2012

Another year done, another twelve months to be filed away for future reference.
Raining outside.
Sat in the living room with Em who is reading the paper. The lamps are on, a cup of tea is on the table, and I am tired from a long day at work, the constant rain, the wet blue-grey of this winter light and from 2012. Only a few hours left now. I can't help but view 2013 with a degree of suspicion that borders on alarm.
Put this year away anyway, and if we don't exactly start again tomorrow (who wants to always start again anyway?) then there will be the oddly comforting environs of January, a month without masks or romance, but that does have a new Voivod album...
The overtly sensitive fire alarm has gone off (dinner is cooking). I have flicked a towel up at it and the alarm has come crashing down to the floor.
Ah well - Goodbye 2012!

Reflections of Lamps

2012 begins to fold in on itself, close down, file things away from 'this year' into 'the past', gets ready for tomorrow night, not for death though - years don't die. They fade and flicker and haunt, they inhabit some distant country of nostalgia and yearning we always try to get back to (even though we've never been there, not really), but they don't die.
Time is conterminous. Lasts forever, even if we don't. 2012 will outlast us all.
It will slip away from us though, and that sad melancholic year 2012 will not belong to us any more.
Em came round earlier. There had been plans for a walk, but this is her first day off since we got back from Worcestershire, and she is now asleep on my bed, dreams in the grey shadows of my sunless room. Andy has gone back out to Tescos to get something for dinner. he went to the Homebase on the Old Shoreham Road earlier on, bought a tropical looking plant, with a braided stem. It looks like a palm tree. I can see it out of the corner of my eye, hidden behind the human size gollywog, and next to the other plant on the dark table that no-one uses except to dump stuff on.
Watch the lamps across the mews swing in the breeze. Haven't come on yet, though there is about the light a certain twilight air. The sky is grey, light faltering to nightfall. There redlections in the glass of the window of the living room lamps. In one of the windows opposite, I see a reflection of a lamp in an adjoining house. Reflection of reflections. An infinity of lamps.
The air outside is looks heavy with a cold refreshing greyness.
Welcome to January, just around the corner. Just coming home.
2013 beginning to unfold itself, and each present moment beginning to slip further away.

Three and a Half Pints Later (23 Minutes past Midnight)

They tore down the hospital, put up some new buildings. I remember this walk past St Annes Well park at night, long line of street lights... Tescos closed (why I'm waiting for some breaded fish to cook now) and I've got nowhere else to buy anything... Portland road, Clarendon Villas.... Saw Doctor Occult in the pub who looked remarkably like my nearly finished painting of him. Talking about Blood on Satans Claw with Claire's friends. Talking with Seamus about tortuously long bus journeys. Outside leaving the pub. Up past my old street. Long walk home. Night should be colder. Sleep. Sleep. And wake at 7:00am for a Saturday morning at work. Oh let it be quiet. Let my fish be cooked.

Australian Dream

In Australia. I have been lying on a patch of sloped grass somewhere in a park. I have lefy and now want to go back. Where was I? I walk across a field. At the edge of the field there is a bench that is used by street drinkers. They are all alike and dressed identically. Physically they appear to resemble human versions of humpty dumpty, and wear baseball caps. Some are on the bench, others are sprawled on the ground. They are motionless, frozen in a variety of unlikely drunk-addled positions. 

I find the patch of grassed slope and attempt to ascend. I want ti get to the exact spot I was lying before. This is ridiculous - the slope is near vertical! I see other people lying about on the slope though. I move further slong the slope and try to find a less vertiginous ascent. The shallower section of the slopes are full of too many people, all sunbathing. I eventually find a shallower way, but the way is barred by thorny bushes. I move further along, find a gap in the hedge, but then realise that, because of the intricacies of a shallow drop, I would still have to negotiate this barrier. There is no way back-

...and the alarm goes off and I wake up.

Back to Work

8:35am.

25 minutes, and I return to work. Christmas is over and we're well into those dead days between Christmas Day and New Year. I think it rained last night, though I haven't yet looked out of the window. I can't remember dreaming last night either, which is surprising. I seem to have remembered lots of dreams recent;ly.

Silent flat.

Andy stayed around Al and Claire's last night. I joined them at the Neptune for a few pints as we did on Boxing Day last year. A pub full of old men who looked slightly out of place in Brighton, slightly out of place in the 21st century. I'm sure they would have all seemed more at ease in the gloomy uneasiness of the 1970s.... though it is hard to say why. When I left the pub to come home I got soaked in a heavy driving rain. 

I ate too much fried beef, mushrooms and smoked cheese for dinner last night, and feel like I have put on two stone overnight.

Oh well.

Aftermath

I go to bed at 3:00am after staying up and drinking (various ales, cherry ciders). Or rather not bed, as I decide to sleep on the two seat sofa in my room for some reason which escapes me now, but seemed to make sense in the middle of the night. I wake while it is still dark, and decide I would much rather sleep in my own bed. I stumble over something in my room (my bed is less than two meters from my sofa) and collapse under the covers. 

I dream of Burnside, back in Kinloss. I rarely dream of Burnside now. In this dream Burnside (the square of houses reserved for the officers and their families of RAF Kinloss) was connected to something called the 'night-suburbs'. I was there with two or three other people. Burnside was completely abandoned. Empty houses shadowing in a day whose horizon was marked with a reddened sunset. In one of the houses, a number of doors - these doors were the houses themselves (I'm not sure how this worked out). The houses - all of Burnside - was, of course, haunted by some never explained force.

I wake with my alarm at 11:00am - one thing, no matter how drunk, I can be certain of, is that I will always set my alarm. I go into the living room, look at the collection of empty ale bottles on the table, Andy's half glass of port, still undrunk. I look at the top of the stereo that I had to remove because a Sonne Hagal CD got stuck, and I was unable to remove. On the table, there is the mirror from Andy's bathroom cabinet. I have no idea how that got there.

I had a cup of tea and heated myself up a vegetarian farmhouse pie. I watched a bit of The Railway Children and continued reading The Corner by David Simon, about drug takers ('fiends') in inner-city Baltimore in the 1990s. 

Christmas Evening

5:30pm Christmas Day.
Em and Andy both at work, and I am alone in the flat. Doctor Who is on the television and is making me vaguely annoyed already.
Beyond the sound of the television, and over the vague noise of voices outside, the flat has a silence. A silence that all buildings have at certain times of year - or of days. Not so much ghosts of the past (metaphoric or literal - your choice) but more like the present moment itself is feeling old. This is 2012 remembered (or imagined) a hundred years from now.
Through the gaps in the curtains, a fragment of the Mews, and I can see a window of one of the flats opposite. I can't tell whether those dark shapes are sofas or heads. The north side of the house (my room, the toilet, Andy's room) is in its always-shadow, comforting and dream-like and eerie in a redemptive way. No sun ever falls there, even in the night.
Footsteps next door, or some piece of furniture being moved perhaps. Quiet now. Something moves again, skittering over the walls of the house next door.

Truncated Snapshot

A snapshot of my weekend away, a fragment from the last day - those last few minutes really. With Dad in Worcester. We'd arrived early, and went for a coffee. Parked in that shallow basin in the centre of toen, nothing here but bits of car park and ring road, a dual carriageway landscape. Wet blue twilight, and the buildings all jagged and silhouettes against the perfectly hues sky. You don't get twilights like this in the South. Walking across there, trying to remember this was once the town where I lived and not being able to, impossible to think I lived here... Felt more like I was walking through one of my dreams of Worcester.

Anyhow, Em's just came around. Time for a Christmas Eve drink.

Inconsequential Woodstock Drive Dream

Dream - passing by the top of Woodstock Drive with Em. A bright summery day, one of those days associated with the first warm days of spring. Leaves on the trees. I remember their pale green under the blue, slightly cloudy sky. Em asks if I want to go and see my old house, further down Woodstock Drive. I say I do not, though am not sure why. We walk on toward Uxbridge.

Kidderminster at Twilight

Went with Dad to Kidderminster yesterday to pick up the last of their Christmas shopping (not my Christmas shopping - I shall be returning to Brighton, flooded tracks permitting tomorrow night).
The last time I was at Kidderminster was with Em in May of last year, before them would have been over the winter of 1993 / 1994. After a very busy Morrisons we headed to the high street, which was bustling too. Dad went to pick up Mum's prescription. I went to WHSmith's to buy a prog rock magazine then waited for Dad on the steps of some building, slightly unnerved by teenage shenanigans about me. When I met Dad we went for a coffee and watched the late afternoon pass by outside - an odd place Kidderminster - well, not odd, just not Brighton. The place was thronged with teenagers and families, and it didn't look like there was a graphic designer (thankfully) amongst them.
The town is littered with old carpet factories - now mostly turned into retail outlets - and roundabouts. I was surprised at how busy it all was; people moving quick through the growing twilight, walking with ease the labyrinth of subways and footbridge, side passage and back street. This is a place where people live out their lives, born, grow old, have families and die. Depressing in one way but oddly comforting in another. I imagine any teenager here would yearn to escape their red brick incarceration - move to somewhere exciting -like Brighton perhaps. Kidderminster has an old and broken soul, on the edges of disintegration, but Brighton sometimes seems so plastic - trendy without depth, without a soul - at least any of note. A place for holidaymakers and that short period in every lifetime when anything you dream of might still be possible. After the holidays are over though or you hit your thirties, Brighton might seem less appealing... I wouldn't want to live anywhere else though... or maybe I would, but I have no reason to...
Leaving Kidderminster in the full throes of twilight. Something vast about the skies up here, great grey things flung from horizon to horizon, the land and buildings all flat, supplicants before unknowable, impeachable gods. The wet dusk, impressive in its sobriety, bought resonances of old Christmases spent here in the Midlands, when my parents lived at Bretforton (the Christmases of 1993, 1994, 1995) and of course my own three Christmases in Worcester (1996, 1997, 1998).
Particularly the Christmas of 1997.
A dark December that one - a 'relationship' gone bad, and the early gloom of that December darkening into crisis as Christmas approached. Nothing serious of course (nothing and everything is serious though when you're 25) - just that back - forth - push - pull of university-era relationships. I remember the shared house I lived in on 136 London Road slowly shedding its occupants for trips to familial homes till there was only Al, Ruth and myself left. Ruth didn't live there, but she spent enough time there to qualify as some phantasmal resident. I remember the preparations for Ruth's birthday party at the beginning of December - feeling later in the month that it was - trips into town with Sal to buy flowers and presents (I bought her Portishead's second album) - I don't remember anything about the party itself though.
We drove out of town as night fell - though this night seemed to rise from the ground, from the parks I remembered (maybe) from childhood visits, from under red brick viaduct bridges and from the shadows cast by street lamps.
By the time we got back to Cleobury Mortimer, it was night.
Midwinter days, a few sickly hours of pale washed out daylight and then darkness again, - a phrase I used in something years ago.
Ah well.
Days start getting longer from now on, even though it seems that these nights will last forever.

