Half an Hour Left of January

The slough of 11:30pm, the last valley of the day before the needle peaks of midnight. Watching the Blakes Seven episode 'Sarcophagus'. The Liberator is haunted, Cally is possessed, and I haven't really been paying attention because I've been writing a message to a friend on Facebook.
The DVD player is whining again - I am being haunted by entropy again - by a mild sense of things breaking down and a disappointment in the imperfectness of devices. Perhaps the only device that can be trusted is sleep, though its purpose is uncertain, and its side-effects are, well, undreamt of...
January nearly done now, and we have the narrow though forever-lasting greyness of February. A strange and forgotten month February. February is rarely remembered well. The cold days of past Februaries are remembered as being in January, and the warm days as March.
Crossing a low, wide bridge over a vast sluggish sea the colour of lead. No land and no sky. Watching the water for the shadows of sea monsters.
This is February.
The bridge is nearly here.

A Shard cut from Unfriendly Cold

I imagine vast industries below the earth, some subterranean factory that has drawn the distance out of the day.
No light, no colour, and the snowy air tastes like needles.
Walking back tonight - even though there was still light when I left work - it seemed to have been night forever.
This is an unfriendly cold.
Even in the flat, and even with the heating on, the cold still penetrates everything, and at night when falling to sleep, I pull two quilts over myself, and in the darkness there, I could be anywhere.
I see my breath, the television, the table, the plant above the CD rack empty of CDs.
Could fall asleep on the sofa. Waken when those cold industries below us have reversed their annual machinations.

Undersea Shafts

The silence of the Mews is beginning to end. The sound of shutters being drawn back and doors open. Men stepping out of vehicles, carpentry footsteps. Imagined smell of timber and saws. A glimpse of the sky shows it to be a steely grey, an almost liquid colour that seems too heavy. Difficult flying for seagulls today. This end of January seems to last forever - and most of February too - no time, no flow. Backed up water of the year - deep - I remember something...
(a dream from last night)
Some kind of underwater structure, like a submerged oil rig. There are great shafts that go into the sea bed itself. Black maws, a bottomless void. I cannot remember if, in the dream, I am able to breathe underwater or am wearing some kind of diving suit - or perhaps I am on the surface of the sea, and the air is so bleak it only seems underwater. These circular shafts of blackness disturb and fascinate me. They go down into the sea-deeps - I imagine them leading to frightening sea monsters - giant octopi and the like. I must walk past these holes but am afraid. I take short cuts instead. This makes me feel much better. I was afraid of these short cuts collapsing but they do not.
All I remember.
I must leave for work.

Abandoned in Polar Suburbia

Porridge eaten, and a cup of tea still to drink. Just about ready to work, and decide what album I'm listening to on the walk to the call centre. Not that I really enjoy listening to albums on the way to work because I can never decide what to play, time is at a premium, and I won't be able to listen to any more albums until lunchtime, and not properly till work finishes.
This is of course so stressful that I end up flicking through albums on my i-pod and not really listening to anything.

The days may be getting longer, but the nights seem to be getting deeper somehow. Last night, after the heating was turned off and I had retired to my room where, over a last cup of tea, I lamented the speedy nature of the weekend, it felt like I was somewhere quite different from a suburban street in Hove. No light pressed against my curtains (I look onto the backs of shops and a locked dead-end passage that runs between this building and the coffee shop) and there was, as usual, no sound. The freezing air made it seem as if my room was some kind of capsule in some remote Polar outpost and I had been abandoned in isolation for months.

This morning does not feel much better. Well, I say 'not better' but, really, I am quite appreciative of winters more dreary elements. The sky was that clogged shade of blue / grey that accompanies January dawns, and the air is suffused with a rather alarming lack of temperature. Even the shower didn't seem to warm me much.

Footsteps through Unfallen Snow

Just into Sunday afternoon. Em sits on the sofa reading the Guardian while I crouch on the floor, attempting to type while shielding my eyes from the sun.
Em is wrapped in a quilt, even though she is fully dressed, which gives some indication of quite how cold it is today. This is proper winter cold, where the temperature seems made of needles, the air of vodka, and everything is sharp and spiky, as if someone has tidied up all the angles overnight.
I can see my breath as I type.
This is the type of cold - and the time of year - that preceded famous childhood snowfalls - the winter of 1986 or 1990 perhaps (even though for the latter I was eighteen). A period of snowfall would always seem to begin with a period of bright sun and blue skies. There would be something inimical about the sun and the sky - too clean, too pure, too sharp - that would tell you that snow would be coming. Walking the streets of Ickenham or Forres or Kinloss, taking in the last sights of pavements and grass and playgrounds, and all those other things that would soon be obscured by snow.
I would always wake before dawn if there was a snowfall, look out through my curtains at that sinister beguiling world. No footsteps through the snow, just that odd cathedral-like snow silence.
I look back up at the sun outside. I would like to think that those may be snow clouds gathering just over the spire of the church. Though it feels like snow, I think this feeling may just be a mixture of nostalgia and faulty clairvoyance, and that too bright, too clear, too sharp sun getting in my eyes.

Saturdays are Days for Exhaustion

Saturdays are days now for exhaustion, even today that I booked off from work. I had done nothing all day (well apart from make dinner, do laundry and tidy up) but I am so utterly drained of energy as I sit here writing. It is the same every Saturday, the stresses and mundanities of the working week catch up and just wipe everything out. I feel I could sleep forever. Even the thought of eating the casserole cooking in the oven is making me tired. can't even remember what time I put it in.
That old question occurs to me; how long would I sleep / stay in bed for if I never had to get up? If there was no guilt about staying in bed, no compunction to be awake, no shame at wasting time by sleeping and dozing and dreaming. Why should one of the most pleasant things in life be deemed as something to be avoided..? I would have loved to have a snooze this afternoon, but that guilt came down that I would be wasting my weekend off, and that I could put it to more constructive use.
Which I did do, but I wonder what I would have enjoyed more.
Everything feels sleepy in the living room, reminiscent of rooms which have been avoided. I don;t know why. Reminds me of being ill when you were a kid, sleeping all day on the sofa in the quilt-and-disprin comfort of tummy bugs and bad colds. At the end of the day, when the symptoms of mild malaise would worsen you would go back up to your room... and the room would be cold and uncomfortable and oddly unfriendly. Accusatory angles of the walls cleat in meaning why have you avoided me today? That's what the living room feels like anyway.
I hear the boiler go in the kitchen. Better go and check. Could have sworn I switched the water off.

