No-one goes in the living room much any more.
When we first moved in here I would often be there of an evening, watching TV and DVDs mostly. As autumn turned to winter, I found my evenings spent more and more out here in my room, or chatting to Andy in the kitchen. I'm not sure what it is about the living room that makes it the avoided room in the house. Perhaps it is the sofa, that small cramped and broken thing I found in the fog on a March night a couple of years ago. It's not very comfortable - but comfortable enough - I fell asleep on it back in January watching Blakes Seven DVDs. There is no sofa in my room though (I sit on the bed) and Andy and myself hang out mainly in the kitchen if we are chatting, and the chairs in there are hard and wooden.
I don't trust the table in the living room, a large circular thing made of some dark wood. It is very well made and belonged to an old lady that Andy did some gardening for. Why do I not trust it? I don't know. The wood seems too dark somehow. When I look at the table it disquiets me, reminds me of the abandoned dining rooms of adolescence - only to be used on special occasions. Such places have an air that is like that found in attics, but in attics there is a comforting aura of age and old things, and these abandoned rooms are somehow the opposite, new and discomforting. They feel like waiting rooms, or showrooms. The waiting room of our living room has an odd air of desolation about it, as if no-one is meant to be there. Em says it is because it is not homely enough. Perhaps she has a point. We certainly need more furniture in there. Perhaps because it is at the front of the flat, looking down onto the Mews, it doesn't feel quite private enough. Andy doesn't use the living room much either. Has a snooze there, apparently, hen he comes home from work when doing an early shift. Most of the time we're in our rooms or the kitchen. I can't remember the last time we were both in there, aside to hang up washing on the hanger to dry in the sun.
Our own haunted space, but there are no ghosts here, just an inexplicable air of edginess.
Puzzling, but a puzzle that oddly pleases me.
Tuesday 28 February 2012
Monday 27 February 2012
Stranded
Watching the horizon for days, and in the no-tides (currents have deserted this odd sea) there drifts something which unsettles. He knows every shadow, every line of the day, every hour of the night, and even sleep doesn't quite provide a respite from these endless angles and prisms and geometries of the island.
The water is lukewarm and the land is shallow. There is nothing to see. The sky is blue and neither warm nor cool.
It is the same every day.
He remembers old Sundays back in the suburbs of London, of lying on a single bed through narrow afternoons, tasting the rain and railway tracks and the damp leaves on the roadside verge bushes. Discomforting sleep would push itself into the gallows of the evening. Twisting and waiting for sleep, and something lost that he couldn't quite name.
Cups of tea and dog-walks, Swakeleys Park and Warren Road, Windrush Avenue, Heythrop Drive. All the arcana of suburbia.
The boat lies in ribbons in the water. The no-tide is taking it away.
The sea is still and there is no change, and there is something missing here.
The water is lukewarm and the land is shallow. There is nothing to see. The sky is blue and neither warm nor cool.
It is the same every day.
He remembers old Sundays back in the suburbs of London, of lying on a single bed through narrow afternoons, tasting the rain and railway tracks and the damp leaves on the roadside verge bushes. Discomforting sleep would push itself into the gallows of the evening. Twisting and waiting for sleep, and something lost that he couldn't quite name.
Cups of tea and dog-walks, Swakeleys Park and Warren Road, Windrush Avenue, Heythrop Drive. All the arcana of suburbia.
The boat lies in ribbons in the water. The no-tide is taking it away.
The sea is still and there is no change, and there is something missing here.
7:34am
Strangely light morning - after a week of lates last week, I certainly notice the shift in sunrise time. I imagine I will not wake in the darkness till autumn now. Another country but I imagine the next six months will race by.
A dream last night I went to see And Also The Trees. Trying to find a good seat in the venue. Then the next morning and I am with my sister at Shepherd's Bush tube station, all brickwork and dripping tunnels. I am slightly panicky because I realise that I remember nothing about the gig the night before. I remember trying to find a sea then... absolute zero. In my pocket I do discover their new album, and though worried about my memory am relieved that I have proof I actually went.
Nothing quite as dismal as Monday mornings before work. The silence out beyond the drawn curtains is appropriate, time itself sober, and possibly still asleep, unlike myself. This hardly feels like being awake though. I feel I could sleep for days. I don't know why. I'm not even particularly tired.
