, advertising something I have now forgotten, and that industrial building that looks like some abandoned experiment between a church and a factory. The buildings on the other side of the street were simple one and two storey affairs, some of which were retail outlets of varying description ('Bargain Vacuum Centre'). Perhaps I felt dwarfed under the huge billboard and the church / factory, but I don't think it is quite that. I think there is just that air of desertion around here that makes t he place seem larger somehow, and the sky vaster and almost carnivorous. There is an air about Portland Road of something ragged and run down, like a street in a less than salubrious suburb of London. A place that might be notorious for crime... if only there were enough people there to commit them. As I walked down Portland Road, nearing Portslade (only a mile or so away from the Mews where I live) the shops became fewer and fewer. I passed by streets leading away from Portland Road into darkening labyrinths of houses and silent questionable estates, their geography sinking into the slowly gathering twilight.

I became oddly superstitious about walking through the centre of Portslade itself. Old and not-really-remembered rumours of the usual teenage miscreants kept occurring to me. This, despite the fact it wasn't even 6:00pm and there were many normal looking families heading back home from the shops... and not a teenager in sight (nor indeed very many people at all). I cut down through the houses onto the parallel road of New Church Road and continued walking toward Portslade... just lower down and nearer the sea. Twilight was gathering quickly now, an incoming tide that was coming in from everywhere. The sky was clear so the darkness seemed to rise from the ground itself, from beneath the leaves and between the houses, and all those hidden places of the day. I passed by the church and graveyard that was near the end of New Church Road. I remembered this church from the summer of last year. I would sometimes walk down New Church Road to sign on, and this church would be the last signpost before Portslade. I hated signing on, and would dread it as much as one dreads an urgent and important job interview. The church in summer was ragged and overgrown with weeds and grasses, and last night it was looking much the same, though this deep in autumn, the undergrowth was much depleted. There were no lights in the church or around the tombs, and the light here was a startlingly deep blue. It was like a scene in a ghost story, though as wonderfully atmospheric as it was, there was nothing, disappointingly, eerie about it all, as is the way with such things. I imagined sleeping between the tombs, oddly warm in the autumn night, waking in the small hours as drunken passers by made their way home, and I would be invisible to them, unseen in the shadow of their own disappointing ghost stories.

When I reached Portslade I turned left and walked toward the sea. I passed by a barred golf shop, and a DVD rental store advertising the new Batman game. There was a fast food pizza place quiet at this time of night, and some kebab emporium out of which a skinhead man came out clutching what might have been a package of fish'n'chips.

-down the end of Portslade now, and we're at the apex of twilight, this place is different here, shifted and older, an ancient and industrial air-

This is what it was like though, like stepping across the unseen boundary from one country into another. Though there is no deliberate demarcation line, there is undoubtedly a difference, something in the air, the light perhaps, or maybe even the sky. This was the apex of twilight of course, the dominion of dusk, transiently triumphant.

We were on the edge of the dockland industrial zone that stretches from the edge of Hove to Shoreham-by-Sea, and the site of one of the first entries from Bridge 39, nearly two years ago.

I watched the squat warehouse-buildings silhouetting themselves against the violet-rippled sky, a display of bare shadow and exposed nightfall. In the spaces beyond the frontline of these buildings, a deeper geography I couldn't see, of docks and dark water, dreaming, drifting ships, locked up walkways and the ghosts of quarry machines and power station accidents.

The breathing of steam, the red light on the chimney, a Cyclops stop-light for passing aircraft, frozen in the sky.

This little section of Portslade, or the seafront, or whatever liminal section I was on the edges of, seemed so utterly unconnected to Brighton and Hove, and even to Portslade just behind me. There was a curious air of a small, dark fishing village about it, a feeling that was only heightened by the sinister architecture of dockland industry. It put me in mind of H.P.Lovecraft's Innsmouth, a coastal port hiding marine secrets, a malign and beguiling occult trade route.

I headed back home along the seafront road, and the small squat houses by the roadside promised mysteries behind their windows through which I could see the 'X-Factor' being watched, Saturday night entertainment repeating itself on every television screen. Beyond these watched rooms, a deeper cartography of old and yellow-light bulb lit rooms, silent hallways and cold landings, and from the frosted cracked windowpanes of bathrooms I couldn't see, there would be glimpses into the dark and crowded gardens below that belonged wholly to the night now.

Over the dark geography of the docklands, on a slight rise, I could see a line of street lamps on one of the factory roads.

They seemed to be watching the sea, as if waiting for something.