View from the Sofa

There are five Fontana Books of Ghost Stories on the floor. Why I thought I was going to read any of them last night was beyond me. My white guitar is disturbing me as it is too close to the sofa on which I am sat. There is a copy of the Fortean Times ('Programmed to kill! Hypnosis made me a murderer!') on top the ghost story books, and another one ('The secret history of leylines') a bit further away.
Curtains slightly open in the living room. In the gap I see one of Andy's Cactus's looking both phallic and nightmarish, as cacti tend to do. Through the window I can see one of the lamps strung across the Mews fluttering slightly in the breeze. Sunny out there today, though that cold sun. A friend at work called weather like this 'hot/cold days'. Glad I'm not the only one who realises contradictory atmospheric descriptions are perfectly valid.
I have today off work and no plans until this evening.
Perhaps another cup of tea.
Usually the best course of action under any circumstance.
Even contradictory ones.

An Airport near the Border of a Northern and Obscure Country

Late. Gin. Orange juice. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Weekend off. Alone in the flat. 12:36am. Sneezing. Sleeping. Slumbering through 'Children of Auron'. Waking to something like a cool breath on my face. Here come the creep outs. Too much gin. Not enough orange. I remember sleeping on this sofa before I broke it looking for a lost remote control. Someone had left. A light on in the passage out back. Cosy fox-light. Illuming nothing. Some captured angle of an airport near a border of a northern and obscure country.

Andy's Tasty Ham Sandwich

Now that's Andy back in Middlesbrough for the week, I shall be alone in the flat, except when Em's over of course. I'm sat in the living room now, aware of all those (very few) empty rooms about me. Strange how unnerving I still find being alone in an empty house to be. Or certain empty houses anyway. Would I dare watch 'Paranormal Activity' on my own? Perhaps at 2:00am on a particularly windy dark night... Maybe, maybe not...
Andy texted me from the coach while I was at work, to inform me that instead of picking up his sandwiches he had made for the journey, had picked up my bag of potatoes instead (They were in similar Sainsburys bags).
I ate his ham sandwich when I came back home from work tonight. It was quite tasty. Lots of ham.
I wonder if he'll being back my potatoes with him?

Marbles made of Hangovers

Unstable weather. Blustery rain while walking to work this morning, then a day of uneasy calm, punctuated by intermissions of cold but pleasing sun. Then, tonight, the rain again. Standing at the bus stop soaked. Drizzle-heavy rain drops, like marbles made of hangovers.
The sea is forgotten now. Not really, as I look at it every day through the call centre window, but it is an unreal sea, a film of tides, a snapshot of currents. I mean I do not walk by the sea, do not sit on the pebbles, do not drink instant coffee bought from stalls by the pier. I do not walk down the promenade or stand at the waters edge, looking out at the horizon dreaming off Europe.
These things are impossible in winter.

Southampton; First Impressions, September 1994

Southampton, September 1994, and I was twenty two years old. After my stuff was unpacked from the van, my parents left and for the first time I was left alone in a city where I knew no-one.
I was also alone in my new house too. I didn't know who would be moving in -or when. I had no idea what my next two years studying illustration would be like.
The uncertainty of the future did not seem at all overwhelming at the time.

The house I lived in was a narrow terraced house with three bedrooms upstairs, two rooms downstairs, and at the back a long living room leading into a kitchen. On the other side of the kitchen was the toilet and the bathroom. From my room, upstairs at the back of the house - a long and cold space that I was afraid would never see the sun - it was a long journey at night to the dark toilet.

I wonder what I thought that first evening as dark fell, smoking endless cigarettes, unpacking and listening to music. I wonder what I thought the next morning as I made my way into the college itself for some kind of induction. I don't remember. There is a blank in my memory, a space where the only thing I have approaching memory is vague images of late summer sunshine. I remember during the first break sat leaning on a bollard outside the college smoking a cigarette. Somebody from my class stood to my left, and another to my right, eating an apple. They were Steve and Jim, later to become friends but we never said anything to each other at the time.

The first week is a blur. I remember getting lost in one of the parks at lunchtime, being impressed with HMV where over the course of a week bought albums by Impaled Nazarene, Opthalamia, Havohej, Children on Stun and Black Sabbath. I remember running into James after some kind of welcome speech in the Guildhall in the town centre. I knew James, vaguely, through people I had gone to Langley College with the year before. I was glad I had run into him. He had been lucky enough to get into halls of residence and that afternoon we went back to his room, listened to The Cure and talked about starting a band, as I suppose almost every first year does in Freshers Week.
That night I waited for him, as agreed, outside his halls of residence to join him and some of his classmates down the pub. I seemed to be waiting there an eternity, listening to Moonspell's first mini-album 'Under the Moonspell' on my walkman headphones. Black night and windy. Still warm though. I remember the yellow squares of the windows in the halls of residence building, situated near the main college itself.
I don't remember the pub that night, but I remember the names of some of the people there; William, Kristen, Violet... maybe some others. I met them the next morning too as they walked about the town centre taking photographs for a project for their film course.

St Marys bothered me. This was the name of the area in which I lived. When I was first looking at houses, over the summer, I was bothered then too. Though the streets were empty, there was something a little unnerving about them too... At the time, this feeling of unease manifested itself as thinking 'the streets were too wide'. Most of the residents of St Marys were from other countries. There was a temple down the road from me, I can't remember for which faith though, and the roads... A labyrinthine clutch of roads, a maze of identical terraced buildings, low ragged houses interspersed with small corner shops selling the mundane and the exotic; fruits and meats I couldn't name, newspapers in which I couldn't recognise the alphabet let alone the language.
My initial feelings about St Marys were to be proved right, it wasn't to be the most of salubrious areas in which to live.

