Last Day in Autumn

Sat in the living room watching TV, Jeremy Kyle, who still brings back memories of the unemployment summer of 2010. Last day of autumn today, at least in my own personal calendar. The idea of December being autumn is entirely ridiculous. The thought that it actually is December tomorrow is a little frightening though. That old time-thing again. It is a universally acknowledged truth that time appears to go by faster and faster as you get older, but why does it always seem so surprising and also so terrible? December. Christmas. The end of the year. Of another year. I suppose next year has an extra element of mortality-fear to it as I turn 40, which seems as entirely ridiculous as it being December tomorrow. I'm sure I should only be about 32 and it should only by September. Underneath all that fear about turning 40 and time turning is that cold stretch of terror of being, say, 75 and thinking that when I turned 40 only feels like a couple of years ago.
Time is too precious to waste.
Jeremy Kyle just finishing on the TV.
Wonder what's on next?

Canvas Quest

I decided -for little apparent reason, I haven't done any painting for over a year now- that I needed to buy some canvases from Brighton Marina. The urge to buy these canvases for painting was so overwhelming that I could not wait until tomorrow, so, at 4:45pm, I found myself waiting at the bus-stop sheltering from the freezing rain.
The rain surprised me. I knew it was cold, but I had not heard any rain as I sat in my grey room, writing about last night's adventures in adolescence, despite having the curtains of my room open for once. It really feels like winter now -deep black between the lamps, and the air damp-heavy and a cold that sinks deep into you, like an infection.
I sat upstairs on the bus, but couldn't see anything because of the rain against the windows. the bus moved painfully slowly - and wouldn't take me all the way to the marina anyway. I cursed the people at the bus-stops who queued to get on, every red light, every time the bus slowed to make way for a taxi or another bus - or even people crossing at zebra crossings. I was sure that the shop that sold cheap canvases ('The Works') would close at 5:30pm. As the bus crawled ever so slowly up Edward Street, past Flo's old flat, I felt even more sure that I would not reach there in time.
I got off too early as well, and hurriedly made my way down to the seafront, where there was a moment of confusion as I could not work out where the pedestrian entrance to the marina actually was. Having eventually found it, I began running down the sloped, rain-slick walkways -I could make it maybe, I only had a minute or two to go- and took the car park outside of Asda at full speed.
I made it there at 5:30pm, only to discover that it closed at 6:00pm anyway.
Oh well, I made it to the arts section... and there were none of the canvases there I wanted. Heart sinking at this final defeat, I asked the assistant if they 'might be anywhere else'.
he went out the back and got me the pack I wanted.
Now I have four canvases. After all the trouble I went to getting them, I had better think of something to paint now.

Revisiting Adolescent Twilights

We moved to London from Scotland in the very late summer of 1985, when I was 13. I say London but what I mean are the very edges of London, those semi-anonymous suburbs, Janus-faced, that one way face London and the other s strangely wild and scraggy countryside, more industrial than rural in feel. We spent a few short months living in a condemned house in Northwood (to be pulled down for a car park) then in the October of 1985 moving to Ickenham. I have written about this house before and its alleged haunting. I moved from Ickenham to a room in a shared house in nearby Uxbridge in 1993 when I was 21, before leaving the area permanently the following year. There have been two other return visits, the first in the summer of 1996 -I did the same route yesterday- and the second in the late January of 2006.

It was always my intention to take the Central Line underground to West Ruislip and then to walk into Ickenham from there, and to alight at West Ruislip just as twilight was starting. I hadn't thought that the lack of light would forestall much in the way of photography - hence not many photographs, and furthermore, the actual quality of the light - or rather the quality of the darkness itself - made any usable photographs quite difficult to obtain.

1: From West Ruislip tube station into Ickenham

I remember this station. This station would be used quite often to return from London, where I would use the travelcard to catch the bus to the top of Woodstock Drive where I lived in Ickenham. Remember coming here with Leighton on our bikes, Christmas Eve of 1986, remember buying a volume or two I was missing from the Pan Books of Horror Stories in the stall that used to be here (now no more). Remember most waiting at the bus stop, looking over at the bleak fields that formed some kind of demarcation between Ickenham and Ruislip, cold and eager to be home, bag heavy with records bought in one of the many second hand shops I would visit in London. That bus always seemed to take an age to arrive.

I walked today, and as I set off down the hill into Ickenham, it struck me quite how old everything felt. I'm not talking about the buildings (there were plenty of new buildings to my left I didn't remember) but something old about the air. It tasted of something ancient and laced with history and centuries and centuries of things happening. I think it helped that there was a welcome raw quality to the twilight too; the red in the sky just over the houses, the cold sliver of a crescent moon hanging in leafless branches. People live and grow old and die here, have children and settle down, go to school, leave for university, go away and come back. Brighton is not a place where these things seem to happen - not in the centre anyway, where everyone lives in an extended adolescence of drink, indie bands, beach barbecues and plans for things that never really happen. Easy in Brighton to live as if the city is a stage to show off on. In suburbs such as Ickenham less easy. Too many houses, too much anonymity, too many spaces and hidden places that might swallow you up. By the side of a pub called The Soldiers Return, I saw the entrance into the curving section of rough parkland that followed the River Pinn into Ickenham. One of those very dark and carnivorous spaces. I saw a man unhook a gate from a fence, glance round, and seem drowned in the rush hour roar of cars passing by.

Ickenham doesn't change much. Same old shops, same old petrol station. A new pub. Saw the library that I spent a week doing working experience at when I was 17, January of 1989. Passed by the churchyard where I once found odd bits of writing on notepaper; 'it shows the danger of living in a place like this, even though I feel the presence of my father near me' and another; 'a violinist violins a murderer kills'. The latter was written in a scrawly child-hand but the former I've always wondered about and why I have always presumed the writer was a she. I remember finding the note when I was helping Mum tidy up the graveyard, bright summers day and those words a winter cool. I took the note but soon lost it.

2.The Road of Old Autumns

There was something deeply autumnal about the road from the centre of Ickenham to the park. Something deeply autumnal and nocturnal about Ickenham itself. The day was slipping fast into night. There was a woman walking across the other side of the road from me, a shadowy cipher, slipping behind cars, under trees, under the sky still sunset-pink. The night seemed to rise up from the road itself. The street lamps seemed to be miniature nocturnal suns.

3. Swakeleys Park

It was a short walk through Swakeleys Park. The birdsong in the twilight was strange, used as I am to seagulls. It gave the place an air of very early spring perhaps. The smell of the water in the pool to my left tasted heavy, stagnant yet strangely refreshing, a summer spell. Across the tangle-thrash of the islands, -reachable only in winter when the water froze, and then only if you were brave enough (I never was)- lay the grounds of Swakeleys Manor. An incongruous thing to find in an anonymous suburb of London. I could see the flood lit walls and windows of the building through the branches. It was mentioned in Samuel Pepys diary but when I was 13 I was more interested in the story of the ghost there, a servant child found locked and starved in the walls.

4. Photographs from the Bridge (Hidden Things in the Everyday)

When I was 13, the bridge was daubed for a short while in heavy metal graffitti; Deep Purple, ACDC, Black Sabbath. White dripping paint on the brickwork. I found this incredibly exciting, but it didn't last for long.

Across the other side of the road, the river Pinn curved toward the A40 and the Middlesex fields. There used to be a rope swing there that fascinated and frightened me. It was a magnet for the hard kids of nearby Vyners School, and was best approached with caution. Thoughts of the ropswing make me think of early summer, of falling in there because I wasn't hanging on properly, and of Leighton's tale of how he fell further out, in the deep part of the river, near a sewage outlet poking out of the brown water. The Vyners kids who were there laughed at him and didn't help him.

The woods across the river were thick and clustered, and one morning, a summer dawn, Craig and myself explored them. There was something thick and unpleasant about them, and after that they were always known as 'The Wood of Oppressiveness'. The land immediately by the river Pinn seemed to attract this kind of less than pleasant description. Further down the river, in the Middlesex fields themselves, there was a place we called 'The Place of Disgustingness', All green stinking mud, rusting factory iron and toxic looking weeds.

Adolescence was full of secret views like this, hidden parts of hidden rivers whose course was difficult to chart. Tangled and often overgrown, there was a curious mixture of danger and safety about such places. I remember in a flash flood once, the river burst its banks, sending all of the park under water, and another time, with Leighton, my sister, and two of her friends, we were attacked by older kids at another bridge, deeper in the park. We were in the water and they stood on the bridge throwing stones at us. One of the kids said to his friends 'you stay here while I go and get reinforcements'. This was the most terrifying sentence I think I had ever heard at the time.

There aren't parks like this in Brighton. Down here they are all too neat and ordered and too mapped and too known. There is nothing to explore in the parks down here, but maybe you need to be an adolescent or child to really see those hidden things lost in the everyday.

5. Woodstock Drive is a Dark Road.

I noticed this before, on the return visit I did back in January of 1996, and I actually noticed when I lived here too. I assumed it was something to do with living inland rather than by the sea, but I thought that the London nights seemed dangerous, less to be trusted than the Scottish ones. These nights, I thought, seemed full of muggings and knives, ghost stories that defined my childhood. The darkness actually seemed somehow deeper here.
I noticed it again last night (Last night! Not even twelve hours since I was there and it seems months ago!). The spaces between the pools of street light seemed to contain an almost palpable darkness, a thick tenebrous quality you could sink into. No wonder I would sometimes run between the street lamp pools when I was coming home from school. Behind the pools of light, behind the houses, there seemed to be great patches of darkness in the hidden gardens too. I could imagine these pools of black rising over the slopes of the semi-detached roofs. Maybe it was some curious effect of the street lamps, that their bulbs were a little dimmer, or the lamps were placed a few metres too far apart... but Woodstock Drive seemed a dark road, as if it were situated at the bottom of an ocean, or was one of those villages you come across in legends, drowned under lakes, with the church bell ringing still on certain days...
As I walked up Woodstock Drive, it seemed that any sense of linear time had fragmented completely. Did it feel like now or did it feel like the 1980s or the early 1990s? Did the past feel a long time away or did the present? Actually it didn't feel like any time. Woodstock Drive felt actually removed from the flow of time. Walking up that street, in that strange darkness felt like one of my dreams of the place rather than the actual place.
Then there it was, my old home.