Metaphors for Judgement

My room is like a garage.
A photograph of myself in New Zealand, stood on a beach perfect as an equation with my sister and Gemma.
A photograph of myself in the New Forest with Jim. I leap towards the camera, Jim leans against a tree.
Everything is brown here, like autumn.
The sword of Damocles has fallen, it's usual monthly lunar swipe of destruction. This one particularly bad, whole streets scalped and entire suburbs destroyed.
I think of moving from this unreal city but am afraid I shall wait until I may be exiled.
A Star Trek annual from 1977, 'Houses of Horror' by Hans Holzer.
The latter is unreadable.

In the Living Room, 8:40, Tuesday Night

Andy hangs up his clothes on the clothes rack, talking about work.
'Made in Chelsea' is on the television. (I've now turned it off).
Red curtains drawn against the Mews.
I dreamt last night of zombies in my grandparents village of Stone.
A pile of comics (60 in all) I bought from Oxfam in the North Laine at lunchtime today.
'The Nightmare Factory' by Thomas Ligotti next to an old photograph of
an of couple I don't know I got from when I worked at Colorama,
ten years ago now.
'Last of the Summer Wine' is now on the television.

A Maladjusted Way Back

A midnight texture to the air, and a certain coldness. I imagine stars in a sky I can't see. These imagined stars have a spectral iciness about them; skating on the ice of frozen ponds in the darkness of winter woods.
Last night I bought the Morrissey album 'Maladjusted' in the basement section of a DVD rental store in Seven Dials. I used to have the album but lost it, or gave it away since I first bought it.
Flicked through it this evening when I returned home from a day with Em looking round London Road charity shops (including another trip to a storage basement in one where I bought more CDs and a copy of 'From The Tomb' I hadn't got. The man behind the counter said, in a rather sinister voice 'I always do special deals for men').
Remember the autumn when I first bought the album. 1997. Another London Road (in Worcester), Ruth, a hangover, nights full of a similar deep autumn cold to this one.
We had drunk vodka the night before. It was a week-night if I recall. Could have been a Wednesday or a Thursday. No lectures that day. Remember that dreadful hangover day, throwing up in the bathroom, then, later, a vegetable chow mein from the chinese a few doors down. Remember Ruth gone home and being confronted with the coldness of my room, that hangover-headache uncomfortable and awful in my head, and my room a desolation of hours, as rooms tend to be when you have spent all day hungover in them.
This is why I bought (or re-bought) the album.
I listen to remember.

The Unquiet Distance

'The Unquiet Distance'

Pen and ink on A4 paper

October 11th - 15th 2011

The Poisonous Timetable

We seem to be in no season, no time, no day, nowhere, caught in a poisonous timetable of the spirit. A plague of yawns, of faltering prayer and badly learnt lines for half-asleep plays performed in theatres of the mundane. A place torn, a pace too fast, and I yearn
-for the strangest things-
(for the petrol station, for those quiet Sunday afternoons serving white van drivers their fuel and Benson and Hedges cigarettes, for that post 10:30pm walk back along the Old Shoreham Road, I remember this in black wind and black rain, and returning to the no-hot-water flat down Buckingham Street, the only time I could stand that place, sat in what I remember was a rocking chair but wasn't, and the autumn of six years ago, and the blue-white air of that time)
I reach forward to turn off the light, but I cannot find the light switch in the dark.

Air Raid Siren Morning

These mornings are soundtracked by the warning sounds of the industrial saws in the workshops below us. I look out of the kitchen window at the men in the workshops opposite, measuring pieces of wood, and drinking cups of tea. I don't know what they make - they seem to spend all their time with these long planks of wood, to be presumably made into some kind of furniture - but I can't even begin to hazard a guess really. The saw is the noisiest of their machines - though none of the workshop sounds are particularly disturbing. I watched a man this morning feed one of the planks of wood into it, though what happened to it was lost in the obscurity of the workshops and my need for a bath. The saw starts early, as I lie in the blackout darkness of my room, just past 8:00am, and it sounds like an air raid siren, cutting through the remnants of my sleep like, well, an industrial saw.

A Melted Toffee Sweet on a Summer Road

I was walking home tonight, when I suddenly started thinking about this.