A dream last night I went to see And Also The Trees. Trying to find a good seat in the venue. Then the next morning and I am with my sister at Shepherd's Bush tube station, all brickwork and dripping tunnels. I am slightly panicky because I realise that I remember nothing about the gig the night before. I remember trying to find a sea then... absolute zero. In my pocket I do discover their new album, and though worried about my memory am relieved that I have proof I actually went.
Nothing quite as dismal as Monday mornings before work. The silence out beyond the drawn curtains is appropriate, time itself sober, and possibly still asleep, unlike myself. This hardly feels like being awake though. I feel I could sleep for days. I don't know why. I'm not even particularly tired.
Notes on a Drawing just Begun
I see a serpent shift where I once lived.
Beyond the snake, coiling where a playground used to be,
a patch of grass, a railway line, and beyond
layers of fields; yellow, ascending to black;
the hills of the horizon.
I see a memory of myself ride the serpent.
I'm not sure what my expression means
but I don't seem disturbed.
Summers lasted forever here
and I would always wait for autumn.
Beyond the snake, coiling where a playground used to be,
a patch of grass, a railway line, and beyond
layers of fields; yellow, ascending to black;
the hills of the horizon.
I see a memory of myself ride the serpent.
I'm not sure what my expression means
but I don't seem disturbed.
Summers lasted forever here
and I would always wait for autumn.
Sunday 26 February 2012
We Followed the Pylons into the Country
Walked out past Hove, past Portslade and into the strange kingdom of Southwick. Only a short walk away from here, but decades back from the city. This was suburbia, a silent place, bird-song mostly, and empty too, appealingly eerie under the first spring-like skies we've had this year. Old men washing their cars with a studied intensity and oddly hypnotic movements - and other men painting fences. Suburbia was a place without women. Small parades of shops, all closed, selling vacuum cleaners and other things I wouldn't be interested in, plagues of hairdressers and Martins Newsagents. In one such convenience store, a teenager, obviously the son of the proprietor, stood watching the football on a small TV. His father stood behind the counter, gave me my change for a can of Diet Coke with a preoccupied air. I wondered if they had had some kind of argument.
The pylons themselves were clustered behind high fences, towering above the labyrinthine squares of allotments. We followed the path round and came to a - I'm not sure what it would be called - an electricity station? A Pylon generator? It was all locked up and fenced off anyway, 'danger-of-death' signs hanging from the wires.
We followed the pylons into the country and onto the Downs. Horses in muddy paddocks, footpaths running through thickets, vast fields opening themselves out under vast and jewel-blue skies, and everywhere the pylons, slightly hissing gods, snakes made out of metal and poison and power. Urban myths, leukaemia clusters. All ground underneath pylons has an odd and haunted air.
We delved further on, along the bottom of s slope, one side bordered by the last houses of Brighton. An oddly dream-like country, the kind of landscape one finds sometimes in surrealist paintings from the mid-20th century. We finally came to the ring road surrounding Brighton and woke up, back to the sadness of Sundays.
The afternoon seems a long time ago now.
The pylons themselves were clustered behind high fences, towering above the labyrinthine squares of allotments. We followed the path round and came to a - I'm not sure what it would be called - an electricity station? A Pylon generator? It was all locked up and fenced off anyway, 'danger-of-death' signs hanging from the wires.
We followed the pylons into the country and onto the Downs. Horses in muddy paddocks, footpaths running through thickets, vast fields opening themselves out under vast and jewel-blue skies, and everywhere the pylons, slightly hissing gods, snakes made out of metal and poison and power. Urban myths, leukaemia clusters. All ground underneath pylons has an odd and haunted air.
We delved further on, along the bottom of s slope, one side bordered by the last houses of Brighton. An oddly dream-like country, the kind of landscape one finds sometimes in surrealist paintings from the mid-20th century. We finally came to the ring road surrounding Brighton and woke up, back to the sadness of Sundays.
The afternoon seems a long time ago now.
Saturday 25 February 2012
Inevitable
Sunlight streaming in through the window, falling on the battered sofa. I sit on the floor of the living room, watch the furniture with distrust. To sit in that sunlight would mean watching the inevitable dust in the inevitable shafts. and falling into those inevitable mines of sleep would leave the afternoon a poisoned wasteland of nothing, save a dream or two. The dreams would not be remembered, inevitably forgotten as afternoon dreams tend to be.