33 Woodstock Drive.
I was too afraid to take a photograph of it, though wish I had now of course. I slowed my walk down instead and looked over.
All the lights were on, and all the curtains were open.
I could look back into rooms from my own past.
The front dining room, empty and yellow, and upstairs, the spare room that was my sisters for a while. I could see what looked like a bunk bed in there, and then, I saw that I could see into my room. My old room. I still feel proprietorial about it.
An angle of the cupboard, that little alcove that led to the door. The familiar plane and shape of the ceiling.
The room I slept in between the ages of 13 and 21.
Out of the door of my room I could see a fragment of the landing.
I could see no-one moving about the house, so with all the open curtains and lights on, it had a strangely abandoned, empty quality to it. The light from the lamps had the same impersonal quality I remember from my teenage years, a 60-watt gloom that failed to illume much as if the rooms that were larger than they were. The house seemed caught up in itself, lost in its own deep and unknowable mechanisms.

It still seemed haunted.

As I walked up Woodstock Drive, the dream-like sense of surreality only increased. There was a deep and quite profound serenity in the houses I passed - and though I passed houses I passed no-one else. Under the street lamps there was an air of undeniable waiting, as if all the cul-de-sacs off Woodstock Drive were nervous with a kind of watchful anticipation. Too many empty spaces, and yet, that sense of sleepy Christmas time peace. I paused at where there used to be an entrance between two houses to an old rickety playground hidden between the gardens of the houses. We called it The Twilight Zone. The slide like the skeleton of a dinosaur in a museum, a set of swings like something Victorian and the scattering of green-moss covered benches. I suppose when the houses stopped being Ministry of Defence housing they shut up all the parks, tore them down, fenced off their spaces and extended the gardens of the houses they backed onto.

I left Woodstock Drive, curved right into the cul-de-sac of Roker Park Avenue, where a temporary best friend, Leighton, lived for a while before his family moved to Langley and we lost contact. As I walked down the road I realised that I could hear the ever present hiss of the A40, and had been able to ever since leaving Swakeleys Park. A ceaseless sea of traffic. No silence here. I don't remember that sound during adolescence at all.

At the end of Roker Park Avenue, I slipped into the alleyway I was glad to see was still there.

6. The Raggedy Alley

From Roker Park Avenue, and Leighton's old house, the alleyway splits in two. The right hand path takes you down the hill, back into those streets behind Woodstock Drive, or you can turn left, up the hill, and onto Swakeleys Road, which is the way I took.

The alleyway was popular with me when I was a kid. Dares at night with Leighton (alleyways are always invitingly dangerous when young), opportunities for freefall bike riding (no brakes allowed), places where you might find stashed and badly hidden porn mags. An inbetween place, another twilight zone. One night here, Leighton and myself convinced ourselves the alleyway was haunted because one of the street lamps switched itself off every time we moved underneath it. For reasons lost to time we (or rather myself) called it 'the night of the watcher', but after that night we never talked about it again.

The alleyway still recurs in dreams though I can't remember much of the alley dreams, though I have a feeling they may be about the houses on the other side of the alleyway. Playing football here with Leighton in an empty residential car park. Vague memories of winter cold and deep night. Or is this one of those dreams I can hardly remember and not a memory?

Walking up the alleyway, I was surprised to see just how overgrown it was, with weeds creeping underneath the fences either side, and the fences themselves looking old and ramshackle, the concrete of the ground cracked and uneven.

But at least all the street lamps worked and didn't flick themselves off when I walked underneath.

7. Ministry of Defence Housing Estate Gothic

A street lamp, slightly crooked. A pavement full of leaves. A wooden fence, and a dark and rumoured geography of houses behind.

That's all you need really.

8. Omens of the Inbetween

So I left Ickenham behind me, prepared to cross over the A40 and head into Uxbridge. As I approached the A40, on the edge of those trees that stretched right down into The Wood of Oppressiveness I noticed these:

When I was at Uxbridge College, failing my A-level in Art (1990 / 1991) I would pass these everyday. I had some strange superstition regarding them, some sub-OCD system of ascertaining omens as to how the day - or weekend - might go. I can't remember the precise mechanics of them now. As I passed them by last night it struck me how like little gravestones they looked. I still don't know what they are. Hydrants of some sort or another? Something to do with electricity cables? Something to do with sewage or water pipes?

They struck me as something a little sinister anyway. Little gravestones. Or little teeth, hidden amongst the grasses and the weeds for twenty years or more.

Looking over the A40 back into London. A liminal place between Ickenham and Uxbridge. There used to be a 'curly-wurly bridge' here, but they widened the road and tore down some trees and tore down the bridge, and now there's a zebra crossing. When they were doing all of this, I was 16 or 17 and became fascinated with the idea that hidden in the building site, disquised as labourers, were bands of travelling cannibals. I meant to write a story about this but never did.

I walked along Park Road to Uxbridge. To my left the Middlesex Fields, a labyrinthine collection of fields and meadows tiny fragments of green and woodland. The river Pinn cuts through it as does the tube line. There are broken bridges there, stagnant bits of water, and the ski-slope. The ski-slope is closed now, and as far as I could see. now completely obscured by overgrowing trees and bushes.

The Middlesex Fields is one of those odd geographies you don't really get in Brighton, something forgotten and somehow industrial, an overgrown and fascinating but oddly disquieting region. A place someone could vanish in, even though on the other side of the fields are only more suburbs, a seeming infinite regression of them in fact. Semi-detached houses stretching on into forever.

As I walked along Park Road by the far too fast traffic within touching distance, I had one of those strange Proustian time-slips I am wont to do every now and again. An odd overwhelming memory of, well, nothing in particular;

...walking to college, 1991, wearing me denim jacket I'm proud of, patches, sewn on by Mum, of bands I like Metallica, Sodom, the Misfits. A grey-white January day, bobbing along, and it's morning. Definetely morning, and I'm in that eighteen year old body again, with my short, neat hair, and then tiny frame, all potential and worry about the future, listening to some compilation of old heavy metal bands, using acrylic paint for the first time, off to meet Julian before classes begin, Julian with his cigarettes, and later Edward with his green-dirty jacket and tales of what stories he's been writing because since leaving school he's done nothing...

That's it though. All I could remember.

9. So I eventually made it to Uxbridge, passed the house I lived in when I left Ickenham. Used the toilets in the Pavilions shopping centre, looked around the giant Poundland where Woolworths used to be. Everything changes and stays the same. I bought a notebook from W.H.Smiths where I used to work. I wishes I could have stayed longer, but I was tired and it was getting late, so I caught the tube back to London, and finally the train back to Brighton. I got in about 9:00pm. We had a pint in the Evening Star and I came home.

I was exhausted.

Travelling back twenty five years is a long way.

Lines Written in a Notebook on the Tube Train from Uxbridge to Baker Street Station

Woodstock Drive is a dark road. The houses sit in a deep eerie peace. In that peace the odd feeling that something is waiting for something. The darkness looked unreal and the glow of the street light oddly ineffectual.
All around the ceaseless mechanism of the A40 - something I don't remember from adolescence.
The streets were without voices.
I don't remember passing anyone.

Swakeleys Park felt like early spring - birdsong in the twilight.

A sense of linear time almost completely broken. Like walking through a dream of places once lived in.

Looking through the windows of no.33. Lots of lights on, but no sign of anyone moving about. The angles of my old room - the tiny room (spare) now with a bunk bed. That same impersonal air in the lightbulb light, as if the rooms were too large, like rooms in a public building than a home. Over the haunted night of 1990 I remember this happening too - the bathroom seemed hospital huge... A sense of the house busy and caught up in itself, lost in its own haunted mechanisms.

The alleyway was ragged. Weeds growing by the fences on either side. A forgotten place. People just pass through here and don't stay.

(The above is transcribed from the notebook I bought at W.H.Smiths in Uxbridge. I wrote the above on the tube back to Baker Street, somewhere from about 6:15pm - 7:00pm. I'll write in greater detail about it tomorrow hopefully, but thought it would be interesting to provide notes for a post before the post itself).

Before London

First proper day off at work. Freezing cold winter air a strange relief. Cup of tea and a day trip to London coming up. Seems a long way into town from here though - even longer into London, but I am looking forward to that first overpriced coffee on the train. Watching the Sussex landscape pass by, turn itself slowly into London.
Dreamt last night that I was in a graveyard on a bleak grey day, like those kinds of days you get in late spring. The graves were scattered amongst reedy marshy grass, and I thought to myself that 'the dead were troubled here'. I was immediately interrupted by a woman to my right, an older woman, late / middle aged. She said that she was looking for 'Stuart or an Arthur Jermyn' (Hmm. Not sure I've remembered that last night properly. Think I might have got that either from an Edgar Allan Poe of an H.P.Lovecraft story.) I said that I was Stuart but did not know any Arthur. I knew that she was either a psychic or a medium who was able to contact the dead. She did not elucidate on her message and her eyes seemed to have a wild and slightly vacant quality to them.
When I first woke the dream did not seem too sinister, but reading it now though...
Sound of the workmen in the workshops downstairs. So rare is it I am in here during a weekday the sound is still novel and startling to me.
I must finish my cup of tea.
Expensive overpriced horror comics wait for me in London.

