Saturday 31 December 2011

Only the Past is Real

Last afternoon of the year.
Grey drizzle, grey skies.
Walked back from my morning shift at work through crowds of shoppers, most of whom seemed to have an inability to walk properly.
Flat is quiet. I'm the only one in.
Charging up my i-pod. The laptop makes contented sighing sounds -like breathing- every now and again.
Swapping messages via Facebook as I write with an old school friend, not seen for over twenty years, about the possibilities of reunions in 2012.
Closed curtains in my room. Dim yellow glow, dulled even more, by the globe of a lampshade.
Last afternoon of the year.
Only the past is resilient enough to thrive.

Friday 30 December 2011

The Colour of American Summers in the 1950s

I read Sylvia Plath's journals a number of years ago now. I remember one entry where she had submitted a poem to the publisher entitled 'Rain'. The publisher rejected the poem saying that whenever America had had rain, they were inundated (floundering you might say) in poems called 'Rain'.
I must be remembering this incorrectly.
Surely all of America would not have had the same weather conditions at the same time, enough to provoke a deluge of submissions of poems to publishers? Same rain, different time-zones... I would go back to double check this, but the collected journals are hundreds of pages along and I like the idea of America having one uniform weather...
Raining today obviously, a slow, thick rain, greasily coating the pavements with an oil-like sheen. A coldness to the water too, this is the rain of drowning, not poems. A slow motion shower, a doom metal drizzle, a grey celebration of the depths of English winters. No drama, just a gloomy headache-y comfort.
I dreamt once of Sylvia Plath. The television set came replaying a short video of her, sat underneath a tree at a picnic in the 1950s. I did not know where the transmission was coming from and concluded that it was some kind of signal from the past. The picture was fuzzy and kept jumping. Some colours over saturated, while others were pale and bleached out. The sunlight was the colour of old wallpaper, bright and wrong and feverish. I have always thought of that colour, since the dream, as that of American summers in the 1950s. No details could be seen, only Plath's oddly predatory smile as she poured tea into tea cups that were dark as shadows.

The Capsule, Drifting through the Small Hours

I tried to read for an hour before going to sleep last night, a last cup of tea and the dim bulb of my bedside lamp slowly warming up, like a street lamp for rooms. I had the quilt wrapped around me but I was still cold.
There was no sound of anything. I've been living here for three months and there are still times when it strikes me how silent it is at night. No taxis, no cars, no drunken shouts. With the curtains in my room drawn, it felt like I could be anywhere, locked in a capsule left to drift through small hours seas. For whatever reason, last night felt very remote, as if my room had settled inside another house, one far larger and labyrinthine with lost hallways and abandoned rooms. The cold had an odd and piercing quality about it, and when I turned off the light, I shivered under two quilts until I fell into a dreamless sleep.

Failing to Describe Deja-Vu

Just turned midnight.
Bought a pile of Fortean Times from Snoopers Paradise for 50 pence each today. Reminds me of the time I used to buy it religiously each month, summer 2005 - spring 2007. Not sure why I stopped. Flicking through them made me think of going to the launderette when I lived on Buckingham Street. The new issue always seemed to come out when I needed to do my washing. Remember sitting in there before the afternoon shift at the petrol station. Can of coke and the clean white interior that smelt of washing powder and clean sheets. Eyeing the few dryers nervously in case they were all being used by the time my laundry was done.
Thinking about this and flipping through Fortean Times. One of the issues I actually had back then but had thrown away in the intervening years. 'Notting Hill' on the television.
Deja-vu.
You feel it come over you, this great wave of nearly memory, try to track it down, analyse it, unmask it, define it. Even when you watch it coming it is all so... slippery.
Something to do with the scene on television, where the characters are all sitting round having dinner (I actually have seen this scene before... I think). Then a mental image - almost an image anyway- of what seemed to be a 'Roman' building, levels and rooms and pillars. Possibly Greek? Didn't they have pillars? A feeling of overarching familiarity. Actually, I call it deja-vu, but that is actually innaccurate as sitting here in the cold living room flicking through Fortean Times while keeping half an eye on 'Notting Hill' didn't feel like it had happened before. It was more like the whole scene reminded me intensely of something else... maybe something dreamt rather than something that had actually occurred. Not explaining it very well, but then again, I don't think deja-vu can ever really be adequately described. The interesting thing about deja-vu, or this trick of memory that is a bit like deja-vu is that it always comes with a curious sense of revelation... which then fades before it reveals anything. Bit like the way a memory of a dream does. Actually, it is rather like that feeling in a dream where you that moment of revelation strikes and you think 'ah... this is all a dream isn't it?'
Except I didn't wake up, and still have to go to bed.
So long as I don't end up watching a documentary on Jimmy Saville like I did last night.

Thursday 29 December 2011

The Stags Head Barometer at the Foot of the Stairs

My grandparents house, Stanklyn Lane in Stone.
There used to be a barometer at the foot of the stairs, above the front door. It never worked, not as far as I remember. The needle seemed to always point towards 'stormy'. It was made out of dark wood, or plastic. The dial was set on some kind of backing, and above the dial there was a miniature stags head ornament. Tiny twigs of the branch-like antlers, beady black eyes.
I never used to think about the stags head barometer going up the stairs, because I could never see it, but when I was coming down those dark and narrow stairs, there it would be, seemingly staring at me in its sightless way. Perhaps I would try to jump from the third or fourth step of the stairs, trying to touch it with my fingers. I don't think I ever succeeded. Too high up, too small as a child. I remember a nightmare I had about those stairs once, of being trapped halfway up (or halfway down) and the terrifying sound of a woman's voice, singing. I don't ever remember dreaming about that slightly spooky barometer though.
I suppose the barometer was there throughout the whole of my childhood, was probably only removed when my parents sold the house after my grandfather died. I wonder where it is now, if anywhere? When I think about that barometer, it makes me think of long afternoons under darkening clouds, red Worcestershire earth, and the sound of traffic in the distance. An oddly comforting drifty-dreamy sound, like the sea.
I imagine the barometer measuring other things aside from atmospheric pressure, though I'm not sure what. Odd, almost abstract concepts like the sleepiness of the fields behind my grandparents house perhaps, or the depth of paths through the woods my Mum would play in when she was a kid, a short distance away. Perhaps the tide-like sway of poplars, trees that always seem to be on the horizon, like some desert mirage. Watching them at night from the small bedroom I shared with my sister where I once thought I saw a ghost.
In Stanklyn Lane, a miniature moon hangs over still days, the barometer measuring strange fragments of childhood and memory; Salad cream Sundays, Arthur Ash round for Sunday dinner, Songs of Praise, watching the rain on the pavement from the living room window, wanting to play and waiting endlessly for the rain to cease.
I caught a glimpse of the house when I went back with Em last May. Halfway up the gravel of the drive, and there was a white van in the front garden, and the windows were different, and it didn't seem like my grandparents house anymore, so we turned back, walked up the hill and ate lunch in the churchyard where they are buried instead.

Message from the Driftwood Days

Strange these days between Christmas and the New Year. Being back at work now makes it feel like Christmas is over but neither does it feel like any other point in the year either. Feels like being on a ship in the middle of a vast ocean, out of sight of land. Driftwood days.
Late to sleep last night, as I'm on a (half) week of lates this week, only adding further to my disorientation. When I walked back last night, the darkness was thick and luxuriant, a spectral cold that offers no comfort but no deception either. Intimations of January, and that month's simultaneous new yet old resonance.
Condensation on the windowpanes. Sky wet and grey. I imagine I'll watch the sea, the same colour, merging into that sky, from my desk at work. The sea didn't look trustworthy at all yesterday, all foamy and oddly brown, like bubble bath and flood water.

Wednesday 28 December 2011

To Mill from the Ruffmans for Mint


Back to work today, and a relatively quiet, if slow day (as first days back tend to be). Did the drawing above between calls. 'To mill from the ruffmans for mint' is a phrase I used in an art project at Southampton back in 1995 / 1996. It translates (as far as I recall as) 'To steal from the woods for money'. The words are old Victorian (I think) criminal slang. Had the phrase running through my head today - don't know why, so it found itself in the picture. The other piece of text 'we are engineers' is a lyric from a Voivod song from their 'Killing Technology' album. I think the song might have been 'Over-reaction'. I have no idea why both phrases ended up in the drawing, nor what the drawing is about. It usually works best that way.

Tuesday 27 December 2011

Lines Written in a Notebook on the Banks of the Thames


A January-like twilight. Snow thick skies though the air is mild. Sat on a bench on the banks of the Thames. The information board tells me this is the site of London's first bridge, and that in the Dark Ages, was 'a place of ill repute and mystery'.
There is a complex of buildings behind me, shiny and new. Symmetrically perfect plastic Christmas trees sparkle with blue lights. We are curves in the hearts of equations. Despite this, there is still an air of eerie serenity.
Watch the traffic on the bridge, the empty platform on the water. In the distance, the London Eye rimmed with blue lights.
Foreign voices approach to my left, fade, come back, fade; a staccato tide.
I risk a look, someone on the phone, pacing back and forth. It still sounds like two voices.
A police siren.
An aircraft.
Only the river is silent, brown waters fading in twilight. Window reflections, street lamp infractions. Dark curves under the bridge; wolves, sleep, cupboards on lost landings, a small window looking out onto the hills of a night-garden...
Someone walks by. A woman dressed in black carrying an orange supermarket bag.
Someone else, coming the other way, gender unknown. A furry Russian hat. S/he looks Russian. A Siberian interloper, still too warm.
Em is quiet, holds her tea with both hands, looks left, then looks forward again as she takes a sip of tea.