A Dream of Snakes and Tarantulas

A cluster of tarantulas in my room. They were all bunched up together, hanging from the whiteness of the wall like a bunch of grapes. I had to get someone to sort them out. A meeting with some kind of pest controller. We view the tarantulas through a kind of video link. To my horror I see that the tarantulas have been joined by a number of brightly coloured, toxic looking snakes. I see them twisting away across the objects in my room. \I am afraid that these snakes will vanish and not be found. How will I ever be able to relax again when there may be hidden snakes?

Landscapes

Sat in my parents' living room in Cleobury Mortimer just inside the county of Shropshire. A cat called Thomas, a grey and white thing, curled up at my side. Sound of the radio in the kitchen, turned down low. Songbirds out in the garden, and the sky above a leaden shade - though it was bright blue when I first got up. Temporarily alone in this new house (Dad has taken Mum to the doctors) and feeling oddly displaced because I am not in Perranporth on the North Cornish coast, where my parents lived from 1999 until earlier this year.
Train ride up yesterday, cutting through England's dismal, strangely hypnotic December landscape. Miles of flooded fields and ragged farmland, provincial towns and dull lamps not yet lighting paths by the side of new housing estates. It took an age for us to get out of London - an hour to reach Slough from Paddington - something to do with bad signals. We were stuck for what seemed an eternity in some industrial railway landscape (an infinity of train tracks and overhanging wires). Under the constant rain, the colours seemed to drain away and everything outside the carriage looked like all the photographs of wartime Europe you've ever seen.
By the time we reached Worcester (where my parents were meeting me) it was dark. Said goodbye to Em - whose parents only live five minutes away from the station - then to the car, parked in the car park underneath the Crowngate Shopping Centre, and then to Cleobury Mortimer.
Funny catching fragments of Worcester like this. Seemed impossible I once lived here. Driving over the black bridge over the Severn, the car swinging by the Bush pub at the base of St Johns where I first went out for a drink with Al and Joe (January 1997). Watching from the car window that path that ran up to the base of Sabrina footbridge, remember walking here, thinking about Ruth, autumn of that year, with an alarm clock in my pocket because I had lost my watch, and these were the days before mobile phones... In all these investigations into my past, I never find any trace of Ruth, no nostalgic rush associated with her, no resonance of past times. I occasionally catch fragments of her house in Whitbourne, somewhere near the border with Herefordshire- the smell of some kind of air conditioning air freshener scent is the same as the smell of her - her parents - house, but that is strangely all.
Now that Em and myself have ended our relationship, Worcester is full of warnings, of things gone, things regretted, things lost. A place not so much for the nostalgic, but for the troubled. Reminders of a worrying emptiness, a hollowness at the heart of these days, the inevitable fear of growing older too, I don't know why... As much as I have mythologized the time I have spent living in Worcester, I remember grey days back then too, the light all washed out and white, drained of romance and possibility, and the colourless skies uncomfortable in its cloudy cold delerium.
Sometimes Worcester seems a city built on drizzle.
The car drive here took us through the black lamp-less countryside, flooded roads and fields I couldn't see, barely a village passed through. Deep in England, deep in the lost heart of England, here we go... and looking up at the sky, I couldn't see clouds, and I couldn't see stars, and we might as well be travelling through Limbo...
It didn't stop raining once.
Slept well last night - even though I did keep waking up, and dreamed of illustrating a comic strip about patients in a mental asylum being confronted with the arrival of a new object - some kind of device - on the wards.
I never found out what that device was.

The Evening Star

Doesn't really matter what other pubs we experiment with - the one in Seven Dials we liked for a bit - currently the Brewery Tap - we always return to the Evening Star. Was there last night for the first time in don't know how long. It never changes, the same rotund middle age men (of which I am one I suppose), the same hard uncomfortable benches, the same slightly wet toilets (well, the floor of anyway)... but there is something comforting about the place. The first pub I drank in in Brighton when I moved down on December 30th 1999 (as opposed to other pubs when visiting). I remember we met Paul A's brother here when he came to visit... though I don't remember much about him, or when this was... Poor Paul, lost to schizophrenia in some home up on Cromwell Road. This used to be the pub of Brighton's best years (though not necessarily the happiest) when everything was still achievable, and we were still aglow with the (admittedly by then fading) rays of youth. We could have been anything we wanted but we chose to drink real ale instead.

In the Company of all our Old Dogs

The dream is fading now. This is what I remember.

In a house with my sister - I think that she was living there. Something to do with the upper floors. I open a trapdoor in the ceiling with a long chain. The trapdoor opens showing a whole series of other rooms. I am momentarily afraid. These are haunted rooms. I am afraid I may have released something. We discover that these rooms can be accessed by the stairs - and we have always been able to do this. We explore the dark rooms. Despite the fact these rooms are haunted, there does not seem to be much that is malevolent or truly unsettling here. I go down the stairs in the comapany of all our old dogs Bracken, Bess, Bruno, Bruno II and Misty. It does not bother me that I know all these dogs to have died.

Crows in the Morning

A familiar country, albeit one I have never seen. Crows cry in early morning, and the air is wet with mist, woods full of too many trees. Churches are harsh and documentary-real. A school room I could almost be nostalgic for and the imagined darkness of the trees.
I'm not sure why the landscape in the old (1970) British horror film  Blood on Satan's Claw (which I've just finished watching)  is so familiar. There has always been something so familiar about the sounds of crows in the early morning, and the film soundtrack is littered with them. I remember once, back in Forres, my sister and myself frightened by the sound of them in the Black Woods on top of Cluny Hill, and again, my room in Drumduan Park, and through those dark-less midsummer nights, my sleep disturbed by crows in the garden... there is another memory of something earlier, living at my grandparents house in Stone in 1977. Arriving at school early in the morning, and was there this one morning, misty and wet, riven by the sound of crows - I vaguely remember a fascination, but this memory might well be a dream as anything real.

Dark Roads in the Small Hours

2:04am

A silence so quiet it is almost a noise. Everything that has a noise seems loud; my fingers typing, the laptop humming. I listen for the sounds of cars outside, but hear the dark roads instead. I am nostalgic and pensive, waiting for something to happen. Something is waiting for me.

Dark roads, as I said.

Never meant to stay awake this late. Meant to go to sleep at midnight but the hours slip away. Everything seems very still in this room. I imagine if I tried that I could imagine voices. A radio-murmur of voices from the locked up workshops below.

Downed tools in a stillness of oil and wood and metal.

It feels like Christmas now, and thinking that, I think further, of the cliff top path at Perranporth I would usually walk this time of year. That path is closed to my footsteps now, and I know, except perhaps as an old man, I shall never see Perranporth again.

I was young when I first walked there - the last years of being young anyway - and now I am not young - but not old either. A liminal age, a borderline phase.

I should go to sleep, let myself slip onto those dark roads and dream, and go and meet whatever might be waiting for me out there. 

2:11am

Forgotten Rooms

Dreamt I was living in some small but cosy ground floor flat. dark and shadowy, the walls seemed to be made of a black wood, which gave everything the appeal of old panelling. In an alcove sat my chair and a computer. Much to my surprise, I saw that there was further space to the left of the computer and chair. I had already put somethings in this new space when I had moved in, but had promptly forgotten about it. Perhaps I should move the chair and computer to allow for greater access to this new / old space? I investigated this space further, there was two or three smaller rooms, all connected to each other. The last room contained a bed (I had thought I could use this as a spare room if people stayed over) and there was a small bathroom. The tiny window looked out onto the sea. This room also contained a door that opened onto Hove Boulevard. I was pleased and excited that I had remembered these rooms - the possibilities were endless, but I was slightly perturbed that the door opened onto the seafront - there would be drunk people passing by at night. Because of this, the whole flat came to seem slightly unsafe, but I was still pleased that I had discovered / remembered these other spaces.

Hangover Day

40-watt bulb light dimmed even more behind the lampshade. Dull overhead light. Listening to The Perc meets The Hidden Gentleman album 'Postcards from the Meantime'. Last echoes of a melancholy hangover hollowing out my body. My rooms feels haunted and old tonight. Alone in the flat, I feel lost in time, like I have been in this room for decades. Hangovers do that to you.
Fag-end of the year, last few drags of these smoked out days.
Works party last night, Christmas dinner for the call centre. Some restaurant I can't remember; cold sprouts, dry turkey. Pretty foul but I ate it all. Lager, red wine, white wine, champagne, cider, rain. Went to karaoke afterwards. Stuffed in a room while everyone shouted to songs I can't remember. A strange pleasure. Then to the casino afterwards where I gambled nothing, but stared at the cruise-ship like interior, and all those set faces at the roulette table, the fruit machine, and all the other devices installed designed to lose your money.
I gambled nothing.
Afterwards, walking up New Church road, I pull out my phone to look at the time, and am surprised to discover that it is nearing 4:00am.
Long sleep, disquieting dreams I couldn't recall on waking.
Time for a cup of tea, some cheese on toast, and to leave this room I've been in for decades.