Forever Now Bridge 39

It was two years ago today that I started Tales from Bridge 39, a length of time that has, unsurprisingly, passed by incredibly quickly. Conversely, the beginning of that time period seems another world away entirely. I remember smoking just outside of Telegen, the old call centre, with Tom and Pam, wondering what I should call the blog I wanted to write. In desperation I settled on 'Tales from Bridge 39', and then only as a temporary measure. I had the very real fear that deciding on a name could take so long, meeting with so little success that any motivation and inspiration might swiftly evaporate. I played with the idea of having a title involving 'Black Shuck', a mythical ill-omened ghost dog of English folklore. For some reason -I can't remember why now- I decided against this, and cast my mind around for another suitably eerie haunting or myth I could use.
Interestingly, the haunting of Bridge 39 is not my favourite haunting, but there was something abstract and open-ended about 'Bridge 39'. It gave nothing away, and could mean anything. I stuck 'Tales from' before it, and it kind of made sense. Bridge 39 is a bridge over the Shropshire Union canal in Staffordshire (see the photograph above) and since the late 1800s, there have been sporadic reports of a phantasmal creature haunting the structure and surrounding woods. The creature most closely resembles a large, aggressive chimpanzee like thing/ Some tales make note of burning red eyes (which bearss some similarity to various hell-hound legends) whilst others accentuate the creature's ethereal qualities - one commentator described how his hand went right through the creature when he tried to touch it. The creature is still - allegedly - seen now. I came across a report of someone who, on a canal holiday, reported seeing the creature peer down at him from that curious 'internal arch' in the structure as his boat passed underneath.
Not my favourite -or most convincing- haunting, but when I was a kid we used to go on canal holidays every year along the Shropshire Union canal. The area of the canal in which Bridge 39 is situated is surrounded by thick woodland. The canal itself moves through deep cuttings leading to a very claustrophobic creepy feel. There's something odd about canals anyway, something cold and still about the waters. Canals seem full of waters for drowning in. I think it is partly to do with their artificial quality - all canals are manmade - and also with the obscure and forgotten countryside they tend to meander through, a landscape of silent fields and tangled woods and oddly desolate flatlands. There is also that curious feeling of absence too, or maybe of trespass. Canals now are for canal holidays and pleasant Sunday afternoon walks, but once they were part of the country's industrial infrastructure. Along the canals are remnants of its industrial history. You often see those black painted iron poles that are cut deep with the marks of ropes from the times when horses used to pull the barges along the tow path. Being on the canal can sometimes feel like breaking into a factory that has been shut down. Still feels a bit like you shouldn't be there.

Summer of 2009 and there was another canal holiday with the family - my parents, my sister and her husband. On the first night we moored up what I thought was close to Bridge 39. After dinner I had the grand idea of walking what I thought was to be only a fifteen minute walk to the haunted bridge. I could time it so I could arrive just as night was falling for maximum effect. As I set off along the tow path, through the deserted countryside, on either side of the canal either dusk-reddened fields or deep twilight woods - I began to feel a little bit disquieted. Despite the fact that civilisation - moored boats, a local pub / restaurant and a group of fishermen - were only a short way behind me, I began to feel very far away from it all. Very alone. I walked quickly through these silent cuttings with their sandstone walls and under the troubling darkness of other long low bridges. The twilight felt tangible and thick with that jungle-smell of damp earth and unmoving water. The last of the red sunset rays gave everything a lurid nightmare glow. An eerie and unsettling region. I was glad when Dad rang me and told me that, looking at the map, I would have to walk about another five miles to reach Bridge 39.

I was pleased to be able to head back.

It was only five months later that I started this blog. Perhaps I was thinking about that summer evening when I was casting about for a name.

Not that it matters. What was to be only a temporary name -as is so often the way with these things- has become it's permanent identity.

I wonder what 'Tales from Bridge 39' would have been like if it had been called anything else.

6:00pm Saturday Night

Nearly 6:00pm.
Windows open in my room, and its cold. '50 Words for Snow' playing and that feeling of time being at a premium because I have to tidy my room before leaving for Em's in an hour.
Sea today was rough and deadly looking. No messing with those foamy-poison angry waves. Closed off the breakwater to walkers; 'Do you think those waves could take you?' Andy says.
Twilight seemed to last forever, walking down St James Stree, a pint in the Heart-in-Hand. Thick Saturday pub atmosphere, ghosts of cigarette smoke and the walls stained with alcohol sleep and bits cut from old papers.
Catch the bus, a suspension made in some dodgy Mexican factory, desert-bumpy ride. Teenage girls falls over and laugh and everyone else is quiet.
Just gone 6:00pm.
A cup of tea then turn off the laptop.
Out into the night.

Vicarious Day Trip to Lewes

Andy is in his room, telling me about his day trip to Lewes yesterday. He walked along the river, passing by the viaduct to the left of the river, and kept walking, and eventually came to a private road, and then took another road that led to a village of five houses. After walking through that village he came to some farmers fields. He could see Glynde in the distance but couldn't get there because of the farmers fields in the way. He lost the path he was following, he says, so just kept walking through the farmers fields, now full of tractors following him, until he found some pill boxes -or possibly bird huts. He went into these odd structures half-hidden in the undergrowth but found no bird watchers, even though he saw plenty of birds in the long reedy grass. The walk was a good two and a half hours or more, and lasted until it had gotten dark. He returned to Lewes, had some fish'n'chips and a pint in the pub where the locals stared at him and caught the train back to Brighton.
Which was much more exciting than my day, spent in a call centre waiting for the day to end so I could start my week off from work.

A Device to Measure Silence

6:59am.
Sat in the living room with a cup of tea, waiting for the water to heat up for a bath.
Still black outside, still seemingly deep night time, though I suppose these must be the last few minutes before the first smeary grey signs of daylight must appear. Everything actually feels silent here -silence not only an absence of sound- but something that has weight and presence, tangible and definable, able, perhaps, to be measured.
Winter.
Radiator-time.
(I remember Joe, crouched in his room at Worcester, winter of 1998, huddled by the radiator reading D.H.Lawrence for his lectures, a guilty gleeful look on his face that was never explained).
Dreaming in the black-out sleep of my room last night, but I don't remember what of. All I have are a few vague images of disquiet, and a feeling that in those dreams there was something important I had to do but that I couldn't remember.
Well, I'm sure the water must have heated up by now.
Time for a bath.
It seems unbelievable that in an hour I will be ten minutes or so into my walk to work.

19 Minutes Ago (and Moving Fast)

Use Facebook to send a message to a friend, and am confronted with a message I sent back in 2008. Facebook is becoming an increasingly strange proposition these days. Like having access to memory - to more than memory - to a kind of time itself. Or rather, to no time. I suppose it does work kind of like memory. Move from the present to the past, just a click of a button.
I read the message with curiosity and trepidation.
I wrote the message from my parents house in Cornwall, 19th November 2008, so almost exactly three years ago. Curious that I wrote in the last post about the possibilities of being nostalgic for three years ago... and then being confronted with a message from that imagined time.
I wonder how long Facebook might continue as a kind of memory. I imagine at some point it will have to get rid of all the photos, all the messages, all the comments... Imagine if it didn't though, and those years would stretch into decades, then generations, then lifetimes, and centuries... Imagine scrolling back through your ancestor's messages of two hundred years before, trying to make real thoughts of a time before Facebook, a true dark age, a lost epoch when years might go by without seeing a photograph of yourself (I am sure there are only about ten photographs of myself between the age of 21 and my mid 30s...)
Look back at the messages again, see '19th November 2008' (the date sent of the first message) then below that '19 minutes ago' (when I sent the second message).
Already, that point is moving further back, and will soon be as far back as that first message, three years ago, and that first message will be six years ago... and I wonder if I'll remember to look at that message in three years time, just to, well... I suppose there wouldn't be much point really, except it might give a certain kind of time-chill.

Maybe.

I'll probably forget though.

Facebook won't.

Facebook remembers everything.

In an Almost Monochrome Country

Last week of autumn, last week of November, and it feels more like winter now. Maybe it's the fact that the early nightfall is still a novelty, and that memories of longer days are still relatively fresh, but this time of year feels so dark. Everything seems an almost monochrome; black, white and the orange of the street lamps only, the latter always seem to be seen reflected in puddles of rainwater, but it must rain in secret, because I don't remember it raining for weeks.
A lie obviously. When was I with Em and and nearly caught in the rain? Monday, Tuesday? It was at Mad Hatters, the coffee shop down Western Road. A post-work coffee, watching the walkers outside. Remember Em asking me if I wanted her hat when I walked back, to not get my head wet, but by the time I had finished my coffee it had stopped raining.
Out last night at the ice rink with Em for a birthday drink. A pint of Scandinavian Cider that tasted pleasantly of childhood and medicine. Inside a summer wedding style marquee, watching the skaters go round and round, most people surprisingly proficient. My favourite was a late middle aged man who seemed mildly surprised that he was on an ice rink at all. He smoothly drifted across the ice, occasionally scratching his chin in a disinterested way. He seemed lost deep in thought, as if he were having distinctly un-ice rink thoughts, which should only consist of Christmas films set in New York.
Keep picking up resonances of this time last year - resonances being those strange Proustian moments that take you right back to a past time. Western Road tastes of the bedsit, and those narrow evening watching DVDs and thinking about horror comics, that cold yellow light and unhomely air. The dark unfriendly corridor to the bathroom in which the shower sometimes worked and sometimes didn't. Then the waking in the morning and peeling back a corner of the curtain to look at the industrial Edwardian landscape outside. Remember the pink of unwelcome dawns over the houses opposite. I enjoy these memories, and, at the same time know absolutely how unhappy I was living there. The strange corollary of remembering; that nostalgia is not limited to those times we were happy in, or to even those times that were particularly interesting, just for those times -any time- that has passed. Not strictly true of course, any more than my earlier statement about not seeming to have rained for weeks. I may be nostalgic for last year - but not for two years ago - but then may be for three years back. Living through the last season of Wilbury Crescent, the smell of polished rooms and freshly vacuumed carpet, staring out of the window at that wide winter sky, the railway landscape, the magpie tree, steamy pipes in the alleyway across the tracks...