Monday 26 December 2011

Scattered Showers (A Permanent Twilight Before the Altar)

The sound of cars in the distance, light in mid-spring rain. Sounds like years ago. The road remembering.
Drifting in and out of sleep. The open window.
The interior of a church. Musty brown. Old prayer books, the scent of attics, of mad old King James bible uncertainties.
The permanent twilight before the altar.
I wind through paths through still woods. Green rain and rivers. Somewhere.
Sleep and drift.
Tides shift.

Something someone told me. I hear his voice quiet and urgent, a whisper. Some tale whose words I can't translate. Are you speaking in another language? Cold hills in the distance. All I hear is the insistence of his words but not the actual words.
Look up at the sun.
Obscured, I shiver.
Lie sleeping on the bed.

Tides shift.

The smell of petrol and petrol stations. There are always wastelands behind petrol stations, a geography of tyres and streams that flow nowhere else but here.
You disappeared didn't you? Years ago?
Some vague recognition there. A photograph I saw in the local paper. Mill town echoes, factory stories.
The rain is fooling me.
Its like I haven't spoken in days.
These scattered showers make voices a quiet song.

Like choirs.
Like your insistence.
Like the hill.

The empty landing, and I am thinking suddenly of boats and harbours and places far away from this rain and this memory and this drifting on a bed in a tiny room, unable to fully wake.
It sounds cold out there on the landing.

The sound of cars in the distance.

(The song 'Scattered Showers' by Disco Inferno can be found on the EP 'The Last Dance'. The above piece is based on images inspired by the song, which I have listened to almost continually over this Spring-haunted Christmas of 2011).

136 London Road Dream

I have returned to 136 London Road in Worcester where I lived when I was a student. The estate agents have allowed access to the house - they think I am buying it or something. Alistair is here, Joe too, possibly Sally, and some other people whom I cannot now remember. The house is subtly different to waking life - darker with a more subterranean feel. The house is also different to how it is remembered in the dream. I try to work out how and why some rooms seem to have shifted, some elongating, some shrinking, some actually changing position within the architecture of the house. There is a feeling that, despite the estate agents having allowed us access, that we are not meant to be there - or at least not for long. I want to take some photographs of the house, particularly my old room, two floors up from the twilight- grey living room. No-one else seems to share my reservations at being in the house. Someone has made dinner on the table and made quite a mess. How are we to get this cleaned up before we are found out? In Joe's old room. I look down into the garden, at a gloomy corner below us. 'I remember this!' I think./ Joe's room seems to have moved. I put this down to the passage of time. Perhaps this happens in old houses one has not visited in a while.

At the canal, looking at a photograph of our old dog Bruno. I am with someone else but am not sure who. We are now in the photograph. I call for Bruno to come to me which he does. He is pleased to see me. On the other side of the towpath is a motorway. Busy cars and lorries. I hope Bruno will be alright as he is not one his lead.

Sunday 25 December 2011

Christmas Day; Sunsets, Fish-heads and Mashed Swede

Christmas morning. Meet Andy on the landing of the flat while I make Em toast and honey for breakfast. He says that he is relieved to escape his dreams. I ask him what he dreamt about. 'Sunsets and loneliness' is his enigmatic reply. I dreamt to, of planks of wood just below the surface of a body of water. Some pathway made by a tribe. I am there with a friend I have fallen out with. A colleague from work asks if he knows how the plank-paths work. The friend races onto the planks and falls between them into the water. 'He does now' I say to my colleague. I attempt to use the planks. As I walk carefully along the planks I notice they are old. The unseen tribe has not used them in a long time. The plank snaps and I am plunged into the water and wake up.
After breakfast, Em and myself head down the beach to meet Sarah for a cup of tea at the Meeting House cafe on the seafront, open all year round. The promenade is as crowded as a summers day. Packs of delighted dogs play with balls and the sea and each other. Children fall off new skateboards or show their proficiency on equally new bikes.
We meet Sarah, and after waiting in the long queue for cups of tea retreat to the pebbles to sit down. An oddly mild day. Glimpses of muted sun from behind shifting cloud banks. As we sit on the pebbles there is the sound of something dropping on the stones behind me. Sarah gives a cry of amused disgust. With trepidation I turn around. Just behind me is a rotting fish head, dropped, one hopes, from a seagull.
I tell her about my recent experience of being attacked by a seagull walking down Western Road at lunchtime.
'The seagulls really don't like you' she says.
The wind gets colder and it starts to feel more like winter so we head on. Sarah leaves to feed cats she is looking after and Em and myself head back here to make Christmas dinner, where I discover I am quite good at mashing Swede.

Saturday 24 December 2011

The Night I Heard Father Christmas

Christmas Eve night.
Got to go out and meet Em in half an hour, out into the cold and darkness. I'm quite looking forward to it though. On Christmas Eve night, the outside becomes another kingdom entirely. I suppose it is echoes of childhood. When you're six years old, the outside on Christmas Eve is the dominion of Father Christmas, always rather a sinister figure I've thought. I remember waking one Christmas Eve night, possibly when I was about six years old. Out on the landing there were noises. The sounds of munching. Father Christmas was eating the mince pies! Obviously it was my Dad -or possibly my Mum, but probably Dad- who was eating the mince pies. My six year old self however knew that it was Father Christmas out there. On the landing. And I was awake.
I was terrified. Utterly terrified.
I was terrified of the possibility that he might somehow discover that I was awake and would leave no presents, but I was more terrified of the fact that this mythical legendary figure was standing out on the unseen landing. I can't imagine being more terrified if my six year old self's nightmare-nemesis the Floating Skull had proved to be real and came floating into the room.
I fell back asleep.
In the morning there were presents to open. I had fooled Father Christmas after all! I didn't mention to anyone that I had heard Father Christmas delivering presents the night before though. Just in case. In fact, I don't think I told anyone about my hearing Father Christmas incident until a lot later in the year, perhaps even deep into the summer months.
My best friend Carl Haslam quite reasonably suggested that it might not have been Father Christmas, but was in fact some other kind of ghost or monster. The idea appealed to me. And made sense. Surely Father Christmas couldn't be as scary as that Christmas Eve night could he? Perhaps it was the Floating Skull after all. I could imagine this bony horror-head eating the mince pies.
By the time next Christmas came I had all but forgotten 'The Case of the Father Christmas Monster'.
Well, about to head out to meet Em from work now.
I hope I don't meet Father Christmas skulking about, maybe in the dark of the Old Shoreham Road.
He really is quite a sinister figure in my own humble opinion.

Fragments of Random Christmas Memories

Christmas Eve 2002.
Remember my manager at the petrol station gave us a £50 bonus, and I bought an album by Opeth and a graphic novel by a Polish artist whose name I could never pronounce, let alone recall. Remember walking up the grey road to Flo's house, where I lived, and the strangeness of not being at home on Christmas Eve. Flo was away for Christmas and I had the flat to myself. On Christmas Day I went round Valerie's house for dinner. There was an older friend of hers there, and her then-boyfriend. They weren't to last for long - only days if I remember correctly. Might have been other flatmates there too, but they are lost now beyond memory. The dinner was very nice. I was impressed by the level of cooking skill displayed, and the ease at which such skills were deployed. I drank too much wine, and went home relatively early, fell asleep in the empty flat just past nightfall and woke up on Boxing Day where I was somewhat ill. By the time I started my afternoon shift at the petrol station I felt much better.

Christmas Day 2007.
Back at my parents place in Cornwall. Felt okay on Christmas Eve on my usual walk across the dunes to St Piran's Cross. Christmas Day comes, and I begin to feel somewhat unsettled. Deep exhaustion, and not just an exhaustion of the body, but seemingly of the soul too... Retreat back to bed with Nurofen and cans of diet coke. Feverish sleep, feverish dreams. Time melting into one long 24 hour flu illness. Even missed the Doctor Who special. That same influenza-hallucination I've had before about 'having to balance the temperatures'. I remember achieving this sometime in the small hours. That feeling of triumph - I begin to feel better. I have no idea what 'balancing the temperatures' mean now I am not ill. I think it may be something to with when the fever breaks and you begin to feel better and your temperature comes down.

Boxing Day 1997.
At my parents old place in Cornwall, in St Columb Major. Endless phone calls trying to repair a relationship that never worked. Incense smoke (the incense stick were a present from her), and a small window looking out onto a white-winter landscape I can no longer remember. Turkey smell and condensation on the glass. Websites about tarot cards. Reading interviews with And Also The Trees and Tom Baker's autobiography. Listening constantly to Suspiria's album 'Drama', as if there might be some resolution in songs such as 'Awfully Sinister' and '(now we see) The Swine'.

December 27th 1998.
Alone in the house on London Road Worcester. Happy with those four floors of early Victorian architecture to roam in. No-one back from the Christmas break yet. Writing songs on the guitar, heading into town to buy albums from the Christmas sales. Remember Woolworths was still open. The statue of Elgar at the entrance to the High Street where I used to meet Ruth. Talking with Corin on the phone, she tells me tales of the ghosts of black dogs, but I am only a little uneasy at being in such a large, old house on my own.

December 28th 1996.
Bracknell.
The Followers.

Deep Waters of 2:30am

2:30am. Deep in the Ox-Hour Lots.
Spectral cold, and if I draw back the curtains of this room?
Lights in the windows of the house next door.
A notebook on my bed, and another book, 'The Big Grey Man of Ben Macdhui'.
There is an old summer here, on my skin,
a certain light, a certain glance.
Deep spring-gothic, but we're
deep in the Ox-Hour lots instead.
I imagine I hear shouts in the distance
of streets I can't imagine
this late at night.