I dreaded that first weekend there as after finishing college at Thursday lunchtime, I wasn't to be back in until Monday, which meant four days on my own in a town where I knew no-one. I didn't have the number for James' halls of residence, and knew no-one else, but much like things we dread, I remember nothing about that weekend now.

I remember a poem I wrote though. Had the windows open in my room and the air was warm, and through the windows, the sound of voices and children playing. It reminded me of Southside in Kinloss, where I lived for a while when I was a kid; Cries outside the window feel just like 78, sixteen years have gone and the hour is late... (Hmm. Less said about that the better. I still have the poem somewhere. I have no idea why I remember those lines) Strange to think that back then, I was remembering a feeling from sixteen years before, and here I am now, eighteen years on from then. Remembering remembering.
Never happier than messing about with time and memory.
Even when I was 22 it seems.

That was my first week or so at Southampton anyway.
Nothing very exciting happened.

Early Morning Industries

Sat on the bed waiting for the water to heat for s shower.
Through the open window I hear unaccustomed early morning sounds (I don't usually have the window openat this time). The sound of some container being moved. Distant traffic. Footsteps. People passing by. There is something cold and wintry about those sounds, but oddly lulling as well. They are sharp sounds, echoey too, as if the outside is taking place in a large resonant cavern or empty room. When I first opened the window, there was a part of me that thought it probably sounded like this here 150 years ago - The sound of early morning horses, the stables being opened, the coachmen getting up from their sleep in the very room where I am writing.

Southampton After Midnight

Falling past midnight. Just shut the windows of my room. Been open for hours while I watched the TV in the other room. Came back in. Sharp night air, and outside the rectangle of blackness, the angles of roofs, the planes of gardens, and all light hidden by stone and brick. Lamps swallowed up by midnight and houses. There is something kind about the night this deep into Hove, halfway between Sackville Road and Portslade. No noise, no disturbance. It feels like night-time here. It never did when I lived in the bedsit.

I rarely think about Southampton.
Too overshadowed by Worcester which came afterwards, and the extended adolescence in the metrolands of Ickenham and Uxbridge. I spent two years living there though. A long time - but not long enough for it ever to seem permanent somehow. A liminal time, an hour neither here nor there, lost minutes, last years, less seconds, and I chip away at the ice that surrounds time and cities. The ice is thinner than I think, and suddenly there is a hole with jagged edges, and through the hole I don't see myself, but what was around me and never saw at the time.

Twenty two years old.
Remember that first Sunday there when my parents left me to unpack in my new room. Alone in the house on Clovelly Road. No-one moving in for a while. Knowing no-one in the city. A sense of euphoric panic and victorious unease. 20 Silk Cut from the local shop where I interrupted an argument between the shopkeeper and a customer. St Marys, the area I lived in seeming restless and untrustworthy, and knowing this because 'the streets were too wide'. The phone box on the corner, and already, the days greying with winter. The mould in the corner of my room, at the back of the house, looking out onto a narrow yard. First album I played there was by the Zero Boys, 'Vicious Circle'. Not an album I was ever particularly fond of. Strange place Southampton, and as I unpacked books and records and posters of Joy Division and the Misfits, balanced my sheep skull on the speaker, I could feel the coldness of Southampton coming.
I would like to say I never remember Southampton with blue skies, but that would be a lie.
Sometimes the sun would shine.

Crouched on my bed, and I really need to get to sleep. I feel like a cigarette for the first time in ages and I don't know why. The lamp on the boxes by my bed illume a pillow in a pillow case I accidentally stole from someone I once lived with. A pot of ink. Work trousers on the bed.
I really must go to sleep.

Lacunae II

A sense of melancholy portentousness defined the day. The portentousness made me feel as if I lay ill with a fever in a noxious tropical jungle, but the melancholy was like a cool flannel across my brow.

Lacunae

It took a monstrously long time to get out of the shower this morning, but when I had, only five minutes had passed.

The Consolation of Sunday Night Hangovers

The evening of any kind of hangover is strange. The traumas of the day have passed, the nausea, the tiredness, the sometime-melancholy, and is replaced by an odd almost consolatory feel. The day may have been endured rather than enjoyed (generically that is, my day was pleasant if lazy) but come nightfall. you find yourself wrapped in a strangely comforting aura. Maybe it's due to the fact that once nightfall hits, any hopes for getting anything out of the day are gone. You give up and in that submission comes the narcotic-like high of DVDs, bad but cosy Sunday night television (a documentary on Les Dawson), cups of tea and food (potatoes cooking in the oven as I write). At the end of all this (and I have about four hours before bed) are the joys of sleep.
Of course, the snake in this particular paradise looks like an alarm clock set for too early in the morning. Groggily turning it off in shocked disbelief; another weekend done with? Ah well, you think, as you reluctantly pull on clothes, have breakfast, take a shower, at least there's next weekend. I'll get out on that country walk then...

A Piece of Em's Flat

Em's flat. Sunday afternoon fading to evening. Behind the wicker chair found this afternoon on a streetcorner, the curtains are blue with the sad blue of Sunday twilights. A seagull calls out on the streets, a raw sound, strangely attracrive, its owner hunting for fish on darkening shores perhaps.
The light in here is yellow and looks softer than usual somehow, probably because I am still disorientated from hungover afternoon sleep. Anyhow, dinner is nearly ready and Em's keyboard is not working properly, so I think I'll leave it here.
I hear Em buttering toast in the kitchen.

8:13pm Saturday Night

Sad Lovers and Giants - 'The Sky is a Glove'
Cooling cup of tea.
Words for drawings forming and dissolving.
Andy moving about on the landing.
A cloth to clean my glasses.
The landing gate going.
Footsteps.

And Also The Coincidences

In the Oxfam on London road and I'm buying a Walkabout CD for £1:99. The man behind the counter studies my And Also The Trees t-shirt. 'I used to work with one of them. Back in Our Price in the 1980s in London. Weren't they on the verge of making it big?'
Mostly white skies, but on the horizon, over the sea, the direction of Europe, a strip of yellow sun. Sea all calm and like those optimistic days of the mid 2000s. Coffees and roll-ups on the beach before an afternoon shift at the petrol station.
Sleep is still sticky and dreamless, and in the mornings, it becomes increasingly hard to drag myself out of bed. Despite the fact the days are getting longer, when I leave for works, that feeling of raw midwinter seems to deepen.
Sharp branches against restless skies, and the posts of the street lamps look like scaffolding for a building whose purpose is as yet uncertain and undecided, but is probably at least slightly sinister.
Another call centre or perhaps a gallows.
But probably just another Tescos Express.