I look about the living room now though, in a flat reminiscent of Wilbury Crescent, the same thick curtains and living room layout, Andy lying on the floor instead of Joe, the same landlady, and I wonder sometimes how much has changed at all.

A Jar of Crumbling Water

Woke up with the phrase 'a jar of crumbling water' running through my head, not yet an hour ago. An obvious refugee from a dream, though the nature of the country the phrase was trying to escape from has gone forever. How would water crumble - as ice perhaps? I imagine water crumbling into a kind of dust, a light-barely there powder coloured white with just a hint of blue. More importantly though is why would water crumble? A river flowing perhaps into some cursed realm, a glass of water taken into a house believed to be peculiarly haunted - perhaps by the spirits of desert of dehydration. Jars and jars of white powder, crammed in the cupboards of this house, dusty-cobweb jam, an eerie heroin for the junkies of the small hours.

Jewel of a Grey and Dreary Day

This deep in November, and the days seem viewed as if through the tiny portholes of an imaginary, ill-conceived submarine. Slow drift along the ocean bed of these hours, late November is a permanent nightfall, and those thin and pale slivers of day are fragile and inconsequential things; ice cracked on a puddle, reflection of kitchen-yellow light fragmented and splintered. A crystalline mundanity, jewel of a grey and dreary day.
This morning and yesterday, while sat at my desk at work, looking out the window, I saw the sky had produced a sun-dog. Sky dogs are an atmospheric phenomenon where a coloured patch of light appears in the sky, on one side or other of the sun, a phantom star caused by ice crystals. Yesterday and today's sun-dog didn't last for long, a fading phantom of a phantom. By the third or fourth phone call of the day, they had gone completely.
Walking back tonight, a slow along a New Church Road that seemed to last forever, then slow through the aisles of Tescos looking for sellotape and wrapping paper for Em's birthday presents. Slow rain, and the slow concrete-heavy burn of the night where even the stars, even if they were imagined, seemed heavy and lost, drifting on cosmic, stagnant eater. The rain was cold and thick and damp, drizzly puddles a storm for a few discarded leaves, and the pavements slick with a twisted ankle promise.
This deep in November, and the days slip away from us all. The afternoons are robbed of romance, and the mornings of wakefulness. Leave your soul in dreams you can't remember, and then into the slow underwater push through the day;
this deep in November, even movement is difficult. Joints of this undersea journey lubricated with oil and faltering honey, an industrial, broken shifting. We crawl along the seabed, 40 watt bulbs trying to illuminate the late autumn sea-monsters, the Kraken-rumours we can't hear, the Leviathan and Behemoth that swim and shift under grey and dreary English skies.

The Dark Truth of Waiting

The morning is silent, I can hear no outside.
Deep and heavy sleep last night, no dreams, a non- soundtrack like now; no birdsong, no traffic, no movement, as if the flat has been transported to a geographically remote region or time.
The devices in this flat begin to entropy; the i-pod, the DVD player. Even the lampshade from my room fell off onto the floor this morning when I returned from the kitchen with a cup of tea.
I cannot believe I have only four days left until I am off work for a week. It seemed an impossibly amount of time to wait when first booked, about six weeks ago, and now it is the length of an Easter weekend away. The thought disquiets me. Everything we wait for must eventually arrive, and not all that we wait for is wanted... but some things may be inevitable.
Four minutes till I leave for work. Till I am meant to leave for work anyway.
The morning feels so still.

November's End Fragment

Cold and exhausted, can see my breath in my room.
A cup of tea, Kate Bush's new album, nothing much
else to say.
Sandwich spread of the street lights look like the
lanterns of airports, underwater; there's no-one
flying here any more.
No colours, a skin like a fever falling, no maps
and my fingertips trace rooms in houses locked
and lost I long for.

Something about Sundays

Something about Sundays.
Oh, not that usual thing about school / work dread - though that is often an overriding feeling of Sundays, but another kind of feeling. Not really sure what it is. Actually, wasn't even thinking about it until I wrote 'something about Sundays' - and I only wrote that because I wanted a starting point for this piece, and I couldn't think of anything else to write.
There is something about Sundays though, isn't there? It's not just that school / work dread equation, this Sunday-something is still evident when one doesn't have anything to do the next day - as I shall find out next Sunday when I have the following week off.
I suppose Sundays were different when I was growing up back in the eighties. No shops used to open on Sundays, apart from newsagents, and they would all close by lunchtime, 1:00pm at the latest. Then there would be those long stretched out afternoons. Trips into town centres would be surreal journeys through an oddly post apocalyptic landscape. Streets empty of people, and if it were summer, bright with hot sun, town centres would feel even stranger. More often than not, I would spend Sundays at home, in my bedroom, a drift of computer games and comics and arguments with my sister...

Sundays are not the same now. In town centres there is no difference between a Sunday and the day before, or the day following, -streets packed with shoppers and all shops open as normal... except perhaps for the larger supermarkets that all seem to close about 4:00pm. There is still something, almost indefinably different about Sundays though, particularly if you're away from the town centre, a feeling of suspension, a strange drifting in a kind of dreary comfort.

Took a walk with Em today through the northern suburbs of Brighton to the Sussex Downs, well, the edges of them anyway. Semi-detached houses, tidy bungalows, and hidden fragments of fields and strips of wood hidden between locked-gate schools and recreation ground football games all seemed oddly... well, not deserted... but changed. Altered. Everything felt like Sunday, as if the very essence of Sunday had suffused and possessed everything. We came to a bowling green that in the sunny haze seemed something slipped from a dream, people walking their dogs, looping round the field more than once, the same people, the same dogs passing by, and just beyond the trees, the sound of the ring road that circles Brighton...

Something about Sundays like I said, but Sunday is almost over now (a programme on the television about 1970s police work; 'a proper hard man, and he doesn't scare easy...') and I really must go to bed. That's the last thing about Sundays though isn't it? No matter how tired you are, no matter what rubbish is on the television, you put off going to bed to make the weekend last as long as possible... but by the time that morning comes, and you're about to enter work, -or school- the weekend, and the just-dead Sunday always seem an impossible amount of time to go, and the weekend to come, well, that feels as impossible as Christmas to a child at the end of the summer holidays.

Maybe I'll stay awake just an hour longer...

Get Out of the Woods, Get Out of the Trees

Times built on disquiet, and a cold air in these spaces. Moving through corridors that always seem closed, and looking out of the window at a sky, now darkened, so far away. Untouchable, behind glass, I play songs but the silence drowns them out. A cup of tea and I think of the attic, and I feel hungover, though I have not drunk since last Friday, and I think of trains travelling through a broken country over which a lazy moon hangs, malevolent-yellow, lighting sunset defeated as crimson pools in the burnt out shells of old houses.
Sat on my bed earlier with the window open. The angles of the backs of buildings, the garage, the hidden geometry of Drury's Coffee Shop. Icy and uncomforted. Walking on a frozen pond in the first hours of a deep, deep January night. Broken-bone trees and the night between those trees like something solid, a tangible thing full of points and comas. A punctuation of unconsciousness, no full stops of stars. Keep walking, keep going. Get out of the wood, get out of the trees.
Small-hours pulse, a bell chiming in the inside of architecture. Once was going to write a story about this time of year, a ghost story, of kinds, about these days before Christnas and after the pleasant cooling glow of mid-autumn. Fading embers shine now like warning lights back in those woods. Came up with the idea back when I was working at the petrol station. The character in the story, who was me obviously, -even the most fictional of these unwritten tales are unequivocally autobiographical- at the beginning of each winter would begin to feel haunted. He would see nothing, but would begin to feel her, start with the dreams and images of the places she would hibernate through spring and summer... a basement room somewhere near the estates of Moulscoombe. A mattress on the wooden floorboards of a room whose windows were gray with dirt, bushes and weeds and ragged trees obscuring the light. There was no other furniture in this room - the hidden room of an archetypal crack house, one long since abandoned, by even the most lost of junkies. Stir slowly, and she would not be real of course, this girl whose face was never seen. A tiny figure wrapped in a dark cloak with a hood covering her head like a shrunken grim reaper.Nothing was to happen in this story, but out protagonist would be aware of her growing closer and closer to him as autumn deepened into winter. Would know that she would be two or three streets away as a Tuesday afternoon slipped into a cold sunless nightfall, would hear from a friend how he, or she, had glimpsed the figure, following him at a distance of a few winding alleyways. He would be disquieted, until, finally, there would be a confrontation that was not a confrontation. In the windowless bathroom of the house our protagonist would be in - like the bathroom here, outside of this room, across the hallway - after a bath, he would hear the door of his empty house open. Hear her footsteps come up the stairs, hear her ragged, decayed breathing, lungs cut to haunted ribbons, and he would put his ear to the door, and across the wood of that door, would know that she was doing the same, listening to him as he listened to her. Then she would leave, and over the weeks till spring, he would feel her fade, feel her go back to sleeping the summer in that basement room, waiting for winter to awaken her again.
I never wrote the story of course, but in those petrol station days when I had closed the garage for the night, I would imagine her in the stock room, in that cupboard with the creepy sink near the switchboard. Suppressing panic I would hurry with the locking up of the station, quick steps across the dead forecourt, and on the pavement heading back into town along the Old Shoreham Road I would look back over my shoulder, half expecting to see a figure at the counterl watching me.