Friday 23 December 2011

Lines Written in a Notebook on a Train journey from Truro to Brighton

I returned from Cornwall to Brighton by train yesterday. I left Truro train station at twilight and arrived at Brighton, met by Em, at about 11:15pm. The following lines were all written at some point on the journey.

Serene at twilight stations. Coffee and a wood pigeon. The strange peace that accompanies the hour before a long journey and there is nothing else to be done. I hear traffic and voices, and the dark fading grey of the sky, and below it all, the deeper sound of quiet.
-written at Truro station

Malvern smoke-ghosts in the hills, pale mist in the spring twilight. From the windows of trains watching the lamp-lit distance pass. The breeze through memories of grass, writing poems over ecstatic night-landscapes. Notebook reflected in the carriage window.
Hallways, a waltz, a house in the comforting country dark. Slow river reflection. Black and white squares. A chessboard floor.
A geography of waiting sentinels. Empty platforms and white station lights. Black hills and and an infinity of streets. With access to the sight of a god, I watch the city arrive. The announcer comes over the tannoy reminds that if I am to alight, to remember all my belongings.
Something about arriving in towns at night. A sense of languorous possibility - a spreading out of a half remembered dream. Night-fragment from childhood, an afternoon fever, bright and cool and ambiguous. If this were Clovelly Heath I were returning to now? Not the city where I lived but its imaginative / imagined counterpart. The city built up over years and memories.
Approaching towns and places I once knew. Reading. 18 years ago tonight, I left Reading for Uxbridge, then by Uxbridge to Bretforton. Langley College echoes. Deep dark December blue. I missed something in that time. An unconsummated mystery. Reach back and there is emptiness where I once stood. An absence in the shape of myself watching. Was she golden? An autumn sunlight of a girl I never saw? That time was full of train stations. Langley to West Drayton. Stood at Langley Station with people I knew and those I didn't. Soemthing absolute about the darkness of those nights. A cold I've rarely known since. Stood at the bus-stop outside college waiting for the yellow 458 to take me home to Uxbridge. Our Price and a ground floor room that seemed a basement room. Sleeping in permanent twilight. A sink and two cupboards. Learning to smoke.
At Reading Station a man holds up a piece of paper waiting for someone to get off our train. As the train pulls away he is still waiting. Another train on another platform arrives. Sudden hope! He went there instead, but soon returned to our platform and watched the train pull away. I watched his face fade into the station.
(-written on the train between Truro and London Paddington

Overheard at Paddington underground:
'He might be a man, but he's definitely a Croatian'
I think I might have misheard.
-written on the Circle Line underground from London Paddington to London Victoria

In December, the whistles blown at stations are cold.
-written on the train between London Victoria and Brighton

Thursday 22 December 2011

Old Times found in the Attic

One of those constants of visiting my parents is that I end up with at least twice as much stuff as I came with. This is because at some point I enter the dusty dark repository of the attic to have a root through my old stuff. There is not as much stuff up there as there used to be (either thrown away or already retrieved) but there is still enough to keep me occupied for hours; old Dr Who annuals, some old comics, old bits of artwork, boxes of paperback books... I have a clutch of comics to take back that I shall never read (I never even liked Daredevil at the time let alone now), a 1980s edition of 'Salems Lot' by Stephen King I aim to read on the train, and I'm contemplating taking back 'New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos' edited by Ramsay Campbell.
The attic is a strange and timeless domain. No natural light, just the lightbulb hanging down from the rafters and the heavy black torch that is always kept on the bookcase below the attic trapdoor. The attic smells of summers and Christmas and the last days of Woodstock Drive.
There is a lot of stuff in the attic that reminds me of the last year of living at Woodstock Drive in Ickenham before I left home. This would have been the yuear leading up to March 1993. I'm not sure why this is, or why the stuff that is up there should remind me so much of then. I was unemployed at the time, spending long rainy afternoons in my room playing my guitar, writing stories -a short phase experimenting with painting (which led me to going back to college the following year)- and reading endless books. I remember one book I read over the course of an evening. it was called 'Night of the Twelfth' and was some kind of thriller set in a boys school. The cover superimposed an image of a boy on a photograph of a distant wood at sunset.
The book wasn't one of those I found up in the attic though. That has been long lost over the years, as most things, I suppose, eventually are.

Wednesday 21 December 2011

Unsafe Crags

Did my usual Christmas walk over the sand dunes this afternoon. I think this is the earliest I've ever done it - usually it is on Christmas Eve, but last year I think it was on Boxing Day. As I head back home to Brighton tomorrow, this was the latest I was able to do it. Theoretically I suppose I could do it in the morning, as the train doesn't leave Truro until 4:30pm. I don't get into Brighton until half an hour before midnight. Just as well I don't have work the next day.
The beach was less crowded than normal - everyone still at work and school I suppose. I wanted to walk along the beach first of all, and then cut up onto the dunes, but the tide was coming in and the way was blocked.
It was a wild kind of day. Looking down from the dunes, the sea was a disturbance of foam and spray, white-boil and crash. The horizon blended into the sky, the grey of the day leveling everything into one disorientating mess. 'All the harmony of a murder' as some movie director once said, but I kind of liked it. The wind was relentless too; exhausting and continuous.
The sand dunes, as usual, were a labyrinth. I have walked them for years (since 1999) but the paths seem to shift and change each year. I came to a dead end following one such path today. It ended on an unsafe crag looking down over more unsafe crags. The thought of all these unsafe crags made mostly of sand unsettled me. The wind swept through the grasses, and the grasses kept sweeping over the paths, making them even harder to discern.
I remembered walking here with Misty, and before that, not last decade but the decade before, with Bracken. Dogs passed to memory, ghosts of old walks. I still remember Bracken's blue lead.
As I made my way further into the dunes, a sense of pleasing solitude came down -for a while anyway. The relief of being away from other people! I find the constant presence of other people to be quite exhausting - in Brighton -as with all towns and cities I suppose - there is always the presence of other people hanging in the air. Little wonder I am so fond of my late night walks - the only time it seems possible to feel a sense of solitude in Brighton.
I found St Piran's cross, and took my usual self portrait with the cross in the background. I used to think it made me look as if I was in a doom metal album shot - a lost Black Sabbath album cover perhaps, but someone pointed out that it did look like some kind of Christian rock promo poster instead. I really should compile them all together in one place. I think I am missing one photograph from the last five years or so. Line therm all up and watch myself growing older, from my mid-thirties to my approach into middle age.
Shortly after St Piran's Cross, the usual melee of dog walkers and old people and couples seemed to appear, like zombies, out of nowhere, and the spell of solitude was broken.
I headed back home and watched a programme on quantum physics with Dad.

Tuesday 20 December 2011

Horror of the Opticians

The room in the opticians is dark. I'm resting on my head on some futuristic / medieval fusion device. A bright light is shone in my eyes. The optician says she is nearly finished. For some bizarre reason, all I can think of is whether or not Nazi doctors were so polite to their victims. This gets me thinking about Nazi optical experiments. My lips go dry and I begin to feel ill. I wish I hadn't started thinking of war atrocities.
I really dislike the opticians, well going to the opticians. The experience of being at the opticians. Not the opticians personally of course. I don't really like any medical procedure in fact. All medical authorities are there to be feared. Opticians used to be exempt from this category for some reason, but the mixture of eyes and machines, and those machines going close to the eyes... What was I thinking? They immediately had to be included in the 'medical procedures to be afraid of' list.
I think its also the possibility that, at the end of the eye test, the optician might say 'we need to send you for further tests. There are certain irregularities that need to be looked at' that is the greatest fear. Blindness. Some kind of eye-plague. Maybe they can see into the brain itself and view some malady lurking there. Brain fever. Brain plague. The would certainly require further tests.
As it turned out my eyes were fine, my left eye has changed slightly, my right hardly. The astigmatism is largely unchanged.
Should get my glasses in two weeks time.
Only two years until me next eye-test and I go through the whole thing again.

Monday 19 December 2011

Train-Sleep and Polar Lamps

Despite some great intention to walk up the Old Shoreham Road in the pre-dawn darkness of this morning on the way to Brighton train station, I ended up catching the bus from halfway down Cromwell Road. This was due mainly to the iciness of the ground, thanks to an overnight frost. Each step painfully measured and slow. A fear of losing my balance and falling. This will be my fear when I am elderly. My old age will be shadowed with the fear of broken bones. The thought of descending the hill from Seven Dials to the train station was not one I relished. Anyway, if I caught the bus, I would have time for a coffee at the station.
The early morning streets were surprisingly busy, and the station even more so. It was only about 6:45am when I arrived. I queued up for a 'large coffee' while a cross Irish man behind the counter shouted at people behind me to 'use the down till!' (whatever that meant) as the one I was at was closing.
With my (very large) coffee I wandered back onto the concourse, listening to some ridiculous death metal album on my headphones ('Horrorhammer' by Abscess). There certainly were a lot of people about.
I looked up at the board at the 'cancelled train' and the 'severe delays' notices, and listened to the message about a 'broken train at Haywards Heath', which meant no trains going to where I wanted to be until it was removed. My heart sank.
As happened I made it to Reading with five minutes before my connection to Cornwall - but with no time to look for old horror comics in junk shops.
I spent most of my time on the four hour train journey to Cornwall drifting through train-sleep. Jarring dream-jags falling in line with the carriage rhythm, glimpses of grey countryside passing by, an anonymous landscape of brown fields and sheep and winding icy rivers...
When I alighted from the train at Truro it was raining, the kind of rain that only Cornwall can do; bleak and despairing, freezing and exhausting. The sky was the grey of prisons on January afternoons. The air tasted downtrodden.
Spent most of the afternoon sleeping.
As night fell, which seems later than in Brighton, I noticed that the bulbs in the streetlamp on my parents street had changed. Instead of the classic orange, they were now bars of spectral, icy blue, street lamps in an imagined Scandinavian country. Out of the kitchen window I looked down onto the rest of Perranporth - icy blue street lights everywhere. It seems all the orange ones have been replaced. The colour of these new lamps seem almost arctic, all snow-blindness and sharpness like polar bears distilled into fatal jewels.
Makes it seem like a slightly different town.