Thursdays were Bad Days in 2012

Last day at work tomorrow, then a week off, back in on Christmas Eve, then Christmas Day and Boxing Day off, then work again during those dead days between Boxing Day and New Years. Working New Years Eve, then New Years Day off, and then 2013...

2012 has exhausted me. 

I don't think I've enjoyed it that much.

Unbelievably I turn 41 in three months time. I still have very little idea as to what to do with my life. Given my past history, this will just involve drifting on from day to day, with no real plans, just vague ideas that never come to fruition.

Ho-hum.

3 x 3 x3

Night / ale / winter

Dream / desire / alliteration

Literate / roundabout / memory

1989 / Western Road / Swakeleys Road

Copse / Named / Lost

Petrol / cars / branch

Fall / autumn / yearn

Bus-stop / diary / grass

Our Price / Ruislip 98 / Uxbridge Common 

Morning Songs

After my shower I heard the sound of horses, clip-clopping on cobbled stone. It wasn't of course - just the sound of the coffee shop next door opening, the drawing back of the shutters sounding like horses hooves. I tried to make them the sound of ghosts (there used to be stables below us, where the workshops are now) but the resolutely refused to haunt me. I hear the sound of a car now, engine running, warming up. A cosy sound, a winter noise. I hear something being unloaded, some indistinct banging noise. Now the sudden sound of a babys cry, seemingly coming from the passage outside my window. I imagine its a cat or a seagull. Now there are voices.

Edge

Started last night when I tried to get to sleep. Can't really explain it... a nervous tic in my leg, barely there, such a soft and delicate thing, but it kept me awake all night, waiting for the nest breath of its crawling discomfort. At 4:00am, my only recourse to sleep was a bottle of Desperado left over from the abortive attempt on Saturday night to go to Sarah's party.
It continued all day, superseded, somehow, by the primary side effect of a crawling discomfort in my own body, a jittery restlessness that is somehow even worse than that awful toothache back in July. I'm dreading trying to get to sleep tonight.
A bad call check today at work - we get them every month - I scored 20% - my worst ever.
Not a good day.
No, not a good day at all.

2:23 - 2:34pm

Suddenly feeling it, where there should be two shadows, one falls, and in that sense of something wrong, that spiraling foreboding; this sense of the missing can only increase, at least for a while. Hard enough now, but when I think to February, when that isolated sense of midwinter hibernation wears off? Look around to those emptied out lands, like those other emptied out lands; spring of '97, summer of '94. summer of '87, late autumn of '05. I can play with these dates like I'm juggling tarot cards, and I'm still not sure whether they continued premonitions or only mirrors.
Sat on the sofa in my room, and I can taste two past periods, one I can't name, and the other a late autumn night in 1993. Smell of oranges (I also associate this smell with the spring of '93 - I think it was the scent of the house I was living in at the time) and air freshener. Cleaning my sunless room on a sunless day, listening to Type'o'Negative's Bloody Kisses album, vacuuming my room as that serious winter light fades to that brutal, consoling winter darkness. Loathe to turn on the lights in that empty house, to break that spell, and I can't remember whether I was smoking then on not. Cups of tea, and that welcome hush of silence, though in that silence, some sense of loss I couldn't quite place either (probably the passing of the autumn of that year, one of the more progressive times in my life). As it got dark, that gladness to leave that house, and that off loneliness. I had a late photography lecture. Yellow bus to Langley College, through those miles of now-bleak countryside, ruled by gods and December and spiky consoling twilights.
That's what I taste now anyway.
Just beginning to get dark.
Night falls so early in December.

Saturday Night Un-Haiku

Went to Sarah's party.

Had a panic attack.

Left.

Chimney Country

Head south to Christmas, to chimney-country, to lands under gray skies the shade of white and afternoon sleep, and I feel those nowhere days with their promises of ghost stories. Lying in bed at night and listening to the wind rattle over imagined moors, black lanes and dreaming hills.
Here in the just-before-twilight of December, a strange sense of something. Last night in the Metropole Hotel, at the Value Awards dinner, and in the bustle of the great hall, it feels like this has all happened decades before. Here we are in the 1930s, being remembered in the impossible year of 2012.
Took hours to walk back along the sea front. Red wine, white wine, water, lager. Wasn't sick on the beach like I was after the Awards dinner last year. Woke up this year with no hangover, just tired, and words I reach for but can't grasp fading now in the cool and comforting evening.

Intimate Apocalypse

Rain sharpened so fine it cut like needles. Roadside pools clogged with the last remnant of autumn. The brown paper bag holding the pizza disintegrated.

This morning it was quite nice.

Winter now, and it's in the sobriety of the air, that sense of apocalypse that always accompanies the end of a year, or rather, that sense of one's own mortality. I suppose that's a kind of intimate apocalypse. Some people get their sense of mortality when summer fades... but I shop for it slightly later in the year.

But I do tend to do everything late anyway.  

Distillations of Concentrated Time

I have long suspected there may be some neurological basis to my fascination and obsession with the past. Tempted as I am to self diagnose with hyperthymesia, this is probably not the case, as I lack the photographic memory (though my chronological memory is indeed very good). I do however spend an inordinately large amount of time thinking about my past (a side effect of the condition), but more importantly, are those constant rushes of the past itself. I don't mean memories - or not just memories - but something else more vital, as if time itself is rushing all over me, as some kind of almost physical sensation.
All day long I have been thinking about Hillingdon Circus (where Western Road crossed Long Lane in Hillingdon). I'm not sure why. To be more precise, Hillingdon Circus in January 1991. There are memories attached to this place and this time, but none important. Of more importance, or resonance are the feelings that this is generating. I can't describe them very well, but phrases like the consolation of January nights and sentient black skies over street lamps like gods and the eternal night-bridge are probably far more evocative of being doused in this curious and particular distillation of concentrated time. 

Night Rattles

Imagine a colour, the shade of a silvery - grey, a fish scale sheen. The colour tastes of being twenty years old, living in a town where friends have moved on. Streets haunted by rooms you once knew intimately. Old homes inhabited by strangers. It is a colour of a certain kind of winter, when you go to the train station in a town you've been meaning to leave for, well, years, and finding that there are no trains any more, and the station is being boarded. The colour of realising that a time that seemed only recent is now years ago.

Bottle the colour, label it with a clinical name. Line them up in hallway cupboards.. Dusty second floor cranny, third floor nook.  Stuffed in the space beneath the stairs with the hoover and other things suffused with this colour. Sleep and wake at 3:00am, and imagine those bottles in their lost and hollow places, rattling in the night.

Down Western Road

I passed twp kids messing about on skateboards. One was sitting down, leaning against a wall, the other on the board itself. I wasn't paying that much attention. The one on the skateboard fell, and his board - at a remarkable speed - sped into the road. It somehow got tangled in the wheels of a car. The car sped off, and I think I heard a crack - of the skateboard presumably. The car didn't stop - maybe didn't even  notice. The boy retrieved his skateboard, and his friend erupted into peals of uncontrollable laughter. Am unfiorgiving sound, harsh and unpleasant. The laughter rang on as I walked down Western Road.

Home again.

A midday heavy with nerves.
Houses of fear.
Home again.

Curled up inside me.
Dark dog.
Sleep is his wound.

Winding on,
Dual carriageway roads.
Home again.

Beginning of an Unwanted Country

An empty wasteground, just before midnight. The day has emptied itself out, and this air is cold, and, oh yes, full of premonitions I can't accurately divine by. A hollowness fills time, and my own silence seems in itself a divination. As an old man, lying cramped on a sofa, weeks and weeks of silence following weeks and weeks of silence. Hear a door open in the flat and it seems as improbable as nostalgia. The sound of water, footsteps, voices from even beyond that. The door closes. Walk these wastegrounds and hope to speak, because there are equations here who tip the balances with silence. Age and passing and withdrawal. Too many goodbyes you forgot to remember. Too many twists of unmapped roads and you're here, at the beginning of a land you've always tried to avoid.

Dream of a Dark Party on Woodstock Drive

For some reason, Mum, Dad - maybe my sister - and myself were to stay back in our old house on Woodstock Drive for three night. I was very excited, as I might be able to continuie my investigation into the haunting there. I was also slightly concerned that it may necessitate spending nights alone there -  aprospect that filled me with dread. The house was larger than waking life, and the rooms had a hollow washed out atmosphere, empty walls and floorboards.
Other people arrived and the house seemed to grow. Talking to a stranger there. He had conducted previous investigations into the house and discovered there were three additional rooms. I also noticed that there was an entrance to a 'cellar level' that I didn't remember being there when I lived there.
More guests. A party. From one of the now very large rooms, I could see a huge upper balcony section that was full of people. There was something monstrous about them - I think they were all holding snakes. There was some kind of accident with them - one of their number had been killed because of some ritual theyw ere holding. The ambulance was called, but I could only watch this from a distance as we were not allowed access to the mysterious balcony level.

Shell

I picked up a breath of something during the day. I've forgotten now, or rather, it's been taken by the cold. Its absence clings to my skin, ghost-kiss, hollowed-out shell space of some yearning, some nostalgia. What was it I tasted? No - nothing - surely there would be something left...  but no, it's gone.

I looked around the office at work. The knowledge of Christmas coming lending everything the feel of a time - or place - remembered. Here I was, the year 2048, 76 years old, remembering the place where I worked when I was 40. Old fashioned hairstyle, old fashioned present time. 