Nothing of course, only emptiness and somehow that emptiness there was even spookier.

Evening creeping on now. Swear the shadows are deeper come this end of November. Turn up the music ('Sonic Mass' by the Amebix; '...beneath a crescent moon, a silhouette is rising...'

A cup of tea? Perhaps, but the kitchen disquiets me, the plates on the draining board, the cluster of forks and knives, a pool of liquid aluminium seeping from factories denying all safety protocols. Outside the window, the mews, always silent, just that imagined swing of the lamps...

Just check my cup - the tea was hardly drunk and still warm.

I remember two nights ago, that road on the edge of town, a liminal space between the hedges hiding the suburbs and the utter unimpeachable blackness of that countryside, an irrational and fascinating void, an imagined landscape of tilting fields, night-curved woodland, ancient stiles on the edges of silent meadows shaped like gallows, unmapped lane and forgotten crumbling farmhouse buildings hiding lamps that flicker their SOS messages of sunset red, barns of jagged sleep, overgrown orchards, lie in the black of yellow grasses with the ghosts of wasps, dreams of the honey-summer still licking lips, the skeletons of fallen apples, somewhere out amongst the glades of sudden spinnies and copses and coverts the trickle of rivers, and the wind through the trees like a tide, makes me think of the stars and wolves, and broken tractors crumbling on brown fields like tilted temples.

The cup of tea is drunk now, and 'Sonic Mass' is playing the last song, and in twenty minutes I'll leave this disquieted house for the disquieted streets, and all the disquiet that these November nights seem to bring.

Scaffold Voices

I think the voices had leaked into my dreams previous to waking up. Vague images of leaning against a wall. putting my ear to the stone and hearing the sound of shouting voices, a dream-argument, a nocturnal unreal soap opera. I woke up properly at some point, jarred into proper waking by shouting outside Em's window: 'You Pussy-hole, you asshole, fuck off...' This continued for a while, along with a sinister kind of clanking. There were other voices that responded to him, but I couldn't make them out. I drifted in and out of sleep. At some point there was more commotion; 'Will you come off of there? Now please. I don't think that's a good idea, do you?'. A woman's voice, coming from one of the neighbouring flats. 'I think they're on the scaffolding next door' Em whispered to me. I hadn't even noticed the scaffolding next door when I came round earlier, -that would explain the sinister clanking though. The woman fell quiet. The voice on the scaffolding continued, joined by another. This new voice wanted to get off the scaffolding, but the original voice, whose owner sounded thick as shit, shouted at him to 'go back to sleep. You aint going anywhere. Just go back to sleep.' The new voice continued saying that he was going to 'jump off the building'. The new voice was not impressed by the veracity of the threat. More people passed by on the street. There was more shouting, more calling of people a 'pussy-hole'. 'It sounded like he was pissing off the scaffolding earlier' Em said to me. I had obviously been asleep during this. More drifting in and out of sleep. I was aware of the new voice complaining about his father at one point, how he never got on with his father, how it was his father's fault. Then there was the woman's voice again, placating, conciliatory, asking the scaffold-voices to come in. 'It aint my fault' the second voice whinged 'Gay man, straight man, it don't make no difference to me...' All this in a tone of voice that suggested anything but. 'It's just the way I was bought up'. The woman continued, 'are you going to come in now? You just felt a bit uncomfortable that was all...'

I didn't really get much sleep for the rest of the night. At one point - and whether this was a dream or not I'm not sure - I saw a shadow fall on Em's curtains. Was one of the voices on Em's balcony? Em said that her windows were shut - I remembered her saying she had taped them up earlier that week to prepare for winter. I drifted in and out of edgy, jittery sleep, listening to imagined footsteps on the balcony, to the insults thrown to passers by, and dated techno music played on what sounded like an equally dated cassette player.
In the morning, while Em slept, and I prepared for work, I went into the kitchen to make a cup of tea, and saw that the kitchen window, leading onto the balcony that led to the scaffolding, was open about a foot wide. No wonder their voices seemed so loud. 'I'd forgotten how noisy it was sleeping in the middle of town' I said to my half asleep girlfriend. 'It's not' she replied 'It only happens when you come round'.

Night Walk through Suburban Nowhere

Went for a long, meandering walk last night. I left the house at 9:00am and didn't return to nearly a quarter of midnight. Walking through new suburbs, and at night for the first time, these labyrinths of houses occupy a strange and surreal geography. I'm not even sure where it was I went, Hangleton perhaps?
There was little to distinguish it from other suburban housing, particularly after dark. I made it even to the edge of Brighton, where there was a windmill, in a different position to how I remember it. How many windmills does Brighton have on its edges anyway? I also came across a small Norman looking church and an adjoining graveyard, miniature and hidden amongst the street lamp shadows. A sign outside a field promised, underneath the dripping white-paint letters proclaiming PRIVATE KEEP OUT, that 'TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED'. On the other side of this field I could see a road heading into the absolute darkness of the Sussex Downs. The road was not even lit by street lamps, just the headlights of vehicles that seemed swallowed up by the void. I managed to walk in a circle so ended up back at the 'PRIVATE KEEP OUT' field. There was something oddly lonely about this part of the walk. A strange, hollow feeling, webs of melancholy laid over the roofs of the bungalows, and as I walked by the security lights illumed the leaves scuttling across the tarmac. So late that even when I passed the petrol station I used to work at, on the Old Shoreham Road, was closed for the night. A silent architecture, lit still by some lights; the icy-blue white of the car wash, the basic lights left on inside; fridges and display cabinets. I could see the till I spent five years behind, that little room out the back where the kettle was and where I would illicitly smoke cigarettes.
Walked on down the Old Shoreham Road, passed by Wilbury Crescent before cutting down onto Cromwell Road and heading back here.
It felt I had lived a long time in Brighton last night, and there were too many things which were lost. The feeling disquieted me.

An Autumn, the Length of a Childhood ago

(listening to 'The Red Shoes' by Kate Bush)

I remember that room. The first room I had when I left home. Ground floor, back of the house. Never got any light, and the view from the window, muted by white net curtains, looked out onto a claustrophobic yard; a garage, and by the side of that garage, a garden overgrown with too much green. In summer anyway, I can't remember winter, and that's what I'm remembering now.

That room, remembered as being dark and quiet, a place of first-cigarette smoke and heavy, heavy sleep. Deep November 1993, and I'm 21 years old, and eight months on from leaving home. I'm feeling for the first time since leaving school that my life is on track, -I'm studying a one year foundation course in art and design at Langley College, a bus journey away from the heart of Uxbridge where I live. We finish our lessons at 5:00pm, sometimes later. After the clocks go back in October, I am always back long after dark.
Though I get on with (at the time) and like the people I live with, when I think back to that autumn, it is of the emptiness of that house, the heavy space of my room, crammed my belongings, too many for a room that small; hundreds of records and CDs and comics and books. One of my wardrobes is permanently out of my reach thanks to one yellow storage box, stuffed full of 1980s thrash metal records; Sodom, The Accused, Celtic Frost, Kreator, Holy Terror, Voivod...
I remember it beginning sometime in November, and I'm not sure what it was. A sense of something lost and somehow beguiling. I'm listening to 'The Red Shoes' now and whatever it is is recorded in those songs. A strange and heavy hypnotic feel, like sleep and being folded in the wings of something grey and desolately comforting. Imagine a photograph of a drizzly seaside road out of season. A sense of things passing, of saying goodbye. Perhaps I was. By this time I knew few people in Uxbridge - I had moved on and lost contact with most, and others had moved on and lost contact with me, and I hoped to leave Uxbridge itself the next year to continue studying - which I did when I started my illustration course at Southampton. back in those weekends though, I would seemingly be locked in the suspension of that room, deep, grey days passing by outside and longer, black-cold nights, heading down into winter. A kind of kind and caressing claustrophobia, breathing smoke that promised sleep and substation dreams. Daydreaming to songs 'And So is Love' 'Eat the Music' 'Rubberband Girl' 'Lily' 'Song of Solomon'...
One snapshot from one lost Saturday - October? November? December? I can't know any more. Sick of breathing that deep smoky air of the room, threaded through with too many hours spent inside (Where were my housemates? I can't remember.) I had a cold, I remember that, my head full of presence, and not remembering what breathing clearly was like. Never without a handkerchief or box of tissues. I remember launching myself out of that room, and the next thing I recall was being on a carriage in a tube train at Uxbridge station, terminus of the Metropolitan Line. Then watching the grey and nowhere suburbs pass by; Ruislip, Ickenham, Hillingdon, watching the grey wash away like washing machine wheels, replaced with the promise and nepenthe of London, of second hand shops at Notting Hill Gate, of Tower Records at Piccadilly, the Virgin Megastore at Oxford Street Reckless Records down Berwick Street. Temporary relief from the strange ennui my room back at 83 Belmont road sometimes created.
That fragment, being on the tube train, waiting to leave. White cold, tastes like ice-cubes, cutting through heavy mist; oh let me breathe London, let me breathe away from there, let me move, let me move, let me move... That whole mildly ill weekend, listening on scratchy vinyl, not Kate Bush, but a single song 'The Darkest Hour' by the old punk band the Amebix.
Then, one afternoon, -later, perhaps December. 'I'll not forget this afternoon as long as I live'. That's a quote from some book read sometime - perhaps even read back then. Yes, 'The Secret History', it always is, but I don't know why I'll forget that afternoon. Nothing happens. It always does.
I had the day off from college - though was due in that evening, probably because I had booked the photography darkroom to use - and I was spending the day just drifting, as one is liable to do when there are plans later on that day. For once I put my time to good use and tidied my room, which was no doubt in its usual state of disarray. There was no-one else in the house - they all worked during the day- and as I tidied, it got dark. As night gathered, I was at that phase when tidying reaches that incredibly pleasant phase of being nearly done when you can hoover and spray air freshener. The smell of that air freshener, green and chemical, a refreshing and somehow tidy smell. Just before having to turn the light on and I suppose I was gathering the stuff I needed for college. I remember the stairs. Rather I remember thinking about the stairs, and when I think back to that day, I think of those stairs, and the brown carpet of those steps, and the pooled shadow-light of the hallway; sleep, heavy corridors, dreams, drifting, lost keys, a noticeboard in the hallway; 'Helen, please ring the police about your stolen handbag', the coin operated telephone, fried eggs and sausages and toast, Charlotte Bronte's juvenalia, the colour brown, attic-glass, bathroom-cold, the Our Price record shop and the huge Sainsbury's just across Belmont Road, and waiting for the bus outside Uxbridge Station in ice-blue mornings, the yellow 458 to Langley, and those days to lead me away from the deep shadow-sleep contained in rooms like the one I had when I first left home.