5:54am: A Dark and Listening Geography

5:54am.
Dead silence.
There is a spectral cold in this hour that is hard to describe, something clear any icy and all encompassing. An Arctic wave, a bathe in a December lake. A sense of stillness too, an utter secret stillness. I might be the only one awake in the world now, except I am extraordinarily tired. I check my tickets; in an envelope in my wallet. I sip my half full cup of tea.
Only minutes till I join that most secret of landscapes, most private of times, that haunted hour (or haunted hours) before dawn. I can almost hear the silence of the streets between here and Brighton Station, a dark and listening geography unleavened by the cries of seagulls or people passing by.
Except ghosts of course.
I imagine there will be plenty of ghosts.
5:59am

Postcard from the Small Hours

Nearly half past midnight. I'm up at 5:00am, so I really should get to bed. Just waiting for my iPod to sync, and then a short four hours sleep, and then an incredibly early waking. Maybe I should make it 5:30, but I just want enough time to make sure I have everything... now where did I put those train tickets? I know I had them this morning...
Deep winter cold tonight. Sat here cross-legged on the floor of my room shivering in a t-shirt. Pile of horror comics to my left and right. My old laptop humming as albums I've are put onto the i-pod; Abscess, Candlemass, Nina Nastasia... Feels like an old winter tonight. One of my old winters I mean, referring to when I was a student and staying up into the black as pitch small hours was a regular occurrence.Seasons of slowly creeping insomnia, sometimes I would feel trapped in the cycle of the small hours. Had to set my alarm if I was to get up anywhere before 2:00pm.
'Syncing iPod. Do not disconnect'
Nearly done now I think; 'copying 44 of 165'.
Hope I remember everything in the morning.
Racing nightfall across the country - and I should arrive well before twilight, at about 2:30pm. Will be strange without Misty there to greet me, a sad dog-shaped absence.
'iPod sync is complete'.
Well, time for sleep.
When I leave the house, dawn will still be a couple of hours away. Actually, when I leave Brighton, it will still be dark, and we're still a couple of days away from the winter equinox.

Sunday 18 December 2011

Night Before Travelling Back

Checking train times for the return journey to Cornwall tomorrow. Back into that annual past, though I will be back before Christmas this year though to spend it with Em. Leaving at some ridiculously early hour tomorrow morning - to ensure I will not be late. 7:00am or thereabouts. It will still be dark, and I'll see Brighton Station plunged into that lightless sea before a winter dawn. The first time since I would have seen it in morning darkness since the petrol station days, as opposed to a night-darkness, which I see it in quite often. The qualities of the darkness are quite different. Morning-darkness is sharp and fresh and feels like ice-cubes and dog walks.
Failed to buy a new and exciting book to read on the train journey. Perhaps this is as well for books bought solely to read on train journeys never work and are never finished. I paid a pound for a book called 'Visits from the Drowned Girl' (by Steven Sherrill. The title sounds like something I might call one of my posts. Read a few pages. Seems okay so far. Good enough for a train journey. Probably will spend most of my time looking out of the window anyway.
I'll have an hour to kill in Reading - the last time this happened, back in May 2010, within five minutes of leaving the station I found a horror comic and needed a cigarette. I hope I'll repeat the former but not the latter. I'll have a coffee instead.
Train journeys - like many other things involving any kind of rules and regulations - always make me slightly nervous. What if I have the wrong tickets? What if I miss my connection? What if I can't find a seat? There is always some background fear that I might 'get into trouble' with some kind of authority for some as yet undefined crime or misdemeanor.
Well I suppose I should throw a few things in my bag (that is falling apart) and prepare for my 5:00am wake up call.
I might pass by the petrol station on my walk into town, pretend I'm working there again like the last five years haven't happened.

That Damn Fox still Haunts my Dreams

I woke sometimes in the small hours last night and, as is so often the case, needed the toilet. After picking my way across the dark clutter of my floor, I got to my door and prepared to open it. I paused - what would happen if I opened the door and a fox was standing there on it's hind legs wearing a top hat? I opened the door - there was no fox standing upright wearing a top hat, but I was very glad to get back to bed after relieving myself.
That image - one which occurs to me regularly when I wake in the dead hours of the night, comes -originally- from an experience recounted in 'Conversations and Caravansari' by Richard Curle. The story was discussed in 'The Big Grey Man of Macdhui' by Affleck Grey which I was reading on holiday in Scotland, the summer of six years ago.
The story -allegedly true but obviously only a nightmare- recounts how one winter, when he was a child and living in Scotland, the author woke from sleep at 'about two in the morning' in a 'rather isolated' room in the house he had lived in since he had been born. Wide awake, he lies there in his bed, watching a swaying tree branch outside of his window. He suddenly becomes aware of slow footsteps approaching the back of the house 'ominous in their leisurely tread'. He hears the sound of these slow footsteps in the courtyard below - despite the fact that it was locked every night - then, with growing horror, actually inside the house itself. He hears these footsteps 'on the flagstones of the lower passage' and 'with a kind of fatal foreknowledge... on the back staircase'. As he knew the house so well he could trace the journey of the intruder; 'they reached the top of the stairs, turned sharp left, then sharp left again, descended a few steps, approached the door of the room leading to his room, and finally stopped at his own door'. Affleck Gray now quotes directly from Curle himself;

'By this time I was sitting up in bed with my eyes glued to the door and with horror in my heart. The handle turned and in the opening stood a creature with the face of a fox, which walked on its hind legs. It was dressed in some sort of way and, would you credit it, wore a top hat, which added to its appearance an indescribably macabre touch... It gazed at me with a fixed rather than a malign expression but did not speak. I shouted out, 'Go away!' - how well I remember the exact words! - and it turned around and went away. I heard its steps follow, in retreat, the precise route they had followed before, unhurried, and steady as ever, until at last they died out on the road leading to the woods'.

The whole thing is rather obviously a nightmare, elaborate as it is, and yet, I find something so utterly spooky about the whole tale. It is the thing I think about most when I wake alone in the small hours, with the wind blowing outside (well, that and the ghosts of Victorian servants with luminous, consumptive stares). The central image, of the fox on its hind legs seems more a comical than a nightmarish one - particularly with the addition of the top hat, but for me - as a ghost story, it somehow works.
I think it works so well (for me anyway) with the setting, of that lonely country house, that lonely room, the juxtaposition of the warm bed and the wintry landscape outside. Through the narrators's experience of sound (the footsteps) we map out the physical surroundings, 'the lower passage' and 'the back stairs'. Who hasn't woken in the night when a child and been convinced that something dreadful is coming closer?
The actual appearance of the fox - the nightmare revealed - is startling and unexpected. There is no rationality for its appearance. If the figure was of a Victorian servant (perhaps with staring eyes) it would make sense, large houses have servants, but why a fox? Why walking on its hind legs? Why a hat? Such layers of irrationality only add to the tale, pointing, if we are to invest any belief in the text - even as a work of fiction - to the idea that the underlying currents of the universe are anything but what we would consider 'sane'; the universe as mental illness. The even more frightening corollary to this might be the questioning as to what would be healthy and sane - if the rest of the universe is so disturbed, then surely it would point to us (the readers) being wrong, that we would in fact be the spiritually ill?
The haunted, now the haunters.
Then there is that final image, of the footsteps fading away on the path back into the woods, the intimation being that this is where the fox originated from.
I cannot help but wonder if the author ventured into these woods in summer, whether or not the image of the fox bothered any future dreams. Did he talk about it? Did the image of the fox occur to him when he woke in future small hours?
As I said before, the central image is absurd and almost comical. I'm not sure why it works so well - for me anyway. Perhaps it was because I first read the story in a remote farmhouse in Scotland, surrounded by a countryside I found both beguiling and unnerving? It was just past midsummer, and the nights only lasted a few hours. This gave everything a strange disorienting sheen to them. I remember waking in the early morning once with the sun bright and shining and the wind blowing. Looking out through my window I could see a path leading across the fields to a small wood. The wind pushed and shoved the thick leaves of the wood, a great voice in the silence of 5:00am. Everything was unreal and beautiful and unnerving.
Back in Brighton I would tell the tale of the fox to friends. Some found it funny and not remotely spooky. Others did. I remember telling one friend whom I then lost contact with for a few years. When we met up again, one of the first things he said to me was 'you know, that damn fox still haunts my dreams'.
So, looks like I'm not the only one then.