Think about a photograph I've never seen. Summer of love 1969, hippies and kaftans (I have no idea what kaftans are). Season of festivals fade, and they're all slightly out of focus, and this photograph is taken at the end of summer, and there is a dark smudge of woodland behind them, like some coming autumn.

I wonder what happened to them, these imagined people three years before I was born?

First Winter Days

The wind has taken the last of autumn, and the city feels plunged beneath a sea. The air feels serious - we don't take in the lighthearted breaths of summer now - and there is a sobriety to the air, a monochrome brooding that sharpens oxygen, makes knives of the walk to work.
Walking back home, and the night feels magnificent, a huge thing that has opened itself up; a myriad of previously locked rooms and wings unfolding themselves from previous narrow corridors. The stars are hidden behind clouds, but I imagine they taste of all the iced-over pools of January childhoods.
It felt like, this first evening of what feels like winter, coming home. There is a relief in the plunging temperature, the rumours of snow, the far-off streets as unreachable now as gods or last nights dreams.

A Shared Birthday 90 Years Apart

Tales from Bridge 39 is three years old today. I'm not sure whether that feels like a long time or a short time. I've been keeping it for longer than I lived at Worcester, longer than most houses I've lived in, most jobs. I thought at one time it was certain that I would only stop Bridge 39 when I died, or that I would consciously end it, write finish I'm done (or perhaps something more portentous in Latin) at the end of the last post but now I'm not too sure, It nearly finished last year, and for no other reason except that it just almost faded away...
My grandfather had a mug that was written on it Old teachers never die, they just fade away. Or something similar. Doesn't make much sense when I think about it. He was a latin teacher and a headmaster at some school somewhere in the Midlands. He was born on this day in 1919, according to Facebook. 93 years ago (he died 30 years ago when I was 10). I never realized till today that him and this blog shared a birthday, 90 years apart.
He would have known a good latin phrase if I ever decided to finish Tales from Bridge 39.

Next Time I'm Walking

My attempt at walking to work along the beach this morning was swiftly curtailed when it seemed the rain, far from lightening, was in fact getting heavier. Despite only living two minutes from the seafront, it took me fifteen minutes to get there and back to where I started to catch the bus.
Even under the most desperate of circumstances, the bus (Brighton and Hove buses are notoriously unpleasant) is never a pleasant experience. I managed to get a seat, and sat staring into space - and the woman who left her handbag in the walkway, causing people to trip over it.
A woman with a pushchair got on, causing everybody to inwardly sigh. I stood up, not quite knowing where to go. The bus was very crowded. The woman with the pushchair managed to slot her self in at a kind of angle. The woman with the handbag glared at me with an expression somewhere between utter hatred and disgust. 'C'mon....' she hissed at me, as if, somehow, it was all my fault (I think something to do with the woman and the pushchair.
I couldn't see where to go. There seemed to be nowhere to stand. That same sense of panicky out-of-place claustrophobia that necessitated my swift exit from the Prince Albert on Saturday night came down. I pushed past everyone, and got off the bus... five minutes from where the journey had begun.
At least it had stopped raining.

Curtains

No, I don' t think their language was ever mine. I think i wanted it to be mine, and once, I may have even hoped to have learnt their language. Those words are dead to my tongue now or my tongue is dead to their words. Either way, it is only silence that remains.
Slept for over thirteen hours last night. No dreams that I recall. This amount of sleep, combined perhaps with those panicky two pints in the Albert, drunk too quickly, have caused me to wake with a nauseous headache. The flat is silent. I heard Andy come in in the small hours. Won't be seeing him till after nightfall now.
The curtains are still drawn in my room, and the darkness is here is heavy as quilts and blanket on a winter morning. The laptop screen glares, and is brighter than the daylight seeping from underneath mt curtains.

Bad Night

Two pints drunk too quickly in a pub built on too many people and too many angles.
Walk back, half an hour after I arrived.
Looking at everybody, thinking your language is not mine
then correcting yourself; your language was once mine.
I remember this, back at Southampton, listening to drunk people on the street laughing.
Northumberland Road, St Mary's myth, Southampton gothic.
Back home now, can't find my phone and the letter box rattles.
Night outside is so unsettled. A stranger in the mirror.
This night for the bird flu god, laid out on this seven week old altar.

Cold Mechanics

5:47pm. Saturday afternoon, though this late in the year, anything after 4:00pm feels like night. Raining too - been raining all day. Only left the house to go to the Co-op down Portland Road for some gas and electric. Some food too, breaded plaice or haddock. Can't remember now, but they've left me sleepy and exhausted and the last thing I want to do is to go out tonight.

Sleep comes with guilt and fear these days. I remember the ecstasy of the petrol station days, those afternoons after an early shift when I would get home about 3:30pm. After a cup of tea, I would fall into bed, sleep for as long as I wanted, get up at evening time, a gradual awakening. More cups of tea, dinner, television.

The world always wants me these days - even at the weekend the world wants me - and the world is an alien and impersonal place, a mechanism really, particularly when all I want to do is day dream sleepily in the sublime quiet and dark of a late November night.

In a few hours I'll be in a noisy pub in the middle of town, unable to hear anyone, shouting conversations, the air thick and clogged with drunk people and alcohol and the smell of wet coats. I have a headache already.

Words cut in Three by Alleys

There is in the light, a knowledge. No, not a knowledge, but a language. I do not know the words, but know the tone. Recognize in the vowels of dry leaves inst brick, a tattoo of time. Scarred stones, trace words with the ghosts of fingertips. Braille for those who can't read underwater any more.

Alleyways. Chimney smoke is invisible against skies. Far up from here, high above wooden fences. Brick walls and tiny windows. I cannot imagine the bathrooms behind winter-frosted glass. Pipes blow out steam, a gothic myth for these backwaters, scent of baths and laundry days, washing line air, captain nightshirt days.

Crooked streetlamp leans in the arms of a stunted trees. Alleyway trees are always stunted, twisted dirty things. Branches regard me with knotted eyes. I can't undo their gaze. A language I do not speak but am possessed by. Unholy tongues for a universe full of words that we are all afraid mean nothing.

Bird Flu God

Wind's up tonight, and here in the kitchen, I can hear it, heavy with tides (like the way on windy days you can always hear the sounds of playgrounds in certain cities) and it vies with the water on the cooker, boiling carrots and brocolli and noodles.

Walking this landscape, and nothing shifts much. A change perhaps in the tenure of the earth, a moistening or drying of the skies. Imagination or sign? I start to hope the landscape might begin to end, that there is a star burning beyond the grey, that there is a dawn, a nightfall.

On a fence post, or on the horizon, or on the branches of a stunted tree, wind tortured and cracked, I see it again. Ragged bird, more bone than feather, and in watchful eyes, a malevolence born of this country I am still deep in. The bird, this avian symptom, a bird-flu god, is too large, magnified by eyes dulled by fever and eyestrain perhaps. Maybe it's size is due to certainty, because its being here tells me that this country exists, and I am nowherr it's borders yet, neither the bird or the country.

Sigh, walk on, and try not to think of grey-cold water, and the grasses of this region that move in the breeze, and I have not spoke for weeks, or sung, and I am afraid of my own voice.

Terry Dowling's An Intimate Knowledge of the Night arrived today. The ghost story as ritual. I am unutterably excited as I have been after a copy of it for years. On nights like this, dreamy and unsettled, it will be the perfect accompaniment.

I think I hear the door go, but no-one comes in.

Just wind, just air, and the thousand voices on the wind.

I am the Teleporting Man

Speaking to J. at work. She says that she saw me walking to work this morning, along Western Road. She was in front of me, crossed over at just past the floral clock flower display on that odd rectangle of green by Tescos. She said she turned around I had disappeared. Thinking no more of it she walked on, only to find that, toward the end of Western Road, I was in front of her. She did not see me pass her, and I did not see her. This is nothing unusual on my part as I am mostly in a world of my own and don't see anyone (apart from a lady walking her dog, who is a kind of clock herself. Depending where I pass her on Western Road, I know whether I am late or early) but J. is quite certain that she would have seen had I passed her. I no doubt slipped by in some odd moment where her attention was elsewhere, but I much prefer to think that I have developed a hitherto unknown power of teleportation.

Saltwater Streets

Wild night out there.
Walked em back home, a mild wind, but there was something darker in it. Old hills and black fields, stars behind clouds, cold as pinpricks. Icy redemption.
Think it was something to do with the sea. That mild wind kept picking up the sound of it, flung it down streets. Felt like I was being followed by tides. Foamy haunting, a saltwater ghost.
Down on New Church Raod there's a man walking just in front of me. He looks a little unsteady, sways slightly. Can't tell how old he is, or anything about him. A silhouette really. Wears some kind of hat and carries a briefcase, twirls an umbrella in his right hand,. Looks like he stepped out of some old decade, bought back by the same wind that picked up the sea. Flings the past down streets too. Night full of footsteps, and when I got back to the Mews, the lamps creaked like all the ghost stories I ever wanted.
In my room now, last cup of tea, and Radio 4 playing a jolly old tune, flamenco style, and I can only imagine the wild night still going on outside.

Attic Peace

When I first woke, about an hour ago at 7:00am, it was all but dark. I crept about the house preparing myself for work (it is not possible in a late November dawn to do anything but creep, as if the very fact of being awake is a secret thing that needs to be hidden). The cat-flap rattled in the door, and aside from this, there was no other sound. I sat on the sofa in my room, drinking a cup of tea, the nocturnal ambience only increased because my curtains were still drawn shut. There is a peace about this time, the serenity of an attic where nothing has been disturbed for decades. I could imagine my lamp, set on the floor, lighting the same things since childhood; my sketchbook, a cluster of wires, a computer mouse, a crumpled pair of jeans. Five minutes till I leave for work, walk out into the cold light of an alien day.

I hear someone move outside, possibly readying the coffee shop next door for opening. Sound of some shutter, or a large barrel. Rumours of movement, and silence already beginning to be forgotten.