I've been listening to 'The Red Shoes' a lot recently, and it got me thinking about that autumn. Eighteen years later now -the length of a childhood- but that autumn, like all autumns, seems no more than a few afternoons away.

Flock of Frozen Seagulls

7:40am.
In the living room with a cup of tea, curtains still drawn against the neonate day gathering outside. The curtains, thick red things, muffle the sounds of the outside. I can detect, as yet, no sound of anyone in the workshops below.
Woke up exhausted when my alarm when off at at 7:00am, not even an hour ago. I was deep in a sleep as thick and heavy as concrete, smothering dreams and any memory of dreams. A coma-drift, lost on a boat in underground waters. The vast arch of a buried cathedral, the soporific smell of cold, near freezing waters.
Yesterday at work - or was it the day before?- I looked out of the window at a flock of birds. Starlings I presume, though I remember them to be seagulls - I didn't know seagulls flew in flocks though. Their wings beat against an air that seemed to actually work against them, and their flight looked slowed down and heavy, as if they were flying through treacle, or through the sleep of last night that I have still not quite woken from.

The Book of Epidemics

It was that post I wrote yesterday about that half-memory of the school in November woods that got me thinking about the Book of Epidemics. The Book of Epidemics has more of a feel of an actual memory - though the contents of that memory, or rather, of the contents of the book itself, lead me to question its validity.
I found the book in the building where I went to Sunday School when I was a kid - on the RAF base at Kinloss in Scotland, so I imagine this dates the memory to the late 1970s / very early 1980s. There were two parts to the Sunday School building - one where the main activities of Sunday School would take place - colouring sessions based on Bible stories etc, and an adjoining room that one would have to walk through to gain entrance to the aforementioned main Sunday School room. This secondary room - a square space with high, square windows- in my memory seemed to be used as a kind of storeroom; bits of nativity play paraphernalia lying about, photostats of typewritten scripts, old piles of paper, once perhaps greatly important, all now forgotten and lost in this room that people only passed through - or met their children in when they had finished church.
It was not on a Sunday School day that I discovered the Book of Epidemics, but on another day - perhaps when I was ill from school with some mild and dreamy childhood illness - or more likely recovering from one, as I wa snot at home in bed with an Armada Book of Ghost Stories or the latest Beano. I was with Mum, who was engaged in some activity connected with the Sunday School building - perhaps planning for a fete, or maybe for the next nativity play. I say I was with my mother, but I remember her as being in the main part of the Sunday School building while I waited for her in that messy adjoining store-room. It was amongst the magazines and discarded Sunday School flotsam that I found the book. I do not remember the title of the book but I remember the contents,('The Book of Epidemics' is a name I gave it myself, and then only today, when I began thinking about it for the first time in years, and needed a title for this piece). The interior of the book was full of old black and white photographs (and what black and white photographs do not seem old?) while the words, crammed thick dense lines I could not have read of in any great detail given my age, described the occupants of the photographs, or rather their fates. In my memory, as may be ascertained from title given to the book, the contents seemed to be a list of epidemics. The photographs showed, I remember, classrooms of children and church congregations. The italicised sentences below the photographs told of how half the people in this photograph died in the epidemic or perhaps how none of the farmworkers survived the sickness. I am, of course, guessing as to the exact words. I cannot remember them in any detail, no matter even if that memory might be flase, but am giving a flavour of what the text might have contained.

The book haunted me that day, whispered through that white, creamy afternoon in which I may have been recovering from a mild childhood illness myself, with the words of disorders and illnesses I had not come across before; typhoid, scarlet fever, typhus, tuberculosis and cholera. Lists of the names of the dead. What would it be like, I wondered, with all the feverish imagination of childhood -that certainty of an almost memory- to live in those times. I imagined rumours and playground whispers under skies turning drizzly with those rumours; that classroom, three of them have come down or perhaps they went out in that rain, and the sickness came with it. Grey premonitions, damp and unwelcome forebodings. I pored over those photographs that seemingly endless afternoon, prodding the skin of those images -those haunted eyes, those hooded smiles- with fingertips that had not - happily - known the kiss of smallpox or chorea.

This is my remembering of the Book of Epidemics, a darker remembering that I had perhaps thought when I began to write this. I do not believe the Book of Epidemics ever existed, and, like the school in the November woods of yesterday's posts, is perhaps a reconstruction of a film, a ghost story, a school project, maybe even playground rumours and mathematics class urban myth. Also in my memory I remember the fear of those polio epidemics, an iron-lung terror, and those tales of it being passed through water, inside infectious swimming pools, in post-blitz streets flattened by Nazi bombs and ongoing renovations.

I am not obviously old enough to remember the fear of Polio, but, like the Book of Epidemics, it lies somehow in my memory. I do not know why, and perhaps this is just as well.

(dedicated to Thomas Ligotti and his story 'Gas Station Carnivals', a tale about memories of things that never existed - never could exist - but nonetheless continue to do so).

'There is Nothing for you here; the Attic has been Cleared'

'There is Nothing for you here; The Attic has been Cleared'

Pen, ink and coloured pencil on A3 paper

October - November 2011

Drifting on an Old Fashioned Sea

Thinking while at work today; in the future this will be old time. Look around me, at all the people in their old fashioned clothes, the old fashioned computers and headphones, and out of the window there is an old fashioned sea. Living in someone else's history. Perhaps I was remembering this nondescript day, when I was very, very old - perhaps in my eighties or nineties. Or remembering it when I will be old, rather than was old.
Kind of day that seems to mess up time, not one for the correct use of tenses.
I think it was a quality that the fog bought down. Watched it from the call centre, watched the buildings and the distance sink into it. That strangely calm sea had no horizon to it either. No waves, no wind. Just that slightly off-white stillness. Seemed to block the flow of things, of hours and seconds and minutes. Time backing up, floundering in pools made of endless afternoons, A flood of hours, a wave of memories.
Beyond, or perhaps, inside the welcome grey of the day - I am startled by dream-like memories - or rather, dream-like memories of even more dream-like fevers, or maybe even just those half-images that come with those mild and dreamy childhood illnesses.

Thought of something I've not thought of for a while, One of those things you know hasn't happened, and doesn't have the quality of having happened, nor of a dream. It's quality is not definable. Not a day for definitions, never mind tenses.

Kind of day that seems to mess up language.
-walking in the woods, and I am older than myself in this not-quite-memory. A November wood, late autumn trees, and they're tall and sombre, and the air between the bark is troubled, and the air must always be described as being troubled in such places as these. Drifting fog, can taste the sharp mist-kiss at the back of my throat. Breathe in this still day and know nothing flows. Come across some building in the woods. Another school. The fact that there is another school, indicates the presence of a previous school... though I don't know where or when. A low building, surrounded by trees growing too close to the walls, to that empty playground, guilty in its silence. Classes are in session though. The yellow light shines from square windows. Fluorescent headache hum. Chalky blackboard score. I don't go near, and I can't see in. The condensation on the window tastes of evening, and the light is failing here-

It has the taste of something from childhood, perhaps a fragment of a film, sliver of a ghost story read in one of the Armada Ghost Books I used to love. Something bought to me on the tides of an old fashioned sea.

A plague of daytime street lamps. See them when I walk to work in the night-chill lingering morning, light sluggish and sleepy. One orange lamp seems bright and antique as a bar on an electric fire, hanging in the air defiantly; this is not the day, nothing flows here. In the grounds of a tiny and obscure hospital I pass, waist high lights - car park globes - gather in the gloom, a Stephen King country. Brick-thick novels of haunted hospitals found on the rotating bookstands of W.H.Smiths stalls inside of old-fashioned tube stations with antique and unheard of names.

The lights in the car park make me think of rain and sleep.

From the call centre I watch them in the distance, on the farther hill, till they are swallowed up by the fog. The stillness in the day is triumphant, gloom resplendent. No song, no echoes, nothing moving, a ceaseless drifting, no wind, a Sargasso sea of a day, old fashioned and resplendent in its muted display, a drugged and attic-light reign.