We were living in Forres, Scotland, so this would have been sometime between 1982 and 1985, and I was between eleven and thirteen years old. I remember it was summer - my sister Rachael and myself were playing (or attempting to) play tennis on the road in front of our house (it was a cul-de-dac). As I sit typing this I am thinking that it must have been quite late - 9:00pm, and still bright daylight, maybe even sunny - the sun didn't sink over midsummer that far north till incredibly late. I remember other people being about, other kids I didn't know that well, maybe my sister's friend from next door. I suddenly noticed something on the tarmac of the ground and looked closer at it. It looked like some kind of sweet, some sticky toffee half-melted onto the road. As I looked at it time seemed to flip back. This sweet triggered off some incredibly powerful, but undefined memory, something from deep in infanthood, maybe even babyhood. Something from the past that swamped the present. As I stood there, tennis racquet ignored, I tried to reach back for this memory, tips of fingers brushing something that slipped away, some memory of comfort and strange sickness, a sticky, weird childhood sickness. It slipped away, whatever the memory was of, and I've never been able pinpoint where it was from. If it was a memory of course. Might just have been some glitch in the brain, some misfiring synapse, some broken connection whose side effect was a feeling of familiarity and fascination.
A melted toffee sweet on a summer road.
A strange kind of time machine.

I started thinking about this on the way home tonight.
I don't know why.

The Autumnal Street

I woke up at 8:30 this morning to the sound of the workshops downstairs, the noise of drills and saws. A strangely muted sound. After a shower I needed to get some electric and gas for the meters. This necessitated a walk to Portland Road as I needed use of a cash machine first.
I am fascinated by the streets between here and Portland Road, secret little roads, a narrow swathe of suburban backwaters. At night, the orange of the street lights turn the houses and unobtrusive trees into the setting for some half remembered childhood dream, or perhaps some half-remembered town to visit some obscure aunt and uncle. This morning, in the cool October drizzle, there was something about these streets -and one street in particular- that seemed to define a certain part of autumn, almost like a sigil. I'm not sure what it was; the anonymous houses, the battered trees losing leaves, and those that remain now coloured in shades of fever, or maybe the sky, grey, unimpeachable and heavy with drizzle.
I walked back along the narrow autumnan geography of those streets between Portland Road and here. I would like to sleep now, if I could, drift into those half remembered dreams I mentioned before, but I must leave for work in twenty minutes. I'll get back here at about 8:00pm. It seems an age away.
I'll think of that autumnal street, waiting across town.
I might go out of my way and walk back along it tonight when I return home.

42nd October Morning

Time tripping half past midnight, into the outer regions of the small hours. Feels so late here. I pretend I can hear the lane - the songs of the dead lamp- that circle the Mews. Outside of the window, down below and to my left the night=geography of the lane remains -and will continue to remain- unmapped.
Laptop hums. Such silence here. My fingers on the keys sound like dancing footsteps. Below me is a workshop, the interior of which I have never seen, a space haunted by the ghosts, perhaps, of dressing tables and sideboards, wardrobes and cupboards, bookcases and garden benches.
A pile of clothes beyond the bed resembles some badly constructed animal; hastily discarded pelts hiding the metal of the railing. I can see Metallica's 'Kill 'em All' on vinyl, underneath a fragment of an And Also The Trees t-shirt. A disturbance out in the hallway. Andy leaves his room for the bathroom. I think of the narrow stairs, the silent mews, the road beyond that and all the autumnal spectralcy outside.
Inside.
There is a peace walking in the first darkbess just past twilight.. Dusk, like autumn, never lasts long enough. Alleyways I never notice before open up, and St Anns Well Park, as I pass by, seems a haven of shadows far deeper than I would have thought.
I'll walk into sleep instead, slip down into dreams.
Wake in the inevitable restlessness of the 42nd October morning of this decade.

Unexpected Observations

I had taken about two calls this morning - it was about 9:20am - when I thought I would check the rota for the day... only to discover that I was on the 11:00am - 7:00pm shift all week. I logged out of my phone and elected to head to the Pavilion Gardens to fill in the hour and a half before I was due back on the phones.
Sitting there in this unexpected time, I drew in my sketchbook I had bought a week ago last Saturday and still not opened what I saw before me. I have the drawing on the table in front of me. Half trees, three bins, a mess of leaves and foliage hiding buildings. Drawing something from life reveals just quite how chaotic the reality of things actually are.
I returned to the park at lunchtime, hoping to carry on with the picture. I was at first disappointed, but the old man sat at the table soon left, and I returned to carry on with drawing. Strange to be in the same place mid afternoon I was in earlier in the morning. The light had shifted and the shadows were different, but the Pavilion Gardens still had that earlier dreamlike feel. It always does when summer has passed by, and even over the summer there is something slightly unfocussed about the place.