Songs for Lost Days

Lost something. Been lost for months, and I knew, but hadn't felt it till now. There had been a ghost with me, and now that ghost is gone, and in lieu of a haunting there is an absence, a landscape of nothing, an untilled field under a leaden sky.
Slept well. Vague dreams I can't remember. Ten minutes before the alarm went off, a series of images that threatened to turn into a dream. I was with Em at Drumduan park in Scotland. I said I would like to see the lights turn on in the lane below the Black Woods. She said she would prefer to stay where we were.
A few minutes before I leave for work.
Watch the light slip beneath the curtains, the hushed movement of people next door (a door closing, a drawer opening) and there is the occasional sound of seagulls. A cold and lonely sound in which there is some kind of strange undefined solace, a song for these lost days.

Sunday Night - 10:02pm

What to do with the last two hours of Sunday night?
I can already feel the alarm, the heaviness of my own body, of 7:00am and that physical drag of getting out of bed.

A bright, sunny day. Took a walk to the pylon country out beyond Benfield Valley park. Came back and slept, read for while (a story in an old book of horror stories called Under the Pylon) did washing, had dinner, drew for a while (the second page of my ridiculous Metroland adaptation).

Eyes are feeling a bit fucked now. Addicted to eye drops, which does improve the eye-strain, at least a little. My body feels cramped though, as if the air it inhabits is too small and closing in on it.
I try not to think about the future, those inevitable grey lands after Christmas.

Six Weeks

A gloomy weekend, full of a strange sense of desolation I can't seem to shake. It's been about six weeks now since this melancholy shift began (six weeks exactly actually - it 'began' on the Saturday after Em and myself had returned from Scotland). There's no particular reason for it... it's all rather annoying actually. Life seems rather bleak at the moment , even though there is no reason for feeling this.
Had another Southside dream last night. Usually in these dreams I am trying to get to the heart of Southside, where I lived between 1978 and 1981. In last night's dream, I was actually back in my old house. I am unsure if I was living there, visiting parents, or on holiday. I needed to leave Southside, and I took a path that ran past the edges of the houses by the railway line. I remember looking at the different shaped houses (some no bigger than sheds) and looking back at some point I realized that some of the street lamps had switched on as it was getting dark, (in previous dreams of Southside there is always a feeling of triumph when this happens). I thought that perhaps I should make the most of this opportunity and walk through the streets of Southside as the lamps were glowing red, just warming up.. In fact, I decided, I needed to take photographs of this. I had left my camera behind though, and needed to go back.
A sunny day out there, and am meeting Em in 45 minutes for a trip into Pylon country, just past Portslade. A quick afternoon of crispy air and fading light, then that drop into night and the gallows-quick crawl of Sunday evening.
Oh well, another week starts tomorrow. Shame they don't pass by as quick as weekends do.

Secret Rooms

Walked back along the seafront road after a works dinner at a Chinese restaurant in the centre of town. Town was surprisingly quiet for a Friday night (aside from the traffic) - mild too for the time of year. Close your eyes and it's hard to believe it's mid-November, look around though and everything seems again like late autumn heading to winter.

Something pleasing about the seafront road when you get over to the other side of the King Alfred leisure centre. Great old buildings, most of them cheap hotels, slightly faded and with a grandeur that seems more influenced by the industrial docks of Aldrington Basin than the Brighton Pier. Get glimpses of windows, and the possibilities of secret rooms... secret not because they are hidden, but because they are forgotten. There are the windows at the front of buildings, there are attic windows, maybe a corner pane or too, we all know these... but on obscure walls, lost under overhangs or behind ventilation shafts, there are smaller windows, whose glass gives no indication of what room they may look upon. The buildings down the seafront road are full of the possibilities of such rooms.

We all pass by hundreds of them each day, mostly don't even think about them, but a lot of them have been there before we were born, and will remain there, spaces between stone, till long after we're gone. Something strangely comforting about that thought. Don't know what though.

Spilt Cup of Tea

I was about to write this post, and reached forward for my cup of tea on the other table. I wasn't paying attention and knocked it over. Tea over comics and books, and I am forced to get up from my seat in search of a tea towel to clear up the mess. I carefully take my two issues of Dell's Ghost Stories comic from their protective sleeves over which the tea spilt, and place them on the pile of comics under the TV I never switch on. I mop the front and back covers of Haunted Horror issue one carefully, glad the covers are made of card. I remove a reprint collection of 2000ad's Finn, as well as two recent copies of 2000ad from under the table that is now dripping with tea and sponge these too. I look sadly at my latest copy of Comic Heroes. This seems very wet indeed. On the other table - not the one my laptop is on (both tables are very small and of a 'bedside' variety) there is a pot of indian ink, some eye drops, a now empty mug and a hairbrush. On the shelf beneath is a digital camera, and on the lowest shelf there is an unopened tube of white acrylic paint and a pair of pliers. When I reached for my cup of tea originally, just as I was start this post, I was going to write about a fragment of a dream last night involving the ghost of a Chinese girl (and in the dream I knew she was Chinese as opposed to generically oriental) with completely black eyes, trying to get in through the open window behind my bed, but now I won't, except mention it in passing.

Lost in Pylons and Poplar Trees

For some reason I'm thinking of those strange days between winter and spring. A lost season, shoved sideways in time. Leaks through sometimes; days of white sky (looking through branches at leaden clouds), Sunday afternoons sinking to evening, thinking of fields lined by pylons and poplar trees, a certain kind of English cold, both savage and dreamy.
I don't know who lost this season, some absent minded god who let it fall through divine fingers. Perhaps it was lost purposefully for this season means most when found, either accidentally or consciously, or maybe the season means most when it is not found, and its absence leaves a shadow, vulpine and drowsy, that watches you as you start to dream of it.
If, in springtime, in the days when this lost season should be, you lie on a bed by an open window at the ends of the afternoon, you can taste it on the air. Tastes like shadowy valleys and tilted alleys, and all those childhood myths you thought you'd never believe in again.

Nightmares of the Sea

The submarine lies just below the surface. Drift and dream, cramped oil-smelling chamber, a mattress and blanket, and no controls, we drift. Through the glass of portholes, the water is heavy, the tides are deep and threaten to drag this submersible lower. The air in here is old enough already. Don't move, don't breathe, just sleep and dream. There are kraken here, and serpents, and obscene ghost ships that float just below the surface. There is a light I do not wish to see, casts a cold shadow. Dead sailors knock on the metal, sound like a bell, their songs to get in, to get me out. The surface of this sea is Himalayas-deep, and pitted with submarines, whose pilots woke, and lost their dreams, and faced the nightmares of the sea.

Grey, Still Day (Thinking about Sleep)

Took ages to fall asleep last night, for no apparent reason, aside from the fact that I probably (definitely) ha cold too much coffee at work. I was unpleasantly neither cold or warm. Every time I came close to falling asleep, a strange palpitation would cover me and I would 'wake' with a start, heart beating and somehow feeling too uncomfortable in my own skin.

When I'm working, I find my dreams to be more jagged and disquieting. Stood at the top of the stairs in the flat looking at the front door, and seeing the figure of a man through the frosted glass. I was afraid that he was the landlord's son (in waking life our landlord is a landlady) and he would want access to the house. In another dream, I could not find something I needed to give to someone at work. My desk was a mess, covered in papers.

It is growing increasingly cold at night now, as we slip toward yet another winter. It looks a grey, still day outside - at least the glimpse I get from between the curtains. I was fortunate in my week off last week. ah well, ten minutes and I've got to go out into that grey, still day, and another absurdly busy day at work.

Nine Lines after Midnight

Two minutes past midnight.
Bedside lamplight.
A half drunken cup of tea, growing cool, almost too cool to drink.
Tired eyes.
I hear Andy leave his room, move to the bathroom.
A gap between the curtains of my room.
The inverted dagger of night is held back by a slash of white window frame.
I will sleep for eight hours.
Wake in the melancholy of a November morning numerous times.

Monday Morning - 8:28am

Ah well, this is it, that moment of a holiday that haunts the rest of all those days off preceding, Mionday morning. Just finished a bowl of porridge (Quakers Oats) and have a cup of tea to drink. My right hand is slightly sticky from the honey I put into the porridge (I somehow managed to get on my hands). All that I have left to do is brush my teeth, hunt for the things I will inevitably not be able to find (keys, i-pod, headphones, wallet) and then head out for that walk to work. Seems to be quite a cold and wintry day out there, which is good. I'm quite looking forward to the walk to work... if not work itself. Have just been on Facebook and one of my colleagues has already said that he is not looking forward to today as it is going to be so busy... Hmm.
I hear the cries of children net door - them or their mother (I cannot tell. She is always shouting).. Aside from that it is silent, and my holiday is officially over.

Sunday Night - 11:08pm

Last hour now. Andy is in the kitchen making a cup of tea or dinner or something. I've spent the last hour or so working on the Metroland graphic novel adaptation exercise, drawing the actress Emily Watson looking tired and annoyed at that unexpected phone call that starts off the film... Ah well, might watch another Space 1999 episode and go to bed, drag out the holiday another excruciating hour, then turn the light off and know the next event will be that damned and cursed alarm...

Sunday Evening - 8:35pm

Resisted sleep, went for a walk instead, through the early twilight of 4:30pm, along Portland road, then up onto the Old Shoreham Road where it passes through the graveyard, then to Sackville Road and back home again, where I grilled four chops for tea. A beautiful night, the sky a clear and intense blue, the air sharp and cold and wintry. After dinner I drowsed in front of the television, episodes of Big Bang Theory I've seen before. Waiting for the water to heat up for a shower. Thought about having a bath, but was afraid that kif I had a bath it would be impossible to get out into the cold air. Twelve hours time, I'll be getting up for work...