Something Always There

Something always there.
Sometimes it might be in the streets of a nowhere town, neither north nor south, identical houses on a hill under lead coloured skies. Sometimes it might be in an increasingly ragged suburb of London, decaying into fields where the glances of sad looking horses reflect a muted sun. Lately it has been inside the interior of a house I once knew, that I dreamt of again last night, comparing toothpastes, of all things, with a work colleague.
The past is a geography that watches us, a landscape always seeking to find a way into the present, A virus inside nostalgia and chronology.
Sometimes I imagine that the day we walk through might split apart, and in these tears and rips, that deeper landscape might make itself known.
Disappearing into new / old places.
Shed like iron and restless casts, inevitable as daydreams.
Something always there.

Premonitions for the White Sky Days

That other side of spring, and here in mid-end winter, I can almost hear them coming.
A chime in the distance, some low resonance, so deep, its almost felt than heard.
Skies white and depthless and infinite, and the days wet and cold and warm, and there have always been chats with friends about armageddon, and those skies darkening (cloud) and the orchard evenings. Blossoms like a haunting over memory. Hills on the edge of all towns, and in Worcester a path by the Severn winds by the side of meadows, and in the water float the possibilities of vanishings and the memories of last-October nights when no-one would come here.
Everything Scottish and Mediterranean.
In the Brighton seas, a yellow haze.
No-one remembers these days to come. They last forever.

Yellow Sea in the Afternoon

Cold and warm, like spring and winter together. Red sunrise sky as I walk to work. Yellow sea in the afternoon, thinking it looks like an autumn from the late 1990s.
Something I couldn't place walking home.
In a notebook I scrawl the following;

yellowing sky, white days scuttle-leaves, gusty winds, lying on my back on slightly damp grass under a tree and watching the branches sway, the leaves sway, something wakes on the edges of all towns, the days belong to the distance and aren't here any more, when you're young your own room is important, a base of operations, and not just where you sleep and wake, shut-door and the landing a remote place, sat on the bed and watching Sunday afternoons drift to evening, the twilight darken(s), memories of rain drip, wet stone, lizard brick skin, you know the puddles in the garden intimately

There is a candle burning in my room. Straight flame, no movement.
Keep thinking of a poplar tree on a horizon, about the dead street lamps of the last few nights, the one outside the bedsit, the one in the grounds of a residential care home down Cromwell Road.
Think about the sea, dusty days and no-one round.
Lost beach.
Lost days.

'Any Fuel with that Mate or just the Ten Benson and the Star?'

Ten years ago today I started my first shift at the petrol station in the Old Shoreham Road. I took the job because I was desperate for money and was afraid my six months of unemployment might stretch into six years. I had worked in a petrol station before of course, back when I was at university in Worcester. I hated every minute of it. This short term solution to a problem soon became a long term appointment, though I wasn't to know that at the time. The hours were dreadful (though could have been worse) and the pay put me under the poverty line until I left. I liked the people I worked with though, and during the evening shifts (2:30pm - 10:30pm) I could play my own music on the tiny stereo behind the counter. More importantly, I could draw as well. Before I started work at the petrol station I would draw of course, but before it was a kind of... hobby. A passing interest. An occasional fad like my periods of playing the guitar are now. I started to take a sketchbook in to pass the time, and with the Rotring art pen my sister had bought for Christmas that year, set about filling sketchbooks. The petrol station became a kind of public studio. When it was quiet I could happily spend hours working on a single piece, and I must have done hundreds of pieces over my half a decade there. People would comment on my drawings, sometimes offer me commissions (I would ignore their calls if they rang though - I'm not sure why). Within twelve months of working there, this hobby had become something quite, quite different. More, I suppose, a second nature than anything else. If that makes sense. I do know that if it wasn't for the petrol station I certainly would never have produced so much work. Would probably have remained that occasional diversion. I wasn't to know this ten years ago though. I remember that first shift well, working with Mike, discussing the first Lord of the Rings film ('Its just too long!' he complained), having to type in credit card details for a customer who hadn't paid for his petrol but had for other items, and I also had my first encounter with the sinister Ginger Gang. They were low-rent criminals, a few years out of school, and had somehow acquired a car. This battered vehicle would appear suddenly, disgorge its inhabitants who would then cause chaos, steal things and threaten us. One time one of them said that he was going to 'cut... (my) face to pieces'... before throwing a sponge at me and running away. It was probably about ten years ago exactly as I write - mid-evening - that they first came in, trying to steal hot-dogs and try free samples of coffee from the machine. 'It's not serve yourself' said Mike as he threw them out. Attempted to throw them out. I wondered what I had let myself in for. 'How long have you been here?' I asked Mike. 'Six months' he said 'since last summer.' Six months I thought! That seemed like an eternity. Surely I would be gone by spring I thought. I would be there for the next five and a half years... .

Ink and Entropy

This strange sense of entropy continues throughout the day. Things continue to break down and not work properly. My eyes are still not used to my new glasses. It is not helped by the fact that I am suffering eye strain from having to stare at a computer screen for most of six days a week, which can't be good for you. Blogger has changed everything round so things look different to what they were, and don't act like I think they ought to. Like waking up in another dimension which is similar, though not exact, to your own. The piece of art I am working on... well... It seems that the ink itself is now not working. One pot is too thick and gloopy and the other is too thin. I am at a loss to explain it, I really am. I have pretty much ruined the piece I am working on. Hopefully I can save it. Then there was time. I got back from town at about 4:30pm, spent an hour watching television and an hour listening to my new album, and half an hour making dinner, and when I checked the time it was 6:00pm. Doing the maths it seems this is quite clearly impossible. Andy, waking from sleep, noticed this odd hour gain too. 'The house seems to be giving us time' he said. The universe is breaking down in tiny inconsequential ways. An intimate apocalypse, an armageddon of minor irritations. Lets hope things get back to normal tomorrow.