Walking to work yesterday morning, listening to music, I heard someone say something to me. I looked up to catch the words 'have you got a lighter mate...' to which I interjected that no I did not, and he replied '...you MORON' with such bile and hatred I wondered if I had accidentally killed his family. I remember his hot red face, all flustered with inexplicable venom. I smirked as I walked on into work, though secretly I was a bit puzzled why people like him aren't, well, shot, or at sent to work in remote salt mines far, far away from anywhere I might ever be.
I walked along the seafront road from Em's this morning to work. Despite the sunlight now, this morning, the day was full of a white gloom, the horizon of the sea vanishing into a void. It was odd, walking past the fish'n'chip shops all closed, the people gathered outside the Grand Hotel waiting for taxis, and a lone security guard outside the Brighton centre waiting for the model exhibition to open. Something always particularly bleak about out of season seaside towns, particularly on a grey morning at the end of winter.
Walking to work yesterday morning, listening to music, I heard someone say something to me. I looked up to catch the words 'have you got a lighter mate...' to which I interjected that no I did not, and he replied '...you MORON' with such bile and hatred I wondered if I had accidentally killed his family. I remember his hot red face, all flustered with inexplicable venom. I smirked as I walked on into work, though secretly I was a bit puzzled why people like him aren't, well, shot, or at sent to work in remote salt mines far, far away from anywhere I might ever be.
I walked along the seafront road from Em's this morning to work. Despite the sunlight now, this morning, the day was full of a white gloom, the horizon of the sea vanishing into a void. It was odd, walking past the fish'n'chip shops all closed, the people gathered outside the Grand Hotel waiting for taxis, and a lone security guard outside the Brighton centre waiting for the model exhibition to open. Something always particularly bleak about out of season seaside towns, particularly on a grey morning at the end of winter.
Friday 24 February 2012
Mute Light
Sat in the living room.
The outside seems remarkably still - a silence in the air. The sky is a uniform shade of grey, though that grey seems laced also with a thread of something yellow too. It is the kind of sky that hangs over certain aspects of England in mid-spring, over a landscape of pylons and waste-grounds perhaps, a clogged canal sky.
I hear the occasional sound from one of the workshops below me, but even their sounds are muted and kind.
Two cacti sit on pots in the window.
The light through the metre gap between the curtains falls heavily, causing my fingers to cast shadows across these keys.
Makes me wish for sleep and strange daytime dreams.
The outside seems remarkably still - a silence in the air. The sky is a uniform shade of grey, though that grey seems laced also with a thread of something yellow too. It is the kind of sky that hangs over certain aspects of England in mid-spring, over a landscape of pylons and waste-grounds perhaps, a clogged canal sky.
I hear the occasional sound from one of the workshops below me, but even their sounds are muted and kind.
Two cacti sit on pots in the window.
The light through the metre gap between the curtains falls heavily, causing my fingers to cast shadows across these keys.
Makes me wish for sleep and strange daytime dreams.
Thursday 23 February 2012
Nostalgia for Armageddon
Willowy days.
I breathe in and taste a small bridge - almost a miniature bridge - over a railway line that runs across a road I once walked every day. In this imagined breath - this imagined memory - there are also rushes - like reeds shifting on a pond.
It tastes like spring in old towns.
A fragment of something, a fever, an unread book, an unheard song:
These summery thoughts are full of boredom and armageddon.
These words are apoken - or rather, whispered, by a woman sleeping - or on the verges of sleep. She flickers over books she had read, tracing charts, chasing stars, the unfortunate constellations combining, knowing, deliciously, that this sleep of hers heralds the end days.
I have no idea who she is.
A fragment, like I said.
I remember 1999, those months coming out of winter and heading into summer. Caught up in Kosovo, in war in Europe, the bombing of Yugoslavia. Long talks into the night with house-mates about Nostradamus and apocalypse, fractured sleep and days cracked by the anxiety of leaving the dissertation till too late. Worried about the future, if there would be a future, and thinking when NATO and Russian tanks were facing each other at Pristina Airport -the worst flashpoint between east and west since the cold war- that Nostradamus had been right after all.
Willowy days, like I said.
Makes me nostalgic for armageddon.
I breathe in and taste a small bridge - almost a miniature bridge - over a railway line that runs across a road I once walked every day. In this imagined breath - this imagined memory - there are also rushes - like reeds shifting on a pond.