Sunday Afternoon - 4:04pm

Written my first story for years - probably over a decade. About 1500 words or so (so it is quite short) called Summer Days of Permanent Autumn. Not edited it yet, but this means that (apart from Bridge 39 of course) I have actually done some writing on my week off from work. I was listening to a selection of Paul Roland albums as I was writing; Sarabande, Roaring Boys, Danse Macabre... Sunset outside, light fading now.Might go for a walk. Sunday evening is here - or just starting. Paul Roland is still playing.

Sunday Afternoon - 1:24pm

Have indeed watched a DVD. The Space 1999 episode A Matter of Life and Death. Now I am somewhat tired, and may go for a snooze, and my last day of the holiday continues as prophesied above... Oh dear. it will be getting dark in three hours time.

Last Day of a Week off from Work

Here it is the last day of a week off from work. 10:24am, slightly hungover, and a whole day to do nothing but try and forget that I will have to be up at 8:00am tomorrow for a nine hour day. Like the last day of summer holidays when you were a kid, and you can't believe the holidays are over, and that Sunday comes, and that day goes by so quickly, and then it gets dark, and you're doing all those things that you have to do before school that you haven't done for six weeks and and and...
But it's still only 10:24am.
10:26am now.
I've got to do washing for tomorrow, and tidy my room, and maybe a bit of artwork - I've done hardly any this week and even less writing (oh the guilt that hangs over us of holidays not used well...) but first I think I'll go to the shop, get the Sunday papers, might watch a DVD, maybe an afternoon snooze...

Gloomy Routine

What is more gloomy than the Saturday of the last weekend of a holiday? Normal service has been resumed. This could be a run of the mill Saturday, a couple of days to yourself to catch up on things, before the carnivorous routine of work eats up all your time. I can already hear that alarm on Monday morning, that desperate rush home when I finish work in darkness (it is my week of 10:00am - 7:00pm shifts next week), then that struggle to try and get some energy to do something other than stare numbly at the television, and succeeding in this only at 11:00pm or so, when you have to go to bed, and fall asleep with that dread of the alarm already there.
You wait for the weekend, for some time (if I'm not working Saturdays that is) and it gets to Saturday afternoon - about now say - and you get so scared of wasting the precious time you have left that you end up doing nothing because you can't decide what to do, and if you do decide to do something enjoyable, then that makes the time - and the weekend - go even quicker.
I'm sure there must be a better way of living than this.

Another Return to Woodstock Drive

London trip yesterday.
Em was visiting friends in Cambridge, so we parted ways at London Victoria. Went to Notting Hill Gate, where in the second hand shops there I bought an Of the Wand and the Moon album, and two compilations of old EC crime comics. I sat in Starbucks and wrote my Nan a birthday card, drinking coffee and watching the passers by on the cool, dry autumn day outside.
Headed back to Ickenham of course. Another entry in these odd rituals of mine, where I revisit places I once lived in, hoping to charge their near-mythic presence in my memory, or to somehow gain some sense of closure on them. My relationship with the past is an odd one - no point in my history seems any further back than a year or two back, and usually the present day is often overlaid with the resonances (the feel or identity) of other times - specific years, or periods in my own history. Sometimes, two or more time periods will be experienced on top of the present moment. I can be walking down Western Road back from work, and I will suddenly, without any doubt, experience, for instance, February of 1987 (white days fading out, cool and empty) as well as the autumn of 1995 (dark rooms full of angles and rain, shallow streets, wine cold as drizzly days).
The past is a constant presence for me, which goes someway to explaining my need for these journeys into the physical locations of the past.
Since leaving Ickenham / Uxbridge in Septenber 1994, when I was 22, I have returned once in the summer of 1996, then in the January of 2006, last year at the end of November and yesterday.
I caught the tube to West Ruislip, and walked down to Ickenham from there. From Swakeleys Road, I slipped into Swakeleys Park, the sign on the gate warning that this was a 'controlled drinking area'.

The path through the park was more tangled than I remember, the trees more ancient and primal looking. There was an odd serenity here, a consolatory kindness in the air that reminded me of sleep and old age.
I used to walk through here on Sunday mornings with Edward when I was 18 / 19, heading into Ickenham (I can't remember what for). As I walked I became aware of another time overlaying itself. This time from autumn 1986, and being here with my then best friend Leighton, my sister, and her friend Nicola, who lived opposite us. In this memory, one of us was wearing red. I do not remember anything else about this memory - which is probably more a collection of memories rather than a single event - nor where the colour red came from, if anywhere.

There was an odd melancholy about the trees, a kind of emptiness, as if the air around the branches was mourning something they couldn't really remember.

The River Pinn runs through the park, a secretive thing that flows through all the hidden places of Ickenham (and beyond). Lost corners where rope swings would be built, a bridge where we were once trapped by older kids, the false bank that turned out to be nothing but a shallow layer of leaves (I plunged in up to my waist). I dream of the river sometimes, and in my dreams it is a huge and primal force, vast and deadly, but somehow still as dark and secret.

...and so after you cross the main space of the park, you turn right into Woodstock Drive. The last two times I have returned here have been at night. This is the first time I have seen Woodstock Drive in daylight since the summer of 1996. Woodstock Drive, when seen at night, is a dark road - something to do with the spacing of the street lamps perhaps. During the day it has a comforting ragged quality, something daydream-y about it, like a day off school when mildly ill as a child. Woodstock Drive always looks as if it is another time - never part of the present. There is an old fashioned taste to the air, as if something here is always slightly out-of-date.

. 
My old house on Woodstock Drive, lived here from when I was 13 to when I had just turned 21. I've written about this house and its alleged haunting before. My old bedroom is the one on the top left of the picture. There is a different window frame than the one I had, and the front of the house wasn't painted white.

Another shot (not a very good one - these were taken surreptitiously remember) of my bedroom window, and below it the dining room window, hidden behind the posts of a fence that wasn't there when I lived there.

I left Woodstock Drive behind, crossed over Western Avenue, and passed by the Middlesex Fields. I took a right and headed across Uxbridge Common, where the wide open sky, brooding and beautiful, was already edging toward an early twilight. This was the place where I saw that huge sun over the December of 1992.

I looked around Uxbridge for a while, then caught the tube back into London, headed to 30th Century Comics at Putney where I bought too many old horror comics before meeting Em again at London Victoria.

We walked around St James Park, and headed up to Oxford Street where we got a bite to eat, before finally heading back home about 10:00pm. 

A twelve hour journey all together, but one which spanned nearly 30 years.

The past is never far behind us.

Small Hours

Caught this thing back in the summer of 2010, where only the small hours feel safe. Rest of the time, it lies upon you, ticking clock, counting hours down till appointments you'd rather miss, places you'd rather not be, people you'd rather not meet. You can forget it out walking too, letting the pavements do their job, beat of footsteps on the concrete crossing roads, watching for new alleyways, for signs of twilight. I could walk forever at dusk, wish I could stop it right there, walk out to that red and beautiful horizon, falling down through violet and purples to night, star-shift skies, and always on the edge of fields, facing that darkness, and that imagined countryside sweeping out into forever... Here in the small hours, morning is a continent away, there is silence here and a peace, and even if it is full of ghosts, I don't mind feeling haunted.

Three Minutes Nine Lines

Playing Sonic Youth's Rather Ripped.
Cold, nostalgic, laced through with something disquieting, some warning or premonition.
A painting of a man whose photograph I surreptitiously took in The Evening Star a few months ago.
We call him Doctor Occult.
The sound of the workshops, low and hidden in the air.
Sunlight on the roofs of the houses.
Undercurrents.
An image of a man walking away down a path lined by lamps, not yet on.
In this image it is December.

Long Hair and Beards

At the Geekest Link pub quiz with Stuart, Nat and Mark from work, answering questions about Superman films, Doctor Who (nearly forgot it was Terrance Dicks who wrote The Five Doctors) and sc-fi literature of the last few years (not that we got anything right on that round aside from Mark who answered a question about Game of Thrones correctly).
We're in the Caroline of Brunswick pub, opposite central Brighton's notorious mugging ground the Level, and the pub is like a retirement home for people who sued to drink at the Hobgoblin when that was a rock / metal pub, way back in the mists (or is it midsts?) of time. Nowhere near as chaotic as the Hobgoblin could sometimes get, a right sleazy dive sometimes, but it is Sunday night. The lights in the gents toilets don't work, so the management have helpfully provided candles instead, so we all piss in a gloomy light the colour of Sundays in the Victorian era, and make jokes about black masses and old horror films.
As I look round the pub, I notice that I do not look out of place. There seems to be a surfeit of men with long hair, beards and (less frequently) glasses. It is like going to a convention where the majority of people are dressed like me.
One of these bearded men sits down at our table when Nat has gone to get a drink. Nobody knows him. We all look at him, waiting to see what will happen next. He looks at us with an expression of surprise.
"I'm on the wrong table" he says. My table's next door".
I look at the table next door.
It is full of men with long hair and beards.

The Worst Taxi Driver in the World

We had ordered a six seater to take us back from the pub last night. Claire had called them by phone - Carcabs I think, and the six seater duly turned up. He dropped Al and Claire off first, and then Sarah. He then had to drop Em off on the street where she lives - and he didn't seem to know where her street was... We gave the taxi driver directions, but it's only a small street, and I thought oh well, maybe it's just slipped his mind... Then he had to take Andy and myself back home, and we gave him the name of our street. he didn't say anything but headed down Portland Road, almost to Portslade... I said to him that we had gone way too far, and then, again, had to give him directions back, right to the door. We then had to badger him to give us a discount for the trip - which ended up costing us £23:00, which seems incredibly expensive anyway. I saw the number on his cab as he drove off - 414141 - which Andy then duly called to complain about how utterly dreadful he had been.\The woman he spoke too sounded 'cagey' and said that there had been no cabs booked from the pub we had been at (The Brewery Tap in the North Laine) since the night before.
Something dodgy going on there...