Two Self Referential Dreams

1. I am descending a stairwell, accompanied by Andy. The stairwell is similar to the kind that may be found in a school or some other public function building, flights of steps doubling back on themselves, interrupted by small landings. The stairway is well-lit by windows (I am not sure what is outside) but there is still the feeling of being deep underground. There is the knowledge, unspoken, that this stairway forms part of some, or actually is, a mineshaft, for the mining of what remains unknown. The stairways and landings are covered with rubbish. This unnerves me and reminds me of those recurring dreams I have about secret stairways found in attics. These stairways are haunted and fascinate and repulse me. Dangerous places. I am about to say this to Andy, and thatw e should get out of here when a doorway comes down from the ceiling, blovking off the section of stairway Andy is on. This 'doorway' is made up of pads of paper, so are easy to destroy. Andy still wants to continue but I am overcome by a sense of panic and terror and must leave.
2. I have returned back to Ickenham and am in our old house with a number of people. I decide to take everybody on a walk through my adolescence. For some reason I wish to show everybody my old college Uxbridge College, where I failed my art A-level over 1990 / 1991. On the way there was stop on the field that is on the way, surrounded by houses. Other people are there too, milling about in a purposeless fashion. Some of them I know, others are friends of friends. The branches of trees, a darkening sky. The field feels enclosed, as if it is an interior space. I wish to find a certain part of this field that is located around the outside of the field. This is in the trench that surrounds the field, where a number of overflow pipes lay. This place I used to call 'Mince Spies' because this was what it was called in a dream I once had.

Glancing at Shrines

Feels like we're deep in autumn now.
The texture of everything has changed - particularly that of the light - or perhaps more accurately, the darkness. When I pass over the border of Sackville Road to New Church Road it becomes, for some undefined reason, more noticeable.
Out here in the Mews, almost halfway between Hove proper and Portslade, feels like we're in another country entirely.
I walked back from town tonight at twilight. It was one of those amazing dusks that you get only in October. I couldn't see where the sun was - hidden by buildings - but the sky was a mixture of red and violet. An old sky, and deep too.
The roads I passed by as I walked down New Church Road were empty but for the early halos of street lamps, and beyond these pools of weak and mysterious light, swelling pools of night. Each street seemed an avenue into some more mysterious and entrancing reality, the dark geometry of houses passed on rumours of hidden gardens, and I was particularly struck by one point on my walk home.
I'm not sure why. All it was was a waist high light - the kind used to light the borders of driveways. This one was just situated inside the gate of the grounds of a building that looked like -perhaps- some kind of rediential home. A large anonymous building that in the half-light, possessed a dreamy quality to it. The light was situated on a kind of verge between a stone wall that demarcated the grounds of the -possibly residential- house and the tarmac driveway which kind of curved sharply to the right so it ran parallel to New Church Road. This light - a 1970s sandwich spread beige colour - fell onto the ground at it's base. The ground was piled with leaves, obscuring the earth or the grass beneath. A thick skin of cast out fevers. Somehow, this obscure little piece of the walk home seemed to define a certain part of semi-urban autumn, almost like a sigil or an icon in a shrine to the Autumnal Mystery. The air tasted of earth and night-time, sleep, and of listening to wind whilst lying in bed having woken from that sleep.
Black mornings and rain, dark, breezy days.
Sunday night now, an hour or two before too quick sleep.
It's only nearly light in the morning when I wake now.
Summer, as it should, feels far behind us now.
Maybe I should leave an offering at that shrine of Autumnal Mystery, and what gift should I leave to such a shrine? A glance perhaps, as I walk by, a passing recognition of these secret places in plain sight.

As I said, it feels deep in autumn now.

Thank You Robert Wise

Just watched half of the old 1963 film 'The Haunting', directed by Robert Wise. Wasn't really watching (I was trying to do some drawing at the same time). Andy was out and I was alone in the flat. What people say about the film is true. It is incredibly atmospheric, and seemed to infect the flat with a curious air of expectancy. As I said, I wasn't really watching it, just soaking up the ambience. I am about to go to sleep, and I'll just be thinking about what would happen if I awoke to the sound of banging somewhere in the unseen night-rooms of this flat...

The Joys of Blackout Sleep

The curtains in my new room are thick, made of an oddly waxy material, almost like rubber. When I turn the light out to go to sleep, this plunges my room into an almost absolute darkness. If I wake in the night and need to use the bathroom (I love that phrase) this necessitates a dangerous trip across the vastness of my bedroom floor, stubbing toes and sliding on too many comics and supplements from the Sunday papers.
Back at the bedsit I would tend to wake with the light, so I was often quite alert by the time the alarm went off. Here though, I am unaware of the dawn behind the closed curtains, and so I wake with the alarm, to that harsh intrusion into dreams that have been forgotten by the time I finish my shower. Sleep back in the bedsit was like lying in the shallows of a summer pool. Here it is like sinking into the depths of a lake that is rumoured to be bottomless. I wonder, without the alarm, exactly how long would I sleep for?