Saturday 17 December 2011

These Tarot Cards are Broken, the White Days Remain Undivined

Been thinking about the White Days a lot lately.
They come in spring time mostly, if not exclusively, and can only be summed up by disparate images rather than precise definitions. White Days, so called because of the colour of the sky and also their internal colour, are almost always remembered rather than experienced. While they are happening they are so vague and soporific they are barely even recognised.
Only later on, you realise, like in a ghost story, that you were being followed.
Let me shuffle a pack of White Days tarot cards, arcana of these disparate images, make love to random patterns of post-cognitive divination with crossed wire coat hangars over hidden rivers, a mill-stream shuffle, waking flailing in mid-dream, small hours jolt, but its only the afternoon, shuffle, shuffle, shuffle, spread the cards, here goes.
-lying on my bed, open window against the Sunday skies, breeze a few degrees too cold to be pleasant, but it was sunny yesterday, first sunny days of spring, and I'm trying to convince myself its summer, so keep the window open, and I'll turn into my room, and pretend I can get warm-
-this is my grandparents house in Stone in Worcestershire, or at least a recreated version of it, because I'm an adolescent here, and I was never a teenager when I lived here. Up the slope of the garden there is a line of dark trees, and beyond that a field, sloping up to a countryside haunted by poplars and woodland-
-there's a church on the hill. Church spire Sundays. Deep chime of the bell. Behind the church a wood, and in the wood a river, water running over bricks and stone, each sharp as something factory made. I remember taking the dogs here once. White dog for a white skies day, and Mum said, shen she was a kid she would come here, into the spinney-
Not a good hand. I can't see anything.
Remember these days from when I lived in Worcester. Essays unwritten and the sky tall and narrow and behind the white dashes of sun, more like a broken electrical circuit than a star. A cold would seem to rise from the river, and there would be a listless dreaminess about everything. Something too open and too vast and too all encompassing. Oh where shall I go? Ross stoned in his small room at the back of the house on London Road, and in the dark uncosy cavern of the basement living room, Joe and Paul and maybe Tony. Will I wonder into town, up the stairs, through the thick soup of the hallway, all dust and virus?
A better image for the white days came when I had left Worcester and was working at the petrol station.
I don't know where this image came from. I probably wrote it down before.
Here it is again anyway.
A man wakes in the cathedral gardens of Worcester Cathedral. There were benches set in alcoves in crumbling stone walls, part, perhaps of some larger structure, or maybe my memory falters at this point. A man wakes anyway, looks out onto the gardens. A small orchard, blossom on the ground, the sky broiling, and, of course, white. Though this white has all the texture of something significantly darker. There is a certain shadow about the day. The orchard is dark in the gloom of the too-tall cathedral building. The man who has just awoken knows something. That someone - at the instant he woke - has only just left the gardens and who has been watching him as he slept. The man now watches the gardens, watches the green shadow darkness of the corner where the figure -he thinks- has just departed for. There is no-one there. Just that absence.
What could be more frightening than opening a room onto a corridor at night anbd finding it empty?

Huddled on the sofa late on Sunday night. Rainy Sunday night. A room in a student house in some city where you didn't stay long. Somewhere like Southampton, or maybe Bristol. Hungover day slipping down into evening. Few drops of rain. Icy-cold rain. Darkening strips of cloud, or rather, the clouds themselves are darkening.
(Think: on the edges of woods somewhere, long grasses are blowing in a breeze that no-one hears)
Fool yourself (or yourselves, you're not alone here) with cups of tea and toast and food that requires no effort. Toast and biscuits, a dinner for tea, a desolate and somehow depressing pack of salt and vinegar crisps. An advert comes on the television at midnight (or thereabouts, and remember you don't have to up for work or school or college the next day) and the adverts sets up an echo, a resonance, in you. Something about the music and the images - shots of countryside that make you nostalgic and troubled, with background music that makes you remember odd dislocated memories; Salad cream with salad on Sunday nights, Songs of Praise on a lumpy 1970s television set and puddles on the paving stones in the garden of your grandfathers house. The next day you cannot remember what the advert was offering, and you begin to think you may have fallen asleep on that ragged sofa and dreamt it all.
The sofa is not new and you wonder where it came from.

The sound of distant cars on a hill.
At night, watching the poplars on the horizon, and the dark blurs of woodland beyond.
A track through a field pitted with rain pools.

Written After Four Pints in The Evening Star

1:20am. Back from the Evening Star. Slightly, well... Not exactly drunk - or even really merry. Just not entirely sober.
Cold outside. I mean really cold., Spectral icy snow painful cold. But no snow. Leather jacket not warm enough.
At the Evening Star:
Weird vibe. Some altercation in the toilets between ageing middle aged men. Lots of other men took it very seriously. They all had grey hair and looked slightly surprised that they were in a 'toilet incident'. One of the men was seen crying at the table later on. The manager of the Star said that 'one of the men' had said 'something' to 'someone else' and that 'it had been taken the wrong way'.
At some point somebody smashed one of the windows of the pub. Fractured it anyway. Didn't see what happened. Everyone turned around to look at the smashed window.
Somebody accidentally spilled a pint on Al's legs.
Doctor Occult turned up.
Greg turned up.
Chloe sang Kate Bush songs (she has a very good voice).
Claire came from a works do.
Tony looked very cool in a hat.
Jo-Jo and Seamus were there.
Andy came from a works do.
Etc etc.
My voice was weird because I have a cough.
Outside a boy fell over. We had left the pub and were preparing to head home. Drunk-slipped up. Face down on the pavement. Crowd of us helped him up but he began to cry. Poor boy. How old? -Fifteen? Sixteen? Said he ha to get back to Worthing.
Al and Claire said they would see him to the station.
Andy, Ben and myself caught the bus back.
Passed by Andy's old house. Light on. Someone there.
Living in the old capsule.
Home now.
Andy in his room.
Asleep.
Am I tired?
Probably should stop writing now and go to sleep.
Cold.
Jaggedy-edge cold.
1:30am.

Friday 16 December 2011

Where the Year Starts to End

Last afternoon at work today before the Christmas holidays, which have now began.
In the boardroom at work this afternoon. Five of us in that huge space, leather chairs and emptiness. Think of all those meetings and grey suits and sharply ironed trousers that have been in there. Ghosts of high level board meetings and power point displays on the screen behind the wooden shutters. Something from a Victorian spaceship.
I am only ever in there for small meetings like the one this afternoon, so the room always feels conspicuously empty. kept glancing behind me at Brighton, a new place seen from the eighth floor - where is that church on the hill? Where are those trees? Distant hills of the Sussex Downs, dark intimations of that countryside beyond.
Sunset all subtle and gold. Catch glimpses of twilight creeping up through the streets, blue-silver flow, like water lit by moons. Go to the toilet and come back. Day gone. Twilight gone. Brighton in blackness outside. Night down in what seems seconds.
This is where the year starts to end, I think, and now I am home, work already seems a lifetime away.

Tuesday 13 December 2011

Before Sleep that Passes too Fast

A day spent freezing under two quilts and still fully dressed. Slipping in and out of dreams I can't recall, angles of outside getting darker and colder.
Andy makes a casserole, I warm up a pizza, Em and myself watch a film.
Walk Em back to the bus stop on Portland Road. Cold night - though getting milder, and the wind not as restless as last night. Out in the Mews, under the light of the lamps swinging, there is a strange sight. Some sort of Christmas decoration, but viewed through a mild cold strikes me as amusingly sinister. Hanging from the window next door three gnomes on a rope, swinging slightly in the breeze, phantom burglars, Santa's creepy thieves.
I imagined that when I returned they may be gone; 'I swear they were there though!' but I forgot to look so don't if they are or not.
The streets between the Mews and Portland Road were empty. The burnished orange of the street light seemed darker than normal, the colour of strange autumns, hallucinatory side-effects of a considerably milder cold.
The sky seems black and deep. Portland Road is empty too, and even the mini Sainsburys is quiet.
Wave Em off on the bus, walk back through the short right-angles of the suburbia to here.
Back to work tomorrow, but there will be the always-too-quick paradise of sleep first.

December Morning with Cold

Bad nights sleep last night. Strange how a cold worsens over the nocturnal hours. A slightly feverish drifting, interspersed with slight dream images of generic graphic novels (I had been reading a book on the subject before sleep). My bladder was working overtime last night, up every hour, or so it seemed. Jam the ruler in the door of my room to stop it rattling. Ignore the cat-flap tapping away down the stairs. Fall into bed and drift-sleep, sore throat and headache. Unable to breathe.
Black hour of 7:30am. Set my alarm half an hour later than normal. Cup of tea and wrap myself in my quilt. Sit on the edge of my bed, nose dripping and sinuses blocked, wondering if I should take the day off work. Maybe I'll feel better when I'm in.
Leave the house at 8:00am. The outside looks shimmery and bright, but raw too, overlaid with a purified essence of the December side of winter. Sunset red sky. Twilight won't leave this horizon. Glimpses of the workshops as I walk down the Mews; planks of wood in messy ranks, leaning against and obscuring walls. The smell of nails and woodwork class at school.
Industrial lessons, factory memory.
There's a van on Richardson Road, and beyond the van a daytime street lamp shines a dull orange against the fresh sky. Carcasses hang down from hooks at the back of the van. Decapitated animals saying here we are, here is your dinner and I don't know what animals they are because they have no heads. I imagine their pink raw scent but fortunately can't smell them as my nose is too blocked. Cheery butchers boys swings the carcasses onto their shoulders. Cold flesh on a bright morning. This is where my pork chops come from, I think, this is my dinner.
Down New Church Road and all the trees are bare now, and without leaves I notice how many branches there are. A forest of branches, bunches of branches, all bony bouquets, autumn-black ink splashes against the watercolour sky.
By the time I get to work, my nose won't stop running, and my eyes seem to want to stream, overflowing sinus-blocked rivers. Too hot and too cold, and that constant pitter-patter-clutch of a headache. After an hour of calls made difficult by a constant need to blow my nose and wipe my eyes, I admit defeat, and for the first time since I worked at the petrol station and had the flu back in 2005, I take a day off sick and come home.