Der Prison

Window open, sat on my sofa under the main lights of my room - can't be bothered to turn on the new lamp I bought last week. Death in June's Brown Book album playing, and through the open window, there is the sound of fireworks added. War-zone effects, a blitz ambiance. I imagine rebel strongholds and executions, bouncing bombs and sniper alleys. Sound of the war getting closer, Joe's fictitious book he came up with sat on the freezer in London Road Worcester, January 1999 - Der Prison, the tale of a man in a European city going slowly mad while in the background there is some kind of revolution or civil war... Waiting to go down the pub, that odd hour before having to leave, the bottle of port I drank last night lending the day a clear and icy haze,  everything sharp and softened and unreal...

1:08am

More port... oh, lets follow these visions down... I want to listen to Sol Incvictus's Against the Modern World re-recorded version from 2006 - twelve years ago! Been watching videos on youtube of neofolk's holy trinity, Douglas P, David Tibet, Tony Wakeford. They all had their own unique utterly personal vision. Shouldn't have been transmutable to others, and yet... each of them - their own personal mythology, is somehow communicable, able to be transfigured...
...and mine? Southside and hat lamps and twilight, dreams of flooded suburbia and impossibly steep alleyways in Januatys full of lakes and clear skies and purity...

Late November / January Last Year / Three Quarters of a Bottle of Port

Three quarters of a bottle of port.
Listening to Late November Sandy Denny.
Certain songs.
January 2011, only last year but it feels longer. Remember the cold, that circular walk around the outskirts of Brighton, a certain sense of premonition, sharp air, clear icy breath, and something beautiful and deadly, an undercurrent, and this song reminds me of a friend lost in the March of that year, certain songs like I said...
...i see only smoke from the chimneys arise...

(i am not free)

The day crawls by. Battered by endless calls at work, one after another after another, and it was like a thousand days rolled into one, an afternoon the length of a millenium, the morning like a rainy Sunday when you're twelve years old and your friends live in another town.
This is a dark autumn.
At lunchtime on a corner, a back alley, talking on the phone, backs of buildings, backs of shops, a car park, and the air is white and empty and not cold and not warm, and I see the geography of the present stretching on interminably.
Back home now.
My week off from work has started. I can't remember the last time I was least looking forward to time off work.
And work this week has been a nightmare.

Breakdown Country

Car's dead and we're left alone in this wilderness. Black undulating hills, no shelter, and I can't tell if this is dawn or dusk. We're on some strange compass point though, some fifth direction, and this could be both morning and night, and if I stay here, this twilight lasts forever.
Keep walking? Easy to say, but there are plenty of people who don't make it out. Bones littered in the grey air, lost in the obscure moors under those dreaming, troubled skies. Look at the engine, and can't make out a thing, but I've got to leave. It's started to emit poison.

Old Sun

I remember.
It's December 1992, and I'm walking across Uxbridge Common back from work. It's a Saturday afternoon, and already beginning to ease toward twilight. There is something snowy about the air - though no snow - it never snowed before Christmas when I lived in Ickenham. Frosty ground, brittle air. I'm listening on my walkman (chunky cassette tape) of Bathory's Twilight of the Gods album, or at least that's the album I associate with this memory. And there - hanging over the common is a huge and bloated sun, a sunset red globe both terrifying and beautiful. It was impossibly vast, a size caused by some atmospheric phenomena I don't understand, something perhaps to do with the light, or the horizon, or just a certain kind of winter day. The twenty years that has passed between then and now, a phenomena I understand all too well, has no doubt amplified the size, and that real sun I saw cannot compete with the sun that I remember, but it is the sun I remember that endures, hanging over the common like a portent or a god of some religion no-one could ever hopr to understand.

Something in the River

Hallowe'en, thirty years ago.
We had spent the day ghost hunting (as usual) around the woods of Kinloss. It was a Sunday. This I remember because the usual trick or treating ritual was done on the Friday, so as not to offend those with Christian principles on the Sunday.
I remember the sun over the tops of the trees to the north of Burnside, that late October light, all serious and mysterious and full with the thoughts of those deep, cold nights to come. I remember the light on the grass, all pale and drawn, and as the afternoon progressed to nightfall, the sun became full and reddened. Leaves on the ground that crackled underfoot, the colour of long nights and dark mornings.
I was halfway down the path to Burnside from the woods. My two friends were still up near the woods themselves. I'm not sure what they were doing, but as it got nearer to evening, the woods began to adopt an unsettling aura, and so I had begun to retreat to the safety of Burnside where I lived. Then my friends were running, and in that moment of pure terror, a kind of euphoria; I knew I had to run too, even though I didn;t know (yet) what they -and I- were running from.
Back at Burnside, one of my friends said that he had seen 'something in the river'. He never described it fully,  (because he was making it up obviously). I wasn't there, and never saw that there was nothing in the river, so I have spent the last three decades wondering what might have been glimpsed in shallow river  north of Burnside.

Whispers Follow Shantell

I've got Shantell by And Also The Trees playing as I write this.
Fifteen years ago - to the minute (it's just midnight) I was playing this song. October 1997. I had gone up into my room, and was about to write a ghost story for a competition. I was playing this song because I was going to use it as some kind of inspiration, about a the spirit of a girl possessing someone in the present (it wasn't a very original story). The spirit of the girl I was going to name Shantell, after the song. Then something struck me. I remembered reading an interview with the singer abot the song, where he said that what gave him the inspiration for the song was an odd experience he had had in a churchyard with a child's grave. He further went onto say that when they were recording the song they had all manner of problems; odd noises appearing on the tape, a whole verse or chorus disappearing... It occurred to me that the song itself might be haunted. Might I be asking for trouble calling the name of my ghost story after a possibly haunted song? As I thought this, and with the song playing in the background, all the books on the mantelpiece all fell off onto the floor.
I decided to call the story something else.

A Year like a Sunday Afternoon

A grey year this one, like someone has mixed all the colours wrongly and been left with is a mess the colour of drizzly skies. \Just one of those times, not one where anything particularly bad had happened, (mostly) but one where everything seems uninspired and not free and stuck.
Feeling sorry for myself without having anything to feel sorry for.
I knew this period of melancholy was deepening when I realized that I wasn't actually looking forward to a week off work next week. I wasn't dreading it either, but it all just seemed so predictable. As soon as I start the week off I'll just keep counting down the hours till I'm back at work again... like a Sunday afternoon stretched over a week.
I'm sure this will pass.
In the meantime I'll take solace in cups of tea and the novelty of the new cold.

Nearly Midnight

A pile of comics I've yet to read. An addiction to buying old comics, but somehow I never get round to reading them. I don't even remember buying some of them. Watched the old Star Trek episode Mirror Mirror tonight, which I've not seen since I had it on VHS tape. I started a painting. The face of a man, muddy and yellow, a troubled expression. I don't understand how to paint, and the painting troubles me. Perhaps I should stick to drawings. A dream last night. The central line tube leaving West Ruislip. A hidden landscape of flooded back gardens. In one such garden, a man in a dressing gown stares sadly at the grass. I have not bought a ticket. i have to go back and explain. I am with someone from work. I try to explain to the woman behind the counter I need to buy a ticket. She says that she 'does not want tio hear any excuses'.

Busy Work

Nine hour shift. Over that nine hours, breaktimes added up to an hour and twenty minutes, the rest of that time was call after call after call. Absurdly busy. Service l;evels dropping 23 calls waiting, then end one call, that beeeeeeeep and another one begins Hello, you're through to Stuart, how can I help you this morning / afternoon / evening? Made the day so long, so very long, that when I left tonight, at 6:00pm, the morning seemed weeks ago.
At twilight James motioned me to look out of the window. A lone surfer on a grey and choppy sea, foamy danger, churning deeps. He didn't fall, just kind of balanced, though didn't manage to surf any waves. He looked set for that darkening horizon, shades of blue, I turned to take a call, and when I looked back he had gone, drowned or vanished, or reaching for that horizon in these suddenly winter-seeming nights.
Caught the bus.
My head was too jagged with calls to walk.

Serpents

Surprised to reach the end of the field, and even more surprised to discover there is no fence, just a steep, long-grassed drop to what I presume to be a trench of water. The sky is white and wet, and the dew on the grass is old and clinging. Cold wind. Sometime in the afternoon in a landscape that is familiar and alien.
Shall I leap across the ditch? Perhaps. I was expecting a fence. Water may provide a greater barrier, like those fairy tales of witches who can't cross water, but this water is still and narrow and deep, and full of miniature sea monsters,
I am suddenly afraid I might sing, and the song would be in the tones of a dream that is about to turn into a nightmare. I recognize the warning in the clouds, they darken, turn the crooked pylons into skeletons. Shall I walk back, or leap the trench, or maybe sink into the water and dream with whatever serpents may already be dreaming there?

Early Night Coming

Even with the television and washing machine going, there is a Sunday silence to the flat. I imagine this is due to the cold - an air-crippling, sharp and brittle pleasure - that has pushed itself into all the nooks and crannies of these gloomy afternoon rooms. I look out through the window, and you can almost see the cold, like watching something that isn't there. The sky is dizzying and grey-white, an ocean void, and across the roofs and gardens a single trees, fading-light leaves all feverish and disordered. the leave look wet, like rain on skin.
Sound of footsteps from next door, the sound of something - a cup perhaps - being put down on a table. The washing machine starts to finish its cycle, begins again. High pitched wheeze. Nothing else, just the demands of the quiet that the new cold has bought.
Even my typing sounds too loud here.
I might go outside, see what I can find in the light teh day after British summer time has ended.
Bring on the early nights.