It tastes like spring in old towns.
A fragment of something, a fever, an unread book, an unheard song:
These summery thoughts are full of boredom and armageddon.
These words are apoken - or rather, whispered, by a woman sleeping - or on the verges of sleep. She flickers over books she had read, tracing charts, chasing stars, the unfortunate constellations combining, knowing, deliciously, that this sleep of hers heralds the end days.
I have no idea who she is.
A fragment, like I said.
I remember 1999, those months coming out of winter and heading into summer. Caught up in Kosovo, in war in Europe, the bombing of Yugoslavia. Long talks into the night with house-mates about Nostradamus and apocalypse, fractured sleep and days cracked by the anxiety of leaving the dissertation till too late. Worried about the future, if there would be a future, and thinking when NATO and Russian tanks were facing each other at Pristina Airport -the worst flashpoint between east and west since the cold war- that Nostradamus had been right after all.
Willowy days, like I said.
Makes me nostalgic for armageddon.
A Dark and Certain Town
Dark and certain towns that have never existed.
The hills are strange and jagged.
Taste of stars and other less defined things.
Walking the dog through a wood.
A fall of stunted trees.
Smoke and twilight, a late winter fade.
Sleep in a room next to a river.
Brickwork, clockwork, sunlight.
Forgotten skin.
The hills are strange and jagged.
Taste of stars and other less defined things.
Walking the dog through a wood.
A fall of stunted trees.
Smoke and twilight, a late winter fade.
Sleep in a room next to a river.
Brickwork, clockwork, sunlight.
Forgotten skin.
Wednesday 22 February 2012
Undersea Day
The sea slips to night without anyone noticing, but it looked grey and sluggish all day anyway, like it was still mired in sleep. An industrial tide, flowing from subterranean factories, and if this water had dreams they would be slow and feverish nightmares.
I thought about walking up London Road to the distant charity shop this lunchtime, but as I stepped out into the mid-afternoon air, the wet, cold air dissuaded me. I thought of London Road, and I thought of it underwater too, and people moving through the submerged shops, waiting for waterlogged buses with drowned and drawn eyes.
I thought of the following, walking home through the post 7:00pm darkness:
The wood you see in the distance will not be the same wood you arrive at. This is obvious. The wood that you imagine however does in no way denigrate the existence of that original imagined wood. Where then, is the otiginal wood as you walk through the trees of the real wood that must always ever be inevitably disappointing?
I thought about walking up London Road to the distant charity shop this lunchtime, but as I stepped out into the mid-afternoon air, the wet, cold air dissuaded me. I thought of London Road, and I thought of it underwater too, and people moving through the submerged shops, waiting for waterlogged buses with drowned and drawn eyes.
I thought of the following, walking home through the post 7:00pm darkness:
The wood you see in the distance will not be the same wood you arrive at. This is obvious. The wood that you imagine however does in no way denigrate the existence of that original imagined wood. Where then, is the otiginal wood as you walk through the trees of the real wood that must always ever be inevitably disappointing?
Tuesday 21 February 2012
Losing Dimensions
Briefly touched - a flickering nothing more - of grey streets under grey skies, and in the gutters streams of water running into drains. The water of these streams - overflow of some unseen rainfall - seem to drag something from the day, something from the stones and the air, and leaves us with two dimensions only. Everything is flat, there is no depth, no perspective, no vanishing point, a 21st century Flatland perhaps.
It felt like the brush of pale and faded crow-wings as they take flight. It was brief, a flash of some ghost-technology, but it seeped into the day.
I remember lying on the grass of some Worcester field with Paul, end of summer 1998, somewhere behind London Road. It was a grey twilight evening. There was a flock of birds up in the sky, but we couldn't look at these birds directly. They could only be seen out of the corner of your eye, some optical effect of the clouds and the dim light. 'Are you seeing this as well?' Paul asked. We lay there watching and not watching the birds, till finally they faded to nothing, like ghosts, some cheap television special effect.
Some days feel like those birds fading.
A wasteground full of broken railway tracks, weeds pushing up through the rust and runners.
Breathing in the white-air, wet with rain, air cold as sleep in the waiting rooms of draughty stations.
Empty playgrounds watched by gulls.
A dead boat drifting in canal waters.