Condensation makes me Nostalgic

Condensation on the windowpanes. Through the wet white fog on the glass, I can see sunlight on the hidden angles of the house next door. The light that falls on the bed is a bluish-white. A cold light. Reminds me of Christmas and old Januaries back at school; 1986 perhaps, school day weekends, drawing A4 posters for imagined horror films ('Frankenstein + zombies = horror!' was the tag-line for one such attempt) trips into Ickenham or Uxbridge for comics or computer games on cassette tapes. Losing afternoons in bad graphics landscapes, losing every game but not minding because who was ever meant to complete Jet Set Willy anyway with that attic bug..? Condensation makes me nostalgic. Back to Burnside, Kinloss, 1982. On the window panes of my room, clearing a space in the condensation. Letting the water drip down. Lines through the white. I used to imagine that what was left was some kind of alien creature, some sub-Lovecraftian monstrosity (I had only read one Lovecraft story at the time and hadn't come across the Cthulhu Mythos yet). I would imagine the house was under siege by the Martians from War of the Worlds (The Jeff Wayne musical version). Hide under my bed with my Star Wars figures and Action Men until I started to think about the possibility of spiders. Spiders seemed much more common back then. Things as monstrous as those creatures I made in the condensation on the window panes. Black bodies and cruel, spiky legs. Black bodies that didn't seem to have eyes. They were like body organs from some nightmare organism. Genuine fear when I would first sight a spider, scuttling along in that nightmare-terror way of movement they have, or hanging next to an air vent on my wall, waiting. This terror lasted right up until I was about twenty when it seemed to vanish, but so did the nightmare spiders too, as if they had been feeding on my phobia the whole time. Without terror they starved to death. I must clear the glass of condensation, open the windows and clean the sill. Don't want mould getting a hold of things in here. Entropy, of kinds, again. I can hear voices from outside. Cold words on these oddly consolatory January days.

Notes from the Wrong Side of Midnight

Just turned midnight. Begin the long fall into Sunday.
The ever present laws of entropy continue to make their presence known. Objects and devices continue to break down (admittedly this is partly because I tried to 'fix' the stereo lead) and my body seems to have slowed as it gets older. Perhaps this is an attempt to actually slow the passage of time down. Age 40, which once seemed ridiculously far away is now, not even on the horizon, but just a couple of months away. Glad I've survived my thirties (well nearly) but I'm sure I should have been 27 or 32 a while longer.
Snow-cold is back. Grey and unrestful skies, though the temperature gauge at Seven Dials showed it to be 8 degrees, which was far warmer than it seemed. Certainly not warm now on the wrong side of midnight and wrapped in a quilt on my bed. Only a cup of tea warms me, and I don't usually mind the cold.
Maybe I'm just getting older.
I really wished I hadn't tried to fix the stereo lead. This means that I can't listen to my i-pod through the stereo any more, and will have to find all my CDs to play, and to stack up in untidy towers in the space next to the stereo.
Oh well. Everything breaks down eventually.

Quick as Lunchtimes, Slow like Gargoyles

When I leave for work in the mornings, the mid-to-last traces of sunrise can still be seen. Walking down New Church Road, the spiky branches silhouetted against the lurid dawn are like trees from a horror comic. There is something surreal and off-kilter about it all, as if sunrise has been pushed back - or forward - but at entirely a different time to what it ought to be. The oddly translucent light gives everything a hyper-real sheen, a lucidity more common in dreams than morning walks to work. Sometimes I wonder if I have awoken at all, and am in fact still asleep.
Which of course is never the case. An hour after leaving home I am taking the first calls of the day and sleep seems far, far away.

Blinds down at work, and through the slats, slices of the shaded sea. The twilight tinge to the glass (to stop it getting so hot in summer) gives the segments of sea the feel of an anatomy lesson conducted, perhaps, by Salvador Dali or Rene Magritte. The sun still gets in my eyes during the calls ('and can I just take your Junior ISA account number please?') and I should just get up and close the blinds, but I look out the other windows instead.
Smudgy-brown roofs of Brighton. The tops of buildings you only see when you're as high up as we are, an invisible landscape. I watch the shiny new planes of the American Express building across the other side of the Steine, and above this a huge crane, like some childhood joy, moving slowly and putting the (probably) final pieces into place.
There is also the glimpse of a giant ferris wheel ('The Brighton Eye') by the hidden pier. Slow moving capsules I only catch the uppermost swing of.
The church next door. The hidden gargoyles halfway up the spire. Something old and comforting and unchanging about them. Been there for, what, centuries before I was born, and will probably be there long centuries after I'm dead and gone.

Leaving work at 5:00pm tonight and last night, and for the first time I notice vague traces of light left in the sky. The day creeping forward, the year moving on, and no matter how slow the days move toward spring, the years seem as fast as lunchtimes do on particularly busy and stressful days you can't wait to end.

Fourth Panel, Nine Hours Work

Fourth panel, nine hours work. Not even the first page done of something I don't know if I can continue. My fingers are covered with black ink as I pore over photographs of poplars and churches and hills and summers. Old childhood echoes, and those echoes of things between those real childhood memories. Everything comes back here to open windows, and like some odd occult device, I feel the alluring desolation of certain kinds of spring days. White skies, and that resounding, surprising cold when the sun goes behind clouds.
I remember the playground of the school I attended for a year there. A freezing breaktime, waiting for the sun to come back. Freezing in thin trousers, and in the old, old morning, the sound of crows similar birds.
Fourth panel, nine hours work.
I wonder if they're windows, wonder if as I draw these memories, this countryside, there's something in there looking back at me.