A Dead Lamp Beyond the Arch

Winds up tonight. Look through the gaps in the red curtains in the living room. Watch the lanterns hanging over the Mews shift in the breeze. The windows of the flats opposite ours are unlit, are never lit, and if I crane my neck out of the window, to my left I see the Butchers on the road. A blue light shines in the window, slightly illuminating the hospital clean surfaces now empty of meat. If I look right, I see the archway at the end of the Mews. On the archway is a small figure of a stone lion. The archway shows nothing but darkness. I do not know what is there, some dead end back-lane perhaps, some passage connected to the workshops below us. There is a broken street lamp there I cannot see once night falls. I wonder what broken street lamps might dream of?
The flat tonight is full of rattling; the cat flap down the steep stairs to the front door, something in the attic, something out the back, the windows somewhere.
Getting later, time creeping up to 1:00am.
There is a silence below the wind, and though I'm not even a half an hour walk from the bedsit, it feels like a county away. I imagine this room to be in a building ringed by trees that grow too close to the windows. Easy to imagine this late at night as we move into the small hours. 1:00am is forever. I can't imagine there being any other time.
And there is a dead but dreaming street lamp near. I wonder if its light has flicked on, just for a short time, lighting that back lane for the sound of footsteps hidden just below the wind.

A Shift in the Shadow for a Less Defined Town

Sackville Road is the borderland -or line- between these new hill-dark lands of the Mews and the old bright geography of bedsits and one bedroom flats back in Brighton. Once Sackville Road is behind me, and I set off down New Church Road back here, there is a shift in the air, or perhaps in the light.
Or maybe even in the shadow, and for the simple reason that New Church Road is lined with trees and fewer cars, and the dark strips of front gardens allow greater opportunity for darkness.
Still too warm to be autumn, but autumn is coming, slow as honey or the last few hours at work.
When I turn off of New Church Road for home, I watch the long parallels sink into the distance, into unseen Portslade. I wonder of course what it would be like if I kept walking, and I try to fool myself that if I did keep walking I wouldn't end up in Portslade, but some other, less defined town. One night, when I walk back home, there might be a shift in the shadow, and I might just keep walking and find it.

A New Summer Obscuring October

Sat in the my bedroom at the Mews. Cup of tea, open windows behind me. Still unused to the vastness of the room compared to the bedsit - and the freshness of the light - no longer will these afternoons be spent languishing in those typhoid yellow spaces.
I walk along the seafront to work in the mornings now, a trip of about 45 minutes. The seafront is full of joggers and dog walkers. The tide seems far out when I leave at 8:00pm, and beyond the pebbled slopes, the receding water has revealed a long strip of rare sand. The people down there look like shadows, silhouettes in the sudden heat of these strange days.
Not sure when the heatwave began, or when I first became aware of it, but there is no trace of autumn anywhere now. It even smells like summer, that fecund, overripe smell of those first hot days of the year. There is something achingly familiar about it, but I am unsure what though, vague remembrance of something, some obscure lost summer. It struck me today as I passed by the Co-op down Blatchington road. The air shimmering, and the summery people passing by, time about to flip back, to be reminded of another hot summer, but the summer stayed lost and I walked on.
Portland road in the heat does not feel part of Brighton at all. It is how I imagine some road in some forgotten region of New York to be. The abandoned churches look almost industrial, and the boarded up fire station tower reminds me of things only glimpsed on television programmes I wasn't really watching; civil war architecture, Southern Gothic hospitality, hello William Faulkner, how are you?
I tried to read William Faulkner. Unreadable.
Gave up after one story.
I seem to reach the Mews this past week at the end of sunset. Lanterns hang over the paved ground, the flower baskets outside the door of a woman are undisturbed. She is the only resident here allowed these hanging baskets as she is ill, in and out of hospital perhaps, with some terminal condition. Landlady rumours, gossip from above the stables.
At sunset the Mews seems Mediterranean in nature. Beyond the arches at the end, beyond the streetlamp is a darkness that promises the landscape of some new country; dry leaves on the flagstones of churches, lizard whispers on too still air.
I hear the washing machine in the kitchen, and the sound of clinking from the tea shop on Richardson Road.
I feel I could sleep for days.