The Churchkeeper

10:10pm Sunday night.
Trying to draw to draw (A1 size) the figure of a woman on (what appears to be) a giant rocking horse in a hopefully-to-be creepy attic. Trying to watch Joss Whedon's 'Serenity' as well, but am only hearing the music as a pleasing background ambience, and have no idea of anything going on.
A hot day today. Down at the seafront with Em, pass the Sunday afternoon crowds smug with their surprised ice creams and hastily retrieved shorts. The book stall just past the old pier was open. The smell of old books I never buy; school fetes and summer days heavy with the melancholy scent of barbecues.
Dreamt a couple of nights ago about the street lamps of Southside. Can't remember anything else now, but just a feeling of something deep, almost tropical, as if that housing estate had been built deep in a jungle. A few dreams last night too I remember. In one I was here, in the flat. There were a number of other people about. I'm not sure I knew them even in the dream, let alone in waking life. Some kind of party. Andy may have been orchestrating it. An older woman came up the stairs. I have a feeling she may have been connected to our landlady. She introduces herself as 'the Churchkeeper'. I don't know what this means. In the dream I try to warn Andy. The stairs are behind me (I'm in the living room as I write).
Keep thinking about the Churchkeeper walking there.
Obviously.
Also dreamt of university again. Not had one of these dreams for a while. In one part of the dream I was heading to a lecture / class, and went through a number of rooms / studios / corridors I had not been through before. The interior of the university was like a cross between Harrow College and Abbotsfield Comprehensive back in the latter half of the eighties. I said to myself that it was 'amazing' that the campus was so familiar to me, and yet I had never seen these rooms before. A vague feeling that I wasn't meant to be there. Other students looking at me as I passed through. Another part of the dream contained that old anxiety narrative of having an essay to do and not being able to complete it on time, or even knowing what to write. In this essay, I had to write about how to set up a direct debit over the phone (Hmm. Shades of work here). Time was running out, and I had no idea how I was going to even start the thing, let alone finish it.
Got back home at twilight tonight. Strange how quick and sudden nightfall is in November when the day has felt more like summer. Sweet relief of the night-chill. Walking the streets between here and Portland Road when the street lamps came on. Scarlet start-up hues, all lamps set to sunset. Someone was taking a photograph of the lamps hanging in the Mews when I got here. Stood across the road, a strangely furtive figure. I wonder if I made my way onto a photograph as I unlocked the doors and ascended the stairs, following the footsteps of the Churchkeeper not twelve hours before?

Unsuccessfully Rewiring Lost Post

Just managed to delete an entire post by moving the laptop from my room into the living room so I could watch the Big Bang Theory. I really can't be bothered to write the whole post out again, so to summarise the post:
1) Went out after work last night. Drank 4 and a 1/2 pints of Tetleys and an absinthe.
2) The guy in 'Hove Kebab House' tried to rip me off 50pence when I had yet another doner kebab. this was strange as I was thinking he was going to that exact same thing.
3) Went to work this morning. Four tortuously slow hours.
4) Physical hangover not too bed. Hangover gives me that melancholy, empty feeling instead. My stomach does feel slightly, well, disquieted though.
5) Whilst eating a sandwich on Western Road, I am attacked by a seagull which manages to steal half my sandwich.
This was as far as I had got.
Can't be bothered to write anything properly now. Still pissed off at that lost post.

Miswired Clockwork

Another morning. Late shift at work again.
Room in a half-haze, the blackout curtains
still drawn.
Sound of machines in the workshops below,
banging and sawing, and no other sound,
no other distance.
Devices in this architecture play on my
mind. Disquieting songs echo, shifting
these grey and winding hours.

Dog by the Roadside

Half an hour past midnight. Managed to make it back to the bedroom after falling asleep - for a few minutes - during episode 5 of the Doctor Who story 'The Chase' I was watching on DVD. A cool night tonight. The quilt doesn't seem warm enough somehow, but the fact that it actually is cold is now a relief.

Had to go down London Road at lunchtime to pay the council tax. Saw a sad dog tied up to a drainpipe on a narrow pavement, lorry sweeping past alarmingly close. The thought of the dog haunted me during my last few hours at work, and I had to go back after work to make sure the dog had gone - which it was.

The air is beginning to taste of winter now. Unmistakeable scent of smoke and cardboard, that folded-Sussex smell I noticed last year. Trees are empty and the nights are full. I saw the perfect shadow of a naked tree perfect against the wall of the Salvation Army building up Sackville Road. All the windows are boarded up from the inside, but there is light at the edges of the screen. I thought the building had fallen into disrepair.
A few months ago, I saw a woman dressed in the Victorian-like apparel of a Salvation Army member outside the building, and wondered, briefly, if I had seen a ghost.

Last Night, in the Mews

Some kind of commotion in the Mews yesterday evening. The sound of a cat, lost and mewling, somewhere, and the sounds of people looking for it. There is nowhere for a cat to hide though, so where these people even connected to the cat? Heard them move up and down the Mews, overhear fragments of conversation 'I don't know what's happening with that flat'. Outside our door. Were they referring to my flat? Wait in the darkness of the kitchen. Noises at the door. Was somebody knocking on our door? Why is somebody knocking unexpectedly on a front door such a source of alarm? Further jump in nerves when I think I hear the door opening. The old tenants, now in my imagination a sinister family of villains, come to collect some old belongings left in the attic, like ghost-pirates searching for lost treasure in a childhood ghost story? Look down the steep stairs. The frosted glass is innocent. I can still hear the cries of the lost cat somewhere, and the sounds of what might or might not be searching continues.

Lights in the Distance

A dark, gloomy day - twilight seemed to fall at about 3:00pm this afternoon. Rain this evening when I walk home. Wet-slick pavements. A pot of tea in Waterstones with Em after work, looking down West Street. My reflection in the glass. Through myself, I see, between the buildings across the streets, the distant lights of East Brighton. Remember Joe once saying how the east side of towns and cities are always poorer than the west.
From where I sit at work, I can see cranes in the distance. I think they're part of the construction site for the new American Express building. They don't move - at least not when I'm looking - but today, in that thick, hypnotic haze, they were lit by lights -lamps of a kind - amongst their structures. Actually the lights, a pale white-yellow, didn't really light them at all, they just glowed balefully in the scaffold-like structures, doleful as sad and resentful dogs.
I remember last year. Where I sat at my old desk - my first desk at the call centre - I remember being fascinated by those cluster of distant lights on top of a hill. Glittering in the early twilights, I wondered what it would be like to wait under those lights, and watch the call centre from there. Since last year, I think I've worked out they are at the top of Bear Road. I have some time off work at the end of the month. Perhaps I shall go there then, wait for evening to come, and as the night swells, find myself part of the distance, whose lights I have always seemed to watch.

Nearly Awake (7:40am)

These near-winter mornings are spectral things, heavy with December in the grey half light. Sat in my room, nearly cold, with the lamp on, the i-pod charging, ready for the walk to work where I can only nearly decide what to play.
The lamp casts a huge shadow of my head onto the blackout curtain. There is some kind of sound from outside. A large container, sounding empty, echoes and clatters. All silent again now, or drowned beneath the humming of the laptop.
Don't remember dreaming last night. Woke up at some point by the noise of what seemed to be some kind of heavy industrial machinery on the landing. I woke up fully -well, nearly- and realised it was the sound of toilet flushing.
7:30am.
Nearly time to leave.

Two London Roads Dancing

I walk up London Road at lunchtime, to the British Heart Foundation charity shop at the far end, ostensibly to look at albums, but really because I just to walk up London Road. I get there by cutting through the walkway that comes out at the front of that odd, tall church, where back in late autumn 2001 I attended a strange art exhibition. Photocopies of ghost-faces in lost photographs, a verger's unimpressed explanation, an M.R.James afternoon in my late twenties.
As I cut down onto London Road, I watch the people passing back and forth, lost in their mid-afternoon supermarket thoughts, their student-noodle expeditions. Across the road, through pale-white light of late afternoon, I see the entrance to the open market. Lived here nearly twelve years and still never been there. It strikes me that London Road is old. That people have been here for decades. Imagine time flipping back, people in the 1970s walking back and forth. Back further, the 60s, the 50s. Blitz era London Road, a black-and-time. All men in hats, and the cold grey mornings full of the vague tastes of smoke and bomb shelters. Remember a taxi driver telling me once how a German fighter plane tried to gun him down when he was a kid. Said the bullet holes could still be seen in the bricks of the wall. London Road? Upper Lewes Road? Hartington Road? Somewhere round here. Pass by the Somerfield where I worked as a shelf stacker for 6 weeks when I first moved to Brighton. London road is an old road for me. Intimate and ancient resonance. Think of that other London road in Worcester. Two London Roads, circling round each other like serpents, cobra dances, python squeeze. Time all emptied out and not flowing properly.

At the base of the hill looking up to where I once lived - but this London Road is flat, and I still would once have walked back along here to get home. Moulscoomb days. Earl Grey tea and Lawrence Durrel's Alexandria Quintet. Could never get past the first book.
The newness of that room.
The starlings out of the window.
I do not get to look at the albums in the British Heart Foundation charity shop. There is someone already there, bent over the racks, ponderously fingering his way through the plastic vcases -click-clack-click-clack- like the sounds of bones, or dice.

Hangover

Too many 'Crabbie's Alcoholic Ginger Beer' last night and now have a hangover. Mild hangovers -as this one- are strangely comforting; drifting on the internet, into and out of sleep, listening to the wind in the grey November day outside (curtains still drawn). Em headed back to hers this morning (she has a friend staying over) and Andy is still asleep. As we lay in bed this morning, there was the sound of bells coming in and out of focus, flung on the pulses of the wind. Some lost church, out on Portland Road. The serpent in this mild hangover is the fact that I have to go out again tonight, to the pub quiz at the distant pub of Carolines of Brunswick which I agreed to about six weeks ago. The last thing I want to do is leave the house. Unfortunately, hangovers, unlike holiday, cannot be booked in advance. Still, I shall have dinner at em's before there, and don't have to leave the house for another three hours.
Maybe some lunch will make me feel better.