Monday 12 December 2011

Message from Europe: 'Crows Feasting on Old Gates, Sky Taut and Clipped'

Head full of mild cold. Feels like the inside of my body is a few degrees too warm and my skin is a few degrees too cold. My sinuses are lightly clogged, and a Sunday-drizzle of a headache patters around my forehead. Lay in bed for an hour earlier in the grey and desolate hour between 8:00pm and 9:00pm. A restless time to try and nap in December - too late for an afternoon snooze, and too early for a nights sleep. Always that fear though of waking in the small hours with the lights still on and that sense of utter disorientation that must always accompany an awakening from an unexpected sleep.
Restless out there tonight, a jaggedy wind has been up for hours; rain-splash, black hills dream. Watch the lamps in the Mews swing across the courtyard. Yellow light on uneven stones. No-one ever down there.
The wind is in here too. As I tried to sleep in that desolate hour, I was continually disturbed by the door of my room rattling and the cat flap banging. In the hallway the lampshade swung back and forth like some poltergeist incident.
Earlier, Andy tells he how he heard the footsteps again. The ghosts of coachmen. A tacit and unspoken agreement between us. Maybe if we can convince ourselves the place is haunted it will be haunted. Why do we want a haunted place so much? Won't seem such a good idea when I'll wake unexpectedly in the small hours alone in the flat though. We begin to experiment on the capsule instead of the capsule experimenting on us. No single phantasm here, no one surviving echo or continuing resonance of personality caught on the walls and the restless door of my room. What would be here would be a fragment of all coachmen, a spectre of all transient and equine journeys. I wonder what this flat was like then - what dreams dreamt in my room on Victorian Sundays and Edwardian afternoons?
I imagine a dark place - slatted windows made of autumn-brown wood and the glass in the frames warped like the myth of liquid they are rumoured to be.
The cat-flap goes again.
Earlier on - somewhere between that uneasy sleep and a bath my hair is still wet from - the cat-flap made such a noise it really did sound like someone was trying to get in the flat, a burglar alarm, the wind stealing quiet from the stairs.
I'm chatting to Joe on Facebook while writing this, a long thread passed back and forth from Poland, where he is, to here, where I am, in the Mews. His words from over the sea, from that dark and imagined Europe; '...have to go to bed... tired... beeping mobile... early morning winter sky... crows feasting on cold gates... sky taut and clipped... my legs cold in trousers... walking...' I send another message to Joe that his words are now in Bridge 39.
Wind dies down out there, a mumble now. My typing on the keyboard sets up a rattle of its own on the table, noise like a miniature train set, or tiny shrunken footsteps.

Dawn-light Fraction

Sat on my bed.
More pre-dawn blackness outside, though, truth be told, there is a little fraction of pale blue light between the curtains.
The colour of cold and wintry schooldays. I remember that colour from other mornings like this too; autumn 1997 for example, London Road, Worcester, when the telephone in the hallway rang. Al and myself roused from our respective beds, unaccountably excited at the thought of some kind of 'emergency call' (It turned out to be Tim's girlfriend, acting as an alarm clock.)
Something about being up before it is light that makes me want to work in a factory, some blast furnace somewhere, a place full of smoke and steam and brick, perhaps in a wood, or certainly surrounded by bare looking trees anyway. The place would taste of snow and raw December sunsets, and there would be a constant soundtrack of noise; metal wheels on railway tracks, machine-screech, men-cries, the noise of old black and white photographs.
That fraction of pale blue light has grown stronger now. Despite this it is still a weak light, a light that seems exhausted and barely conscious. I shall watch the light on the sea from work, watch it make the waves foamy and cold, until the early night and the sea will just be a blackness and I can see no more.

Sunday 11 December 2011

The Smell of Clean laundry and the Autumn of 1987


A certain smell of clean laundry seems to hold within in a taste of the autumn of 1987. I'm not sure why this is, or why the smell of clean laundry -this past month or so only- brings back such a strong resonance of that time.
There is very little of importance connected with that time - I was fifteen years old, in the final year of my GCSEs, living in Ickenham in West London, and that's about it really. If I concentrate on that clean laundry smell (I did some laundry washing this afternoon) further and deeper details come to mind.
I remember the October half term holiday because my cousins John and Ann were staying, which necessitated what seemed to be lots of trips to London. I remember going with John into 'Shades the Heavy Metal Specialists' down a backstreet of Soho, and in that darkened interior buying an album called 'At the Gates of Damnation' by a forgotten thrash band called Deathwish. The album was one of the first to be released on some totally forgotten label. As a promotional device, the album came with a free tape with other forgotten bands on some of whom were also signed to that forgotten label; Virus, Necronomicon, Deliverance... One band on the tape had a song called 'The Boneless Ones'. I remember the singer having a strong Welsh accent, I don't know why.
I was also quite into role playing games at the time, most notably 'Call of Cthulhu'. Crouched in the school library, hidden behind little used shelves rolling dice with Craige and Flea and David, whom always insisted on calling it 'Call of Kafoo'. I didn't spend that much time actually playing these role playing games, as reading about them was much more fun. 'White Dwarf' magazine every month, painting Citadel Miniatures in my room.
I remember over that half term I sent off for both packs of Top Trumps Horror Cards. I had them both when I was a kid, and I remember trying desperately to remember the names of all the cards, that strange moment of triumph when I recalled one, plucked out of memory; 'High-Priestess of Zoltan'.
The cards came on the day that John and Ann left. I think it was a Saturday. I didn't hear them go as they left early in the morning - John was staying in my room on the spare bed. I remember the strangeness of waking up to that spare bed, the disturbed bed clothes thrown back, and stranger that I had slept through their going into their own future, their own lives.
When I think about it it was the last time I saw either of them.
I don't know why the clean laundry smell reminds me of that time, nor why it has only done so for the past few weeks.
Anyway, I have work tomorrow.
A cup of tea then bed.

House of Footsteps

Before I left for Em's last night, Andy and myself were talking; 'It only happens when you're not here. The door of your room keeps rattling'. It is a very rattly flat we live in. The doors are not snug in their frames, and there is the cat-flap too, which, despite Andy's best efforts with masking tape, we are unable to have shut properly. 'Sometimes that cat-flap sounds like someone coming up the stairs'.
Moment frozen, for some reason. In the kitchen, comfy yellow light, and I have to go outside. I'm sat on one of the chairs and Andy is bustling about.
Yes, I've had that too, the cat-flap rustling, and it sounds exactly like someone coming up the stairs. When I've been alone in the flat, the noise has so perturbed me that I have approached the landing cautiously, glanced down, and nothing of course. The frosted glass of the front door. Twilight fragments and angles of the Mews outside.
The steep and narrow stairs lead straight up and into a hallway that splits the flat in two. On the left hand side the living room and my room, and the right Andy's room, the bathroom and the kitchen. For some reason this stairway corridor reminds me of a light blue, the shade of a rainy pre-twilight daydream.
Something about living in an old place though. Something undefined and indescribable. A feeling of falling perhaps, a not unpleasant sensation of sinking through water. All those imagined years, all those imagined histories.
What is now the workshops below us - the carpenters and furniture makers - was at one time stables, these flats above used as accommodation for the coach men. Old black and white photographs from the 1800s, grainy things showing the church and the Mews, in a bleak landscape devoid of anything but snow-bleach fields and a threatening, burdened distance.
Came back this afternoon, with a narrow coffin-white cabinet I found on the streets last night. Andy tells me how he stayed up late last night -2:30am - but was woken this morning at 9:00am, by the door of my room rattling. He goes on to say that as he lay there listening, he became convinced that there was the sound of footsteps in my room, of someone shuffling about. I switch the light on in my room, wait for the light bulb to warm up. Bleak uncomfortable shadows. 'Exactly like someone moving about'.
I'm alone in the house now, and there is that feeling about it, an expectancy in the architecture, in the cold flow of the kitchen and the stairs. A radio turned on low in another room, but when you open the door, you remember there is no radio there.
The door rattles in the frame. Rumours of a door opening.
I wait for the sound of footsteps even though I am alone here.

Saturday 10 December 2011

Morning after a Works Dinner

Walked back home last night by the sea. Too much wine and one expensive awful lager. Left the party as it was getting going - afraid of a hangover for the Saturday shift. Left them all in the Metropole - a violet coloured Brighton Overlook, all long corridors and labyrinthine wallpaper. A man stopped me on one corridor; 'you cannot get out this way, you must go back'.
Foamy sea and the promenade was empty, and I cannot remember the man in the newsagents by the Neptune but am glad I bought a can of diet coke from him. Waiting for a shower now, and outside there is the sound of a bird, lost and heavy in still grey light.

Thursday 8 December 2011

Cold Day, Deep in Coma

Sat in the living room.
The curtains are open - a rarity for the morning - I presume Andy has been up already and opened them before he left for work.
The light outside is grey and heavy. The sky seems full of snow, full of thick and serious clouds. The coldness of the air is everywhere, a penetrating and spectral state.
I watch one of the lamps strung across the Mews, drifting in the breeze. Even the movement looks cold.
Across the roofs of the houses opposite I see the church spire, a silhouetted structure reaching up to a needle sharp peak.
A seagull passes by, a shadow only.
Everything feels deep in coma.