Criminal Failure

Walking with Em at lunchtime past the old call centre, heading back to work after paying my council tax and picking up a couple of comics from Dave's Comics. Going to take the alleyway, that right-angle corner of a half hidden passage between the car park and some building that I can't remember anything about except that it forms part of this short cut. I see a man lean against the wall. Stocky and grey, and immediately suspicious as if he is waiting for something and pretends that he isn't. Another man comes out of the alleyway we are about to take, looking similarly suspicious. Hunched shoulders and that overly studied casual walk, all rolling shoulders and shifty eyes. The two men glance furtively at each other, but only succeed in looking nervous. Their body language tries to deflect attention. They might as well have a sign about them saying 'something dodgy is going on here'. The man who has come out of the alleyway walks up to the other man, slips a square of something into his hand. A flash of white and that is all. Nothing is said. The man who has come out of the alleyway stalks up off the street while the other man walks past Em and myself, his face slightly flushed. I watch the alleyway man walk up the street, toward Queens Road. Everything about him is suspicious. Even the way he walks. I curb an urge to laugh and wonder if Em noticed anything. As soon as we get round the corner Em immediately asks me if I noticed anything dodgy there at all.
As an attempt at a low-key drug deal, to try and attract as little attention as possible, this was a complete and utter failure.

7:14am

Deep tiredness. One of those truisms of morning, that it must always feel like you will never be awake ever again. Still seems black outside, deep night-silence stretching on and on and on... Remember school days in Scotland. Forres Academy, and Mum giving my sister and myself a lift to school. Always calling in at that newsagent first. A rack of books, and always something there to fascinate me, a new Pan Book of Horror Stories, a novelization of the latest film, Gremlins, or Indiana Jones maybe. Waiting for a new comic to come out maybe. Waiting for the winter special of Doctor Who magazine. The small car park behind the newsagent. The air tasting of cold and night and sour milk. Mum said the latter was the smell of petrol, but to me it smelled like thinking you were never going to feel awake ever again.

The Names of all the Tiny Lanes

This was in the first petrol station I worked in, back when I was living in Worcester doing my English degree. Summer 1998. I had successfully managed to avoid getting a job for my first two years there, so it was with some reluctance that I took a part time job at the petrol station just across the road from where I lived on London Road.
I worked two or three evenings during the week and on Sunday afternoons. Sundays were the worst. I would work from 3:00pm until 11:00pm. In those days we were actually allowed to smoke behind the counter. Even still those shifts dragged by like you wouldn't believe.
There were two of them.
One of them was a large rotund man while the other was a small scarecrow-like creature. Both were of indeterminate age, though I would perhaps put them somewhere in middle age. Late forties, early fifties. They both had learning difficulties of some sort or another and were resident at one of the care-homes in the area. The small scarecrow man was friendly, almost pacifying, while his larger friend, though polite was somehow imperceptibly threatening.
I can't remember what they came in for - snacks, or maybe cigarettes. They always came in together, inseparable friends. One day the larger man asked if I had a book of maps. I pointed out the maps - next to the car care section - and left him to browse. He came up to me after a while and asked if I had any map books which showed 'the names of all the tiny lanes'. His voice was calm and composed as he asked this, his voice reminding me, inexplicably, of a Victorian ringmaster in a strange circus. His eyes were intense and desperate, and he seemed oddly ashamed, as if asking for a peculiar brand of pornographic magazine.
I can't remember whether or not he found what he was looking for, nor what was so vital about the names of all the tiny lanes.
It was an August afternoon, one of those hazy reddened days you get right at the end of the month. Lost in the midst of deep summer, drifting on swan song fever, the season slowing as it nears its end.
This afternoon passed, began to fall into evening. Sometime around sunset I noticed them again, sat by the roadside deep in conversation. The larger man seemed to be explaining something in great detail to the small man. Were they both smoking cigarettes? I want them to be but they probably weren't.
Sunset crept on into forever, and I watched them in the deepening red twilight and imagined them discussing the names of all the tiny lanes as it got darker.
I don't know why I remember this so much but I do.

The Preoccupied Man

In the pitch blackness of 7:00am when I make my way to the kitchen to switch on the hot water and on the edges of my consciousness I just about am aware there is something unusual happening. I ignore it and after my shower am still aware of something that has fallen out of the usual pattern of these winter weekday mornings. Down in the Mews there is some kind of noise - the noise of one of the workshops opening. A white van sits outside the workshop opposite here, usually only seen at night. In the flat above the workshop I see the Preoccupied Man. I have noticed him for a week or two now. I only ever see him in the room of his flat that would correspond to the living room here. There is nothing in the room and is lit by the flat light of a dull bulb. I do not know remember whether or not there is a lampshade. Set in the far wall of the room, there appears to be some kind of window, an interior window, for the room is not deep enough to extend to the back of the building. The man is always preoccupied with something on the floor. I have always imagined it to be some kind of woodworking project - or maybe something to do with a carpet. I have never seen him before dawn before so can only assume - perhaps wrongly - that his appearance is somehow connected to the fact that one of the workshops is operating before dawn.

Glee of the Small Hours

Time creeping in to the small hours. Need to get to bed. Third panel of something I'm working on. 'The country is haunted by poplars' (a boy looking out of a window at night) 'Watch them from the window at night instead of sleep. Milky-spring moon. Cold through open window'. Black ink and pen drawings. rough sketches, the same child by a telephone in the dark nook of a hallway. Window rusted open. That repeated line 'open window, darkened cloud'. Photographs fail and the paper looks yellowed. Attach it to the wall. I need a scanner but mistrust them, as if they will let me down, as they have done before. Give technology no chances. I need to sleep. I feel the glee of the small hours on me.

Monday Morning List

Silence.
Curtain-shadow.
Cup of tea.
Dreams of bus-stops in dark countryside, and sinister London tube stations.
Doner kebab wrapper.
Washed out grey dawn-light.