Waiting for the Washing Machine to Finish

Sat on my bed, waiting for the washing machine to finish, and then to head out to meet Em. Quite looking forward to the walk over to her house - a little under half an hour. Got my back to the window, and there's a warm / cool breeze (an oxymoron I know) coming through. I am aware of those rectangles-within-rectangles of night over my left shoulder. Turn back my head and see the light on in the kitchen across the - across the locked in passage between here and there.

Fireworks go off in the distance, and don't quite drown out the whine of the washing machine in the kitchen. Had a bath instead of a shower. Lay in the soapy water for half-an-hour, mapping out the geography of the past as usual; autumn 91 at Harrow College failing a foundation course, autumn 92 (mostly) unemployed in my bedroom in Ickenham painting small canvases, autumn 93, living in Uxbridge, attending Langley College doing another (rather more successful) foundation course.

The whine of the washing machine in the kitchen appears to be reaching a crescendo. I must prepare to go out anyway, gather the objects needed for trips into Saturday night; wallet, keys, phone, i-pod.

We need so many things to go outside these days.

November feels like Home

Just got back from a quick walk down George Street with Andy. Bought lots of old copies of the Grant Morrison penned 'Doom Patrol' comic from the Oxfam on Blatchington Road for 20p each. Very tempted to head back on Monday morning before work and pick up the copies they had of 'Animal Man', 'Shade the Changing Man' and the other early 90s Vertigo-type comics they had there.
Twilight outside. A pale-blue November twilight. No bite to the chill in the air yet, though the light has that troubled, dreamy quality about it. One thing that I have noticed over the past few years is that my fascination and resonance with autumn has shifted from September / October to November, which was previously my least favourite month of autumn. There is something deep and ancient about November, a dreary significance, and feels somehow far more autumnal than the preceding two months do. November feels more and more like home as I move through my very late thirties.
It is an understated and hypnotic twilight tonight. The sky, behind the silhouetted buildings, was a muted gold, a gold that was not reminiscent of the sun, but more of the light that might be found in attics, or that might fall on tangled paths through little used woodland.
Waiting for the water to heat. Time for a shower, and then into town to watch some experimental / noise type bands at the West Hill. As is often the case these days, and particularly on these Saturday evenings, what I would most like to do is just to sit on my bed in silence, and watch it get dark outside.
Perhaps when I have my week off from work, at the end of this month that feels like home.

Dream Splinter (The Base of London Road Again)

I do remember dreaming now. A vague splinter of something just come through in this Saturday just-afternoon. Walking down London Road in Worcester, into town itself. Then turning around near the base of the hill to try and find the place I was attempting to draw a couple of weeks ago. The drawing and the reality didn't quite match up though. Twilight. A dark evening air, and the light all washed out. Pale and somehow dark at the same time. All I can remember.

Mundane Thoughts on another Saturday Morning off Work

Listening to an album by Ancient Ceremony, first bought back in the early autumn of 1997, then re-bought at Replay just before I moved out of the bedsit. It really is a dreadful album, but very funny. Still haven't drawn back the curtains of my room. Sat on the bed aith a cup of tea and the bedside lamp on. The lamp is balanced on three cardboard boxes.
Got to sleep relatively late last night, about 3:00am, after drinking all of three ales with Andy (Andy drank port) while watching The Inbetweeners season 3, The Mighty Boosh and Look Around You. I don't remember dreaming last night at all, which is becoming an increasingly common thing whilst sleeping here at the Mews - I blame the blackout curtains. Just had a peek through those curtains, the sky has that flat, white and wet look of November. I can imagine the pavements under the nearly-dead trees, messy with rainy leaves. I have a slight headache from the three ales, but this is swiftly fading now. I am thinking about watching a DVD. Don't know what though.

Back through Incense Smoke

Incense burning in my room.
The smell reminds me of the Christmas of 1997, in the second year of my degree at Worcester. I think I had been bought incense sticks of a similar nature. I spent most of that short Christmas - only two days - in the small spare room at my parents then-place at St Columb Major in Cornwall. Endless telephone conversations to my on-off-on-off girlfriend of the time, trying to, as usual, get back together, or find some reason to stay together. I would burn the incense as we talked - and after we talked, and I would stay up late into the night on the internet - the very first year of the internet for me - looking at band pages, and articles on tarot cards. I would read my own cards too, looking for some sign of resolution in the images on the cheaply produced cards. A light-blue feeling, like shallow waters, or the colour of an autumn sky, just after rain.
It was one of those Christmases when the wind would be up all night, howling like it was stuck in an infinity of chimneys that surrounded my room. I can't remember where that room looked out on to - the garden? the side of next door's house? In my imagination, that tiny window just looks out onto a blankness of stars and a tangled, slightly overgrown field, ragged with night, always disordered by the wind.
I can almost taste the cigarette smoke in that small room, the ashtray and the cigarette butts, and time locked away in burning incense and faltering landscapes out of obscured windows.

God as a Geography of Absence

Walking back home tonight, through the Churchill Square crowds and rumours of Christmas. A light rain makes the pavement slippery and untrustworthy. The novelty of early nightfall. Dark by 5:30pm now. Look up as I cross the road, and see a bus waiting at the bus stop; '25: Universities' - A summer bus for me, most of the time anyway, and a daytime bus definitely. Line of students waiting to get on, and go back to their halls of residence, scattered along Lewes Road, their shared houses in the Moulscoombe estates, their rooms and lectures and student union bars up at the campus itself. I only catch that bus on bright and warm days, to go for a walk in Stanmer Park, with Em a month or so back -probably longer now- and then, before that, the day before I headed up to Worcester for Em's brother's wedding back in July.
What would happen if I got on that bus now though? Just slipped onto that bus, paid two pounds for a single ticket to the edge of town?
The woods up at Stanmer Park would offer a different aspect. Trees waving in black wet winds, and the darkness over fields and under branches would be disquietingly alluring, sinister as the contemplation of pools of hidden water on summer days. The ground covered with damp skins of fallen leaves, and the sky above the trees and empty lanes would be silent and dark and pure, a god as a geography of absence.
I didn't get on the bus of course though. I walked past, and came home, where I made dinner and watched repeats of 'The Big Bang Theory' on the TV.

1950s Horror Comic: 'Inside the Furnace'

The title of the post is one of the search terms that led someone to my blog today. '1950s horror comic' makes sense. My love of horror comics, particularly the gruesome and surreal pre-comics code comics of the fifties is well documented (well I may have mentioned them in a post or two last year...) 'Inside the Furnace' though... what could this be referring to? Perhaps the unknown searcher - lost in some lurid and enthralling nightmare of his own - is searching for a 'lost' horror comic...
'Inside the Furnace' though... what kind of 1950s horror comic might this be? There is something strangely unsettling about the name. After all, no-one would like to be actually be inside a furnace - certainly not while it is lit anyway. Perhaps there is something in the furnace, some cursed thing eager to get out? The threat in the title 'Inside the Furnace' is undefined, but certainly there. 'Inside the Furnace' sounds like a horror comic from a dream. These dream-comics occasionally pop up in my nocturnal wonderings, one I've mentioned before called 'Forbidden Mysteries' showed an old man fishing off a pier at night, and another called 'Occult Tales' showed Spiderman battling a monster at sunset. There was another one too, called 'Dead of Night' (this was a real title for a comic put out by Marvel in the 1970s) and had a picture of a wood just before twilight, a bloated dying sun hanging heavy through the winter branches.
I entertain myself with the history of these mysterious non-existent comics. I imagine them produced by a company called 'Drumduan Comics', (named after the road I lived in where I first came the concept of horror comics when I was ten years old). I imagine the stories in 'Forbidden Mysteries' as something odd and unsettling, and slightly surreal, as much as the dream it came from. I imagine this mysterious company vanishing at the end of the 1950s when the comics code came in and destroyed the horror comics market, only to re-emerge in the 1970s, with new, equally obscure titles, before a final blaze of glory in the early 1980s, with a run of lurid comics whose titles may have been inspired by the video nasties of the time; 'Buried Alive!', 'Eaten Alive!'. In my imagination the names may change, the history of Drumduan Comics is unsure and transient, a haunted untrustworthy thing. Occasionally I imagine Drumduan Comics appearing briefly in Mexico in the 1960s under the name 'Noxis-Nibris imprints'. It is never known who runs this company, nor who works for the company. Their comics appear are whispered of at comic marts, unbelievably rare things that people suspect may not even exist, a four-colour urban legend. People remember them, but no-one ever seems to possess a copy (some parallel here with Nigerian horror films that people swear exist but have never seen.... though you can see video cassette covers on the internet...). Perhaps one of these comic collectors tracks an address down, not an American one, or a Mexican one, but one in a small town in northern Scotland. He may go there, and find the street on which he might find a clue to the origin of Drumduan Comics, and only to find...

...but here my imagination fades out. I don't know what he would find. I can see a road, leading into a vast forest on the hill (echoes of the 'black woods' that looked down on my bedroom when we lived in Forres) and the road just petering out. There are rumours, perhaps, of a blackened burnt out factory, but that's all I have, and the history of this purely imagined comics company continues to remain unknown.

'Inside the Furnace' sounds like it might have been one of the titles published by 'Drumduan Comics', perhaps a short run, only five issues, sometime in 1954.

Perhaps one day, as I have long intended to, I may turn the dreamt of and imagined covers of these comics into paintings, and if I do, I might have one them titled 'Inside the Furnace'.