Wednesday 7 December 2011

White with the Weather of Old Centuries

As well as my maternal grandparents' house at Stone in Worcestershire, and my paternal grandparents' house in Wolverhampton, I also knew a third grandparents' house too. This house belonged to my paternal great-grandparents, whom I was lucky enough to know until I was around ten years old.. So as not to get them confused with my maternal grandparents (Nanny and Grandad Stone) or my paternal grandparents (Nanny and Grandad Mole) my great-grandparents were designated as 'Little Nan and Little Grandad'. Little Grandad, I mostly remember as sat watching the boxing - or maybe the horse racing. I remember a mole on his face, a liver spot? Is that what they're called? People don't seem to have them these days. Little Grandad fought in the first world war, though I didn't know this until the last year or so when Dad told me. Little Nan I remember as being indescribably Victorian. An echo from the century before, all steamy horse mornings and gas lamps, freezing cold winter mornings with flat, white unimpeachable skies. This colour only exists in old photographs that is impossible for an unremembered sky to reproduce. I remember her toothbrush, in the bathroom at the back of the kitchen. Strangely curved, it was like a device from another world entirely and used to fascinate me. I do not remember why they were designated as 'little' Nan and Grandad. Perhaps they were small, but I was small too, and I do not remember them being smaller than any other grandparents, maternal or paternal.
It is their house that concerns me here. The interior geography of grandparents' houses are ones that haunt our childhoods and our memories, unreliable or otherwise, of those childhoods. Places of wonder and spookiness perhaps, of holidays maybe -Christmas, or summer, certainly of being taken out of the normal routine of school and homework and weekends anyway.
My great grandparents lived in a terraced house in Handsworth in Birmingham. I remember the streets there as full of terraced housing, all exactly identical to each other. The weather in Handsworth I remember as always being exactly the same; grey and cold - uncomfortable but not freezing, a winter weather and also a non-weather too, a weather perhaps from a previous century.
I have always found terraced houses to be terribly mysterious. From the outside they give nothing away. Only one face can be seen. No sides, no backs. No intimation of what the back garden might be like. Inside a terraced house, apart from the rooms at the front of the house, you feel far removed from the street, in a secret kingdom, just back from the everyday.
At my great-grandparents house, the front room was mysterious too. Vague images of silent furniture, a wooden table. That same white Victorian light. Perhaps this was my great uncle Frances' room, for when he had friends over. He lived in that same house all his life, until he died only a few years ago now. For some reason, I don't connect him that much with the house.
When we went over we would sit in the cramped but cosy living room out the back. A small television was in the corner, around which armchairs and sofas were crowded. Despite the wintriness of my memories of their house, I remember that room as deeply autumnal, all browns and shadows and afternoons. Next to the window was a tiny room that looked out onto the long back garden. From the living room, there was a kitchen, and on the other side of the kitchen a bathroom where that strange curved toothbrush lay. I think Dad took me into that garden once. I remember it as being a long, slightly ragged garden - grass growing through cracked paving stone, a slightly ramshackle pond. Maybe anyway. Perhaps I have dreamt it all.
Far more mysterious was upstairs. You accessed the upstairs in the house by a door in the living room. The upstairs would fascinate me, a dark geography of unexplored rooms, and perhaps other stairways, maybe a series of interconnected attics, a place of shadows and beds and hours I never saw. In those long afternoons there, I would often think of that mysterious, remote upstairs land. I could not possibly imagine what it would be like up there. The fact that there was a whole other level to the house fascinated me, the fact that it had been there through all those years and all those visits and all those days out and I had never seen it.
Dad took me up there once and I can't remember a thing about it, except that the stairs were narrow and steep, but I think I only remember that because because I want them to be narrow and steep.
I have another vague memory I attach to that house. One of those ridiculously early memories that make no sense as to what is being remembered or why it has lodged in the memory. Perhaps it is not a single memory but a collision, a collusion of different memories, attached to each other because otherwise they would be too fragile and small and insignificant to survive.
Rain.
I remember rain. The only time I remember any weather connected to the house other than that wintry whiteness. I remember a dark living room and I remember a comic. It was something like TV21 or Countdown, one of those old British comics that had two page comic strips based on the television series of the era. It was a Doctor Who comic strip starring Tom Baker. I remember an orange tinge to the colour of the illustrations.
That's all this memory consists of; rain, an old Doctor Who comic strip and a dark (and in my memory empty) living room in Handsworth.
I wonder who lives there now, if the house even still exists.
Maybe, after great uncle Frances' death, it has remained empty, boarded up and dilapidated, and is known to other peoples' grandchildren visiting their own grandparents and great grandparents. An empty house has a great hold over the minds of imaginative children, particularly terraced houses in an area of town where the skies are white with the weather of old centuries.
Maybe that weather will last them years as well.

The Inevitable Disintegration of Devices

Devices and object continue to deteriorate.
my laptop is incredibly slow (again), an aching crawl from Facebook to Bridge 39.
My glasses get worse. The scratches on both lenses turning the world into a kind of carnivorous fog that seems to eat things up.
My i-pod stops playing ten or eleven times on each song it plays, necessitating having to hold the thing continually so I can press play again. A constant interruption in the flow of the songs...
When I turn on the television there are rather alarming cracking noises coming from somewhere inside the structure.
The DVD player makes annoying groaning and whirring noises during the playing of a disc.
Devices break down of course, but why are they all happening at once?

Tuesday 6 December 2011

Fragment of an Imagined Kitchen

Sat drinking a post-work half-pint of Doombar in the Duke of Norfolk with Em. It's about 8:00pm. Another late shift, then, after work, looking around the Jamie Oliver branded shop down Western Road, looking for Christmas presents. I admire the packaging, and wonder if rubbing duck fat on yourself would keep you warm in the snow.
The dark interior of the Duke of Norfolk, and I sit with my back to the rest of the pub. In the other half, I hear a rowdy group of drinkers who have long lost any sense of goodwill and are spiralling quickly into an ugly, shifty, nasty place. They have accents that sound like someone taking the piss out of Eastenders. I wonder why the barman doesn't tell them to be quiet, but he just looks scared.
Past Em's right shoulder and out of the window, I look up the house opposite. look up at a window on the second or third floor. Just a fragment of a room, and for some reason - maybe the light - I think that it is a kitchen. I see the dark bob of a man's head, a shoulder. Both seem unconnected to each other. Floating bits of clothed bodies. A strange anatomy lesson. Does he wear glasses? I want him to, but I think my memory is providing these spectacles. The body shifts and is gone.
Where has he gone? The light in that imagined kitchen is still switched on. I still see that angle of wall, of ceiling. Rare joints of architecture in this abstraction of an evening butcher. Maybe there is something in the oven and he has left it there to cook or warm up. Maybe he stands in the doorway of a room into a living area, talking to someone else whom I imagine is sitting down. I imagine them to be students, perhaps studying science or enginerring. I don't know why.
These imagined people with their imagined dinners and imagined conversations. They have no idea I am watching a fragment of their window, wandering on their lives, as deep and rich and mysterious as anyone else's.
I am at home now sat in the living room, the television playing some television movie about a haunted submarine I am not watching. I wonder if that kitchen is now dark, all food eaten, all conversations done.
I imagine someone in that darkened window looking down into the Duke of Norfolk where I sit, imagining someone looking back up at them, and here I am halfway across town writing about them both.

Waiting for the Bath Water to Heat Up

It is quite amazing how cold it has got so quickly. Trying to sleep last night and nearly shivering under two duvets. Creeping cold that sinks into everything. The cold didn't seem to affect my dreams though - or maybe it did as I dreamt partly about summer. I had returned to a slightly altered Cornwall where there were adverts for a peculiar kind of summer holiday. A firm was offering 'capsule holidays', which were a kind of hostel, where you got a 'miniature hotel' in a tiny glass room.
Waiting for the water to heat up for the bath (I'm not in till 11:00am) and hoping that the gas doesn't run out. Drifting in hot water with a cup of tea before leaving for work at 10:00am is the one balm for another week of late shifts. I've only been back to work a day and my week off feels like a lifetime ago.

Monday 5 December 2011

My Right Eye Watches the World through a Scratched Lens

A spectral cold, like thoughts of deep space. Like memories of snow. Walking to work, down Western Road, past the clock tower and the newsagents, and everything feeling frozen. No, not frozen really. Near enough to be reminded of things freezing though.
I could imagine stars hanging in the petrified air.
The sea looked unstable, as if it might shift and pulse, change itself into another geometry entirely. Looked like a lion with the colourings of a wolf. A bruised sky above the curve of the France-near horizon. i could not imagine boats sailing on that sea.
Shifty untrustworthy water.
The lenses of my glasses continue to deteriorate. The right lens is the worst, a fog of tiny miniscule scratches obscure everything I try to see. I don't know where the scratches came from. I imagine the claws of a miniature cat, scrabbling against glass, or some spectacle of a virus contracted from an attic full of old belongings.
No antibiotics for this pane though, except perhaps for an overdue eye-test.
Catch the bus back home tonight with a spare bus ticket that Em gave me. Sat cross legged on my bed thinking about Christmas and painting and sleep. Yellow light of my room. I need a cup of tea. I see a sheep skull next to the stereo, and on the other side of the stereo, a can of deodorant.
The fire alarm has gone off.
Something must be burning in the kitchen.