Afternoon Dreams

Sat on my bed in the blue of early twilight. The Saturday-angles of the house next door, so called because I really only notice them on Saturdays, are beginning to soften into their night-states. No movement there, and the windows, ragged and slight and legion, -I can count at least eleven- are as secretive and preoccupied as ever. There is one that particularly fascinates me. It is half obscured by a back extension that comes out of the main building. It nestles on a grimy patch of wall, next to a shadowy-stain of a blunt chimney.
After work finished today I headed home and soon went to sleep for a few hours. Deep and intricate afternoon dreams. One set in a dream-alley that was located somewhere between here and Portslade. The alleyway was boarded on one side by a high fence that led onto fields and on the other by the gardens of houses. The alleyway could only be accessed by the two entrance / exits, and presumably through the houses whose gardens looked onto the alleyway too. The alley was lined by trees and street lamps. Despite the secretive nature of the passageway, there were quite a few people here, mostly teenagers. I walked from one end of the alleyway to another. I remember one section that looked out onto the low roofs of sunken houses. They clustered round the sinister enclaves of a miniature electricity sub-station.
The alleyway eventually opened out onto a playground, actually into a piece of playground equipment. This looked like some kind of slide, where instead of a slope there were steps instead. There were more teenagers here, a boy and a gurl. The boy had not noticed me and sat down on the steps. I was afraid that he would become aggressive with me, and was surprised at how apologetic he sounded when I asked him if I could get by.
There were other dreams too, but I remember none of them. Twilight has deepened outside, halfway to night now, and I am still heavy with sleep.
I feel exhaustion clinging to me like rain.
It always does when you fall asleep while it is still day.

God of Doorways and Transitions

Passing a call to someone in another department at work today, talking about the two faced nature nature of January, one of sludgy grey cold, and the other of pure and brilliant sunlight. 'Like someone has sharpened all the angles over night' she said, and I passed the call over.
January, named after the Roman deity Janus, the god of doorways and transitions. He is often depicted as having two faces, one to look at the past, the other the future.
January is well named.

Met Em at lunch today. Warm enough to have a cup of tea on the beach. 'Builders tea' (large for myself, regular for Em) bought from the stall outside of Brighton Pier. Sat on the steps leading down to the beach, watching two foreign students eat fish'n'chips from polystyrene boxes. Battered cod on the stones of the wall that one of the girls sits on and behind her, the shadows of the under-pier.
Blue of the sea beyond.
I pretend I remember the sea glittering.

In the lift at work. A sudden breath of something. A lungful of some past, some memory, some time I can't quite focus on. Something that tastes of Christmas and those years of Southside in Kinloss, the turn of the 1970s into the 1980s. A dark and cavernous feeling, something mysterious and deep and comforting like a grotto or a school nativity play.
Looking at the fairy lights on a Christmas tree, multi-coloured bulbs wrapped round and up and down and between the branches. Hypnotised by those lights lost in the most remote aspects of that tree, lost and happy in the pine-needle labyrinth.
Not the only Proustian-rush that I experienced today. Had two walking home tonight. Two breaths, and in each breath a flinging back to some other time. First breath and I'm in Ruth's house in Whitbourne, January of 1997, out in her garden in a similar sunlight. The smell of her parents hallway, an orange smell of new hooverings and air freshener.
Next breath and-
No. It's gone. I can't remember what that second breath took me back to. Like trying to remember a dream, once its gone its gone. Trying too hard to remember what I remembered. Mirrors facing mirrors, a psychomanteum of intimate history, an unsolved mystery for a phantom retro-ective.
Never mind.
Can feel the coming spring. Today anyway.
Think of Janus again, always looking to the past and the future.
No doubt which way I face.
I always have my back to tomorrow.

Things I don't know before Midnight

Watch Em get on the bus, wave at her in the yellowy warmth while I stand by the empty bus-stop. Watch the bus pull away, and in my memory the bus is silent. I don't know why. I should head home for I am extraordinarily tired. Another thing I don't know the reason for either. I slept well last night - even if that sleep was threaded through with deep dreams. College days reunions, people I haven't seen for years, decades.
The night is too clear and spectral and beautiful to go home though. Everything is sharp and clear, as if preserved in an ice that not only freezes, but sharpens things too. The angles of houses are like knives, and the halo of the street lamps looks like it could slice up space.
Even breathing seems dangerous.
Space. No clouds tonight and I can see stars. Orion's Belt. The only constellation anyone can ever name. Why is that the only one I've ever known? The stars look oddly blue, the colour of an absolute zero cold.
I go for a short meander down New Church Road, toward Portslade then cut up into that lose section of streets that run up to Portland Road. Suburbia coiled like snakes. No-one in these streets. No cars pass by. The lights behind the curtains of rooms hide their secrets and their occupants, and it starts to feel like I'm walking through some future-museum exhibition of English suburbia in the early 21st century.

You don't get days like this any more

Reminded of those days you used to get.
Late spring, edging into summer. Ice-cream sticky air, and the hot days falling to a cooler evening. Back to where you live, far from where you spent the day. You're on the edges of things here. Walk in the scrag-fields round the edges of the street where you live. Empty house and cups of tea and the rich, pregnant sun making shadows heavier. Languid liquid velvet.
Pause here as you smoke cigarettes. Watch the days wind themselves on into summer. This is why you can't get these days now. They need to end, they need to be an ending, to open up into the vast and unexplored possibilities of summer, and who knows where you'd be at the end of those three months?
Summers now offer only watching the days pass by from an office or a shop or a petrol station or wherever you work, and you know you'll be at the same place come September.
But this is not now.
Something lost about this time. You know you're looking for something don't you? Something lost that was never found, and you can taste the ghosts of it on the seed-flickering air, on the edges of the white-flowered embankments of dead, dreaming lanes. On the stile you pause, and watch the path flutter through ragged late-ground to a violet haze of a wood, a cluster producing twilight under cut-and-bruise coloured skies.
'...something we will never find'.
Words from an old book, or something you read somewhere - something you wrote, summers and summers ago, and don't really remember now.
Walk back to that empty house made of wood and too many landings and lie in the dark of your room.
Late spring, edging into summer.
You don't get days like this any more.