Condensation Season

Condensation on the window panes, and on the Saturday morning walk to work there is an icy tightness in the air. Oh, this is winter, this is the coming season, and I do not do up my jacket because there is something about the novelty of the cold that is appealing. It feels like coming home.
After an absurdly busy shift at work which resembled more four hours in a hellhole factory (call after call after call after call... ad nauseum) I had a pint with James outside the Mash Tun. Ghosts of Telegen, I remember those old faces I used to drink here with here; Jen, Katie, Pam, Motley, Arran, Tom...
There is a clear lucidity about the air, a January light, and the sunlight falls sober and crystalline on the buildings, the temple-like church opposite the pub, the cycl;ists, the passers by, those whose Saturday night drinking has just begun.
Sat in my room with the curtains drawn and the windows open, and that cold is here again, and even the sounds of the outside - the cars, something rumbling in the breese - are lit through with the cold. A sound to hurt, a song to sleep by. It sounds like the distance.
I fell asleep watching the television, and only woke when it had gotten dark.

Return to the Aluminium Factories

Still dark when the shift begin - not really, but the air had that feel of too-early night-time. Fire up the machines, load the devices, oil, petrol, rust, and breathe in the chemistry under it all. Check the gauges, the needles, in the red, escaping steam. There are cracks in this factory, ruptures in the wall, and the underneath is swelling through.
Breaktimes are curtailed, and during the half hour lunch, the rain outside is cold and still tastes of night.
Melancholy roads, nostalgic Sainsburys shelves.
I'm not sure what we're making here, not sure what we are even, as we tend this moebius strip of abstract process and watch the sea between backwater industries. I can't see any reflections on the factory floor, all I hear are the echoes caught in the pipes, asking for so many things, and I can't be bothered to understand then any more.
The coffee machine kept breaking down during the day, and this was the worst thing of all.

Autumnal, Obviously

Obviously really, considering the nature of the preceding two posts, but...

Walking home.

Not the sky this time, though that remained the same shade of featureless grey as the last two nights, but the light. It wasn't quite twilight, but more that even rare time that precedes twilight. Walking through Churchill Square shopping centre, the North Laine, down Western road, there was something about it all that was unmistakably autumnal. As I said, it was the light itself that seemed to be suffused with autumn, and there was a whiteness to the light, despite the fact that it had begun to get dark.

Southside again. I remember this white light from Southside, the pale air that rushed with browning leaves as we waited for the streetlights to come on, something occult about it all, that time that precedes twilight, the tension of waiting for the street lights to come on, breathing in the air of Abbey Crescent and Easter Road, and all those playgrounds and alleyways, and childhood spaces hanging heavy over it all.

I might be expecting spring time tomorrow night, but when a pattern is recognized, it stops becoming so, and usually becomes something else instead.

We'll see I suppose, but I'll probably forget to notice.

Summery Sky

Walking home again.
Exactly the same shade of sky as yesterday, except with a tint of twilight-red in the white / grey cloud. Yesterday felt like a winter light, but this felt like a summer light, or rather, a very early summer night, perhaps no later than the first half of May. It put me in mind of the way that when the days start to lengthen, places seem to somehow deepen. An average street seems somehow longer, the local park seems full with extra nooks and crannies that weren't there before, and on the outskirts of town you swear that there will be a new suburb that you could not reach in winter. There was a time when I was as fascinated by the mysteries of summer as I am now (and have always been) of winter or autumn. Tonight put me in mind of that fascination that I haven't felt for a long time now.

Wintry Light

Walking home, after 5:00pm.

Something in the sky, that white shade of nothing slowly fading into the grey of twilight. The sky looked like it was foggy or misty, rather than merely cloudy, though ground level was mostly unnaffected by whatever meteorological description I have failed to correctly supply. Something there like I said, in the muted light of the first street lamps, the black boughs of damp trees by the roadside, and the yellow leaves on the ground... breathe in and taste that foreshadowing, that premonition... Winter. Not the temperature (it was mild), but the light. The light was that kind of light that seems to precede snow, all sober and mysterious, a white light but heavy with nightfall and Christmas and ghost stories. 

A light like silence.

Pavilion Gardens at Lunchtime

Sat outside the cafe at lunchtime. Green chairs and a cup of tea, the usual mix of old couples and people on the verge of middle age. A man plays pipes in the distance, and there is something jarring about the sound. Forests and pan pipes and panic, and people vanishing. Echoes of this even here, on a mild grey day, murky and heavy with mid-autumn.
Watch the grass - signs to stay off it - there actually is no grass any more - they've torn it up. Muddy earth, wet and sticky looking. The few trees on the grassed area look marooned and remote. It seems impossible to think that people spend days here over summer drinking tea and pretending that autumn and winter never existed.

Lovers Lie

An early twilight, thanks to the obscured skies that crept up some time past Reading. This woke me a little - the first train from Worcester down to Reading had kept pushing me to a dangerous sleep. Lull of the wheels, and that abyss of dreamy deeps below me... I'm not sure where this exhaustion came from - I slept well last night - and anyway, I had the same issue on the journey up on Saturday. As the train trundled through the bright sun and the lucid afternoon landscape, I was afraid that if I gave up to sleep, I might not awake until Slough, or Paddington, and for the latter, there were no circle or district line tubes to catch...
I managed to get a coffee at Reading station from a stall on the platform. I wasn't sure, but the girl who served me looked like the girl who served me coffee when I was here in May 2010, then travelling up to Worcester. This unnerved me slightly, though there is nothing unusual in the same person working in the same place over a number of years.
These days seem full of superstitions I can't quite place.
It was a busy train from Reading to Gatwick, but I was quite happy, serene in the early stretched out twilight, watching all the obscure and secret places no-one ever thinks about pass by, all those shadowy estates with their hidden gardens, spines of trees across the ridge of a slight hill, parks abandoned in the rain. I felt content, settled in this twilight phase, this transition. The man opposite me commented to his wife how 'murky' the day was out there.

(there is always that fear of life passing you by, when I was younger it was there, this fear of getting old before I had fully finished with being young, even when I was fifteen, the approaching end of childhood unnerved me, and I remember the autumn of when I was twenty one - 1993 - the dread of the passing autumn days that I wanted to last for far, far longer, and in this all, there is that fear also of staying still, of watching other people - other places - move on, and being left behind - Mark and myself, during the days of Actors Orphanage, even wrote a song about it, 'Lovers Lie'. It was called 'Train Song' for a while because we had used a train sound effect during the song, and the lyrics were full of references to trains and journeys, and watching the trains pass by but never being on the train... I don't have the song any longer - I only had a cassette copy and we recorded the song over the balmy Easter of 1996 - sixteen years ago - but the fear of being left behind still remains even if the song is long gone)

They are secret landscapes you see by train, as unreal and unreachable as the cloud kingdoms seen by plane.
Windows of houses promising rooms dulled by dim afternoon light, a slight valley, scattered houses hidden by suburban trees and the street lamps having just come on, and, there - for a time - I thought the train might creep through the ground of the mansion I have seen only once before, February of 1997, and can't remember where - Reigate? Redhill, the place anyway where I saw what I came to call the King of Stations. The train stations of these places are secret things - empty platforms lit by white lamps, and no-one gets off the train, and I think what would it be like to fall in love here, to sleep here, to dream and wake and get lost here? Oh, but we're all lost here already though, as we pass by in these trains, through these unknown places at twilight, and we don't stop and we don't stay, and we're still all scared of being left behind.

Postcard from Cleobury Mortimer

First post on my new lap top. No humming of ancient hard-drives, and  I have an 'i' key I can actually type with. White keyboard, all new and under the keys, the turquoise blue of the background panel, all sci-fi blue and gleaming, a summer pool made of metal and alien sky...
Got soaked walking to Brighton Station this morning. A deceptively fine rain in the mild air. I wished I had caught the bus.
The train ride up here went immensely quick (still what wouldn't be quick after the epic fourteen hour coach journey from Inverness to Brighton three weeks ago today?) No hitches, no delays, even the tube ride was smooth... The most annoying thing was a French man who sat next to me on the train from London to Worcester (he kept shifting and squirming in his seat like some recalcitrant child) and the man who sat behind me on the train from Brighton to London, whose voice resonated at a particular timbre that seemed uncannily precise in its ability to irritate...
Always nice watching the landscape shift, from the sparse dullness of the Sussex Downs to the tangled luxuriance of Worcestershire, the latter a landscape of poplar trees and chimneys, crumbling red brick walls and tangled clusters of trees scattered about the yellowing October fields. Autumn had cast all this with a light from a dream, full of something pensive, as if the train were passing through a landscape where something had just happened. The journey was also marked by an incredible tiredness, an inexplicable exhaustion pushing me into the tempations of sleep, of train-sleep, lulled into dreams by the rhythm of the carriages, the wheels on the tracks, the passing of station names Moreton-in-Marsh, Kingham, Evesham, Honeybourne, Pershore...
I had ten minutes to spare at Worcester, waiting outside Foregate Street station for my parents to pick me up. Leant against the time table sign, watching all the teenagers passing by (why is Worcester full of so many teenagers? - I never noticed it when I lived here). Here I was, yet another Worcester - not the Worcester I travel to with Em, nor the one I went to college at, nor the one even before that, day-trips from my parents then bungalow in Bretforton, winter days, and long summer sighs, car and train-rides through that endless midlands landscape... and yet it was the same Worcester. If I turned right, then cut behind the station I would find Em's parents house, if I turned left, I would find the upward slope to London Road, where the ghosts of old summers and older autumns might wait... There was something strangely melancholy about waiting there, and I was glad when my parents arrived to pick me up.
A twenty minute car journey, and we were in Cleobury Mortimer, a name from an And Also The Trees song surely. A new house, a new town, a new landscape that seems familiar at the same time.
Ten past midnight, an Armstrong and Miller repeat on the television, and now I can sleep, that incredible exhaustion of the train journey has gone, and it feels I might stay awake forever...