Deep December Morning

7:36am.
When I first got up this morning at 7:00am, it was pitch black outside. A week off work and it feels we're a season later. When I had had my shower though, the light was industrial-grey outside. the first time I've seen that winter shade of morning. From the platforms of tube stations I imagine commuters watching the London horizons for that pinkish strip of twilight that will be there until nightfall. Twilight never leaves a winters day. It was twenty years ago since I first thought that, when I used to catch the tube to college in Harrow everyday.
Sat on my bed now listening to the silence of the morning. There is a factory-like humming somewhere - possibly something next door. There is the occasional slamming and opening of a car door. Nothing else. Not this early anyway.
Twenty minutes now until I leave for work, back along New Church Road, back along Western Road, back to work, back to the call centre.
My week off, I'm sure, only lasted five minutes.

Sunday 4 December 2011

Ghost-Summer

'Sometimes, in the depths of winter, I suddenly feel as if it were autumn or spring...'
-taken from 'The Great Shadow' by Mario De Sa-Carneiro

Lying on my bed earlier, drifting into sleep in the new - but still ancient- night. I thought I would sleep, but too nervous of sleeping away the evening and hence wasting the last day of my holiday, I just drifted instead.
A ghost-summer occurred to me, the feeling of a season that is not here. Not really summer, but late spring - very late spring. As I closed my eyes I could smell the air, that electric promise of meadows at night. I remember Jen once said to me that the smell was of France after nightfall. Could see the streets - of some nameless and imagined town - probably a mixture of places; Worcester, Uxbridge, Ickenham, Forres... The days I was imagining were those late-Spring grey days. White skies that drift into dreamy evenings. Perhaps a late sun making everything hazy and unreal and the sound of insects and birds. Telegraph poles crooked against the strange-sky blue, hedges and the rumours that something wonderful is about to happen... but never does. The time of year, for some reason, that I always associate with doom metal bands like Count Raven, Place of Skulls, Electric Wizard, Paul Chain, and Saint Vitus. I could picture myself lying on a bed with the window open to evening birdsong and churchyard afternoons... a cold breeze, too cold, but warm at the same time.
The feel of the ghost summer persists now, as I sit in the kitchen writing this on the laptop, in the last few hours of my week off work, just at the very beginnings of winter.

Seagulls in the Twilight

Sat in the kitchen with the laptop, waiting for some pork chops to cook, spit and grizzle on the grill behind me, the window open to catch the smoke before the fire alarm notices.
Lying on Em's bed this morning after a sleepless night (bad beer at the bar we were at last night) listening to the seagull cries. Such a cold sound, plaintive and somehow appealing. Gloomy Sunday shores, sheltering from the rain at a fairground-deserted promenade. Orange beaks pulling mussels from the water. Little crabs, unlucky fish.
Think I'll stick to my pork chops.
Today has that unmistakeable air of winter. The muted light all white and sluggish, and a cold exhaustion in each breath. Walking back here from Em's I crossed New Church Road, and looked down the long parallel right to the vanishing point. Both sides of the road were lined by bare leafless trees, and the shade of the tarmac reflected the grey of the sky. Cold pinched faces of passers by, and me, thinking, I could sleep forever.
But I can't. Holiday is over -for two weeks anyway when I am off for Christmas- and that gallows-dread of returning to work tomorrow hangs over me. Feels like the last day of the summer holidays at school.
There is the evening though, and it is early enough not to be dark yet.
I can hear the sound seagulls in the twilight.

Saturday 3 December 2011

Snake Dream

I dreamt there was a broken snake in my room. Primary coloured and toxic looking. The room appeared to be the bedsit, or reminiscent of anyway. There was a way of fixing the snake, of joining the two halves together again. I did this, and left the snake to merge on a plate on the messy floor of my room. Later on, thinking about this, the thought of the snake recurred to me; what would happen if the snake fixed itself and I was not there? Obviously, the snake would escape and be loose in the room. I rushed back to my room. I don't know where from. The plate was empty and the snake was gone, hiding somewhere in my room. Dad was there. He drew something out from under the bed and pointed out how the snake had slid over whatever it was he was holding. There was a sticky snail-like trail over the object. There was no sign of the snake though. How was I ever going to relax in my room with a snake loose somewhere in it?

Friday 2 December 2011

All Casseroles are Haunted

A Casserole is in the oven, hopefully cooking.
This is my first attempt at cooking a casserole. If I had known it was so easy I would have done so before (cooking is not one of my strong points. We shall wait and see what it is like when it is cooked.
Despite the fact that I greatly enjoy casseroles (though haven't had one for years) there is something rather magnificently bleak about them. I'm not sure why this is. I suppose they remind me of the 1970s, a decade that despite my then-young age I remember well, a decade of serial killers in bleak northern towns, epidemic-coloured wallpaper, IRA bombings and an odd feeling of January-bleakness. At least this what comes across now when you see photographs of that time... even summer photographs of the 1970s look a bit wrong somehow, as if taken during a series of disturbing events.
Casseroles somehow manage to sum up all that strange decade's resonance.
They remind me of rainy evenings, soaked through from school and cold and uncomfortable. Nothing on the television - nothing good - probably Blue Peter or Screen Test or Record Breakers rather than the preferred choice of Grange Hill or whatever else I may have been watching at the time. I am, perhaps, in trouble at school, and this is weighing on my mind. The yellow light of the kitchen, either the one at Burnside, or the one at Southside, troubles me. Too yellow and humming with fluorescence. Too gloomy forever. Endless rain, no playing outside. Perhaps we are having casserole.
Casseroles are haunted.
I haven't tasted one in years, but that thick brown taste, delicious as it is, may make me think of dusty-dark rooms in wet winter afternoons, barely out of sleep in peeling wallpaper rooms. Narrow stairs leading up to spare rooms never used, looking out over the scrubby backs of untended gardens; rusting bikes, wheel-less wheelbarrows. All that detritus of places that belong to dreary, meaningful days.
Only half an hour and the first casserole since child will be cooked and ready to eat.

Slipping into a Gasworks Sector

Canals in London.
They slip through an inbetween region, just below the sound of the traffic and buildings. A strange place - or non-place - urban and rural simultaneously.
We leave London for the Grand Union Canal near Paddington Station, slip over bridges and under flyovers, take photographs of slightly sinister sculptures of life-size men facing each other across car-park style paving stones. The curve of bridges across cold water, leaves on skin and in the translucent body that skin covers the ghosts of objects and more leaves. A thousand remnants for a thousand past autumns. Seagulls. Pigeons.
Old and rich houses. Postcard-pretty boats with handmade home-printed posters in their windows 'SAVE LONDON'S BOATING COMMUNITY'. There are a lot of cyclists. Most have that lean, wiry air that cyclists tend to have as if they have left themselves hanging upside down in a particularly bitter wind for three days. Unlike Odin, who did similar, and gained knowledge of the runes, these cyclists gain a the power to never appear to be tired, even when cycling up steep inclines, and to make the 'ting-ting' of their bell at once both a plaintive, strangely cold sound.
The canal seems cut deep into the ground, so the landscape outside the canal remains unreachable and unknown. Gradually the canal changes, decays from a pleasant Sunday-walk place (even though it is a Thursday) to something less trustworthy, and certainly not safe, though it is hard to determine why.
There is a gasworks to our left, over a fence taller than me. The skeleton of the gasworks looks like a nightmare of a rollercoaster ride, all prison-camp aesthetic and spiky iron angles. Across the alarmingly still water (I am used to the sea remember) a large and overflowing cemetery slipped and overflowed, half hidden by trees and bushes.
I suppose it was the sight of the man burning bits of paper in a fire by the side of the canal that first began to change the atmosphere. He looked intent and did not look up as we passed by. 'It feels like we're in the middle of nowhere' Em said. After we passed another man who was gesticulating wildly to himself (though Em said he was on a hands free mobile phone) we decided to take the next bridge up 'to some shops'. By this time the canal had descended almost entirely into a sinister and unsettling region - slough-white skies reflected in cold drown-water, factory drift, murder echoes. As we climbed up the bridge to the shops, two older characters, looking like they were on the run from knife crimes in a Glasgow estate, watched us ascend. Greying temples, hard eyes, like little bits of perfectly rounded stone.
We ended up in an industrial estate. In the industrial estate there was a restaurant which was appetisingly called the 'Chinese Food Manufacturing Centre'. Hmm. Think I'll give that a miss.
It felt like we were in some kind of limbo, or maybe purgatory.
We finally made it to some shops, but these shops felt like they were the last remnants of a dying town. A little string of stores that seemed somehow to be infected with the downbeat faltering rhythm of the area. Brazilian hairdressers, Portugese newsagents. Welcome to Kensal Green. Across the road a group of puffa-jacketed hulking youths, all gangling limbs and skulking heads managed to saunter up the street in a somehow sinister fashion. 'It's just depressing' Em said. I was having visions of tourists wondering naively into knife crime areas, and was very glad when we caught the bus back to Paddington Station.
We took the canal to Camden instead. This canal, branching off from the Grand Union that took us into the sinister gasworks sector, was again set into a deep-ish cutting. Across the water this time, huge mansions, elaborate as temples, austere as mausolea, stared down at us. In the gathering twilight, I watched a gardener on one of the grassed slopes mow the lawn. The yellow lights that spilled dully from windows reminded me how late in the day and year we were.
The canal took us through the centre of London Zoo. To our left strange birds flew around a huge enclosure. People on walkways looked at Em and myself as if we were exhibits. On the other side one door on a low building had one sign saying 'GIRAFFES' and another saying 'WOMEN'.
We soon made it to Camden, and it started raining. Looking back on the canal, now deep in twilight- just verging on night - it seemed hard to believe we had just come from there, and impossible to think we would take that way back. As I said in another post, always something odd about canals.
Too much chance of wandering into the sinister enclaves of a gasworks sector.