An Accidental Psychomanteum

Met Em after work for a cup of tea at Mad Hatters down Western Road. The place was mostly empty; people clearing up behind the counter, a couple of women sat behind me talking about vegetarianism. There was a man on the brown leather seats by the door, shaved head and a laptop, sat small under an exhibition of photographs I didn't pay any attention to.
Felt later than it was. Only quarter past five. The wet-cold of yesterday morning had become something purer. There was a seriousness to the air tonight. The taste of snow, that old black January rumour.
Headed up to the toilets before I left. Footsteps on floorboards, clatter on the steps. Wood-angles up on the landing. Discarded things that looked like an old school chair, an old piece of gymnasium equipment. The air was still and heavy, tasted of vague dust and corridors.
Above the stairs a long, narrow mirror, and opposite this mirror an identical one. Walking up or down the stairs necessitates being caught between both mirrors. They are fairground mirrors, distorting reflections into some long drawn out parody of whatever -or whoever- is caught between. Look up at myself as I descend, at the myriad - the imperfect infinity- of warped reflections.
There used to be something called a psychomanteum, something that dates from Greek times, though was more commonly used in the Victorian era. Basically it was a mirrored room, an interior space designed for an illusion of forever. The Ganzfeld effect caused by staring at a uniform field of colour helped ensure hallucinations.
The device was used for contacting the dead, a radio to receive messages from the reflected.
Despite looking as I pass down the stairs, my fairground selves don't meet my gaze. They seemed preoccupied, lost in glances and locked-up thought.
I suppose Mad Hatters has closed for the night now.
I wonder if anyone has switched the psychomanteum off?

Enjoying Bad Weather

The sea kept me awake all of last night, though it didn't disturb Em. A roaring in the background, swelling and receding, but always there. It crept into my dreams too; flooding water rising and bursting banks, steps leading down into dark untrustworthy liquid. Old dogs were there too, Bruno and Bracken and Bess, happily living in the interior of what looked like some kind of ship.
From the call centre, the fourth floor view was obscured by the rain pelting itself against the windows. I watched with fascination the glass warp and shiver, the distance get swallowed up by clouds. Through all the commotion I could see the sea, brown and foamy, untrustworthy and dangerous as the water in my dreams though somewhat wilder. It was so dark that the day did indeed feel like a dream. Surreal crepuscular hours. Watching a strange armageddon outside while talking about child trust funds and Post Office ISAs.
The weather, like some poltergeist, set off the fire alarms, and we all had to troop outside and wait by the entrance to the cinema. Blistering rain and wind so strong it nearly pushed people over, flinging water every way, salty and stinging. The smokers tried to roll cigarettes and the rest of us talked about the hurricane of 1987.
Half an hour later the fire alarm, for the same reason, went off again. We went out by the cinema once more. I was on my break at the time, so managed to take my coffees with me. Everyone pretended to be annoyed and miserable, but were all secretly enjoying this unexpected distraction.
I met Em at lunch, and we had coffee in Waterstones. By the time we had finished coffee, the sun had come out and everything had calmed down and it started to feel more palatable, even spring-like.
I pretended to be pleased, but I was longing for the bad weather.
It is January after all.

Counting Ravens in a January that seems only Recently Gone

Condensation on the windows, and through them, in that obscured outside world, planes of sunlight and blue skies. The light that falls on the bed is white and clear, the colour of the end of Christmas holidays in the 1980s.
The year really begins tomorrow, despite the fact that I spent three and a half (very) slow days at work last week, it didn't feel very much like work. Moving further away from Christmas now and we must all begin to steel ourselves for the grey iron days of January and February. Inevitable and premature will take place to attempt to detect signs of spring, signs of the days lengthening, signs of something warming.
Long way to go yet.
I've always had an odd fondness for January though. The first three weeks or so anyway, when everything feels new and full of potential... but by the time we are into January's twenty-somethings, all the romance has worn off and we're left with a month that seems to have been produced in a grubby grey factory in a country where health and safety legislation is lax to say the least.
Playing Count Raven's doom metal classic 'Destruction of the Void' as I write. It was in the dead days after Christmas 2006 when I bought this, but it seems to conjure up the odd ambience of very-early January, those black deep nights, empty of celebrants and full of something much more like moors and hills and rain. Pre-industrial phantoms pushing hard into all the angles and straight lines. I remember listening to 'Destruction of the Void' walking along the Old Shoreham Road one night such as the above. Everything was cold and pure and clear, falling through the deep-pool air, like sinking underwater. Wire fence to my right, and Hove Recreation Ground all dark and vast, somewhere in there, the railway track cutting past the side of the school. Walking under the walled wood of that school, and in the cold late Christmas night, the trees were old and suburban and secret. That night was immutable. I could have walked or hours but I had an early shift at the petrol station the next morning.
Time is creeping up to 10:00am. I'll have a cup of tea and try to find something to take my mind off the fact that Christmas is over.

Hypnotic in the After-Rain

Time trickling past midnight now. Slow stream of the new year, already (just) into the second day.
Sat in my room contemplating whether or not to watch the whole of 'Lets Scare Jessica to Death' on Youtube. Someone has uploaded the whole film and I've been wanting to watch it for years. Or should I sleep?
Em and myself made our way into town this afternoon. A heavy exhausting rain, whipped this way and that by the breeze. Puddles of infant flood water by the roadside. Everything cold and grey and saying that, yes, this is January.
Caught the bus home and nearly missed my stop, so caught up was I in whatever I was thinking. I can't remember what now though. Blank bus-ride.
When I came home I slept for a few hours on the sofa in the living room, only waking up to play another episode of Blakes Seven (I bought the last three seasons in CEX) before falling asleep again. After that I watched six episodes of 'Children of the Stones', a 1970s supernatural / occult series for children, originally aired at 4:30 in the afternoon, just before teatime and only an hour after Playschool... I was alone in the living room watching it, and the unnerving, oddly familiar feel of it (I definitely have not seen it before) mixed with my rainy exhaustion and new years day tiredness to create a slightly edgy atmosphere. Things flickering at the corners of my eye, a nearly-deja-vu, a soft and hyonotic dreamlike lullaby, unheard on the air.
Have the curtains open in my room. Something keeps triggering off the security light in the locked passage between this room and Drurys coffee shop. A cat, or maybe a fox.
In the darkness out there I see a sliver of yellow brown light in the one of the windows of the rooms above Drurys.
A guilty slight curve at the edges of mperfectly drawn curtains. I wonder if anyone sleeps there, or reads there, or just sits staring at the television, or maybe at nothing? Maybe it is a landing light, left on all night, and there is no-one there at all.
It has stopped raining.
I have just opened the window, stuck my head out into small hours.
Breathed the silence, breathed the night, breathed in another new year.