It felt like the brush of pale and faded crow-wings as they take flight. It was brief, a flash of some ghost-technology, but it seeped into the day.
I remember lying on the grass of some Worcester field with Paul, end of summer 1998, somewhere behind London Road. It was a grey twilight evening. There was a flock of birds up in the sky, but we couldn't look at these birds directly. They could only be seen out of the corner of your eye, some optical effect of the clouds and the dim light. 'Are you seeing this as well?' Paul asked. We lay there watching and not watching the birds, till finally they faded to nothing, like ghosts, some cheap television special effect.
Some days feel like those birds fading.
A wasteground full of broken railway tracks, weeds pushing up through the rust and runners.
Breathing in the white-air, wet with rain, air cold as sleep in the waiting rooms of draughty stations.
Empty playgrounds watched by gulls.
A dead boat drifting in canal waters.
Lost in the Undertow
Imagine standing at a beach. It is twilight, or the light is bad, like colour in an old polaroid. Little can be seen. At the edge of the waves is a figure, throwing something - a pebble presumably - into the water. As you get nearer, you realise the figure is yourself. The skies are uneasy - yellow storm-light and swathes of deep black night sky. The waves themselves are chaotic. Swelling, mountainous things with an earthquake undertow. The figure at the watersedge - yourself - does not seem troubled by the waters, but as you get closer, you see his worried expression. You want to ask him what is wrong, but your words are lost in the growing wind, and the salty taste of the spindrift is poisonous and brackish.
Monday 20 February 2012
'A Mouthful of Weirdness' said the Boy
As soon as I stepped into the upstairs section of the comic shop, I knew I had picked the wrong day to pick up last weeks issues. I have nothing against chatty shop assistants... Well, I do actually, its just the last thing I want to do when I walk into a shop, is have to have a conversation with the people who work there. Maybe I'm just grumpy, but I want to be left alone to browse in peace. It should be fairly obvious when someone wishes to talk and when someone doesn't. It obviously wasn't today however, as the boy behind the counter began to tell me about his 'mouthful of weirdness' he was having that day (whatever that means). With trepidation I asked him what that was. 'I wouldn't like to tell you as I might offend you'. 'I'm sure I won't be offended' I replied in what I hoped was to be a manner that might indicate that I'm sure I actually wouldn't be interested. 'I'm not ready to talk about it anyway'. He started to talk about comics instead. I wished somebody else would come upstairs and take away his attention. I desperately scanned the shelves looking for the titles I needed. I asked him instead if 'Justice League' had arrived this month. This led into a long and complicated explanation that basically boiled down to 'it will be in this week'. He then went on to say how much he hated repeating himself, and how this was a trait he picked up from his father, or mother, or something, and how, if he was repeating himself, all he wanted to do was shoot the person he was forced to repeat himself to. By this time I was quite fancying a bit of gun-play myself. Still, at least it was better than the old guy who is sometimes in the comic shop, not sure if he works there or just hangs around, but he follows you about, making comments on every comic you pick up, and drones on about just how fantastic and comprehensive his own collection is and how he's one of the 'most serious' collectors in the country... I know Saturdays are the day to avoid because that is when he is mostly there. If I walk past and spy him in there I hurry quickly on only to come back another day.
Sunday 19 February 2012
Virus of the Soul
In the Costa at the big Tescos today, waiting for Em. Stood at the escalators looking down, past that smooth rhythm sound of the conveyor built, through the sounds of tills and footsteps and baskets and trolleys, and through it all, but still unsure what I was looking to.
I flicked through the Sunday newspapers. There was nothing interesting in them.
The mild illness continues on its strange course. The symptoms are so minute as to be almost indescribable. It feels like I have a depression of the body, or a virus of the soul perhaps. I feel disconnected from the world, looking at everybody passing by in the late winter sun like I might look at people in a dream.
When we got back to Em's flat I curled up on her bed, and fell into a deep dreamless sleep for an hour or two.
By the time I returned home, I was subject to a creeping unanchored melancholy. These feelings I find are not uncommon to such mild illnesses. I spent the evening changing my room round, which made me feel better. Battling with the heavy bookcase, making a makeshift table out of boards of plywood, an old portfolio and a half finished canvas happily occupied me instead.
Andy stood on the threshold of my room. 'I can smell blood' he said 'like when you cut your finger'.
For some reason, this spooked me out a bit.
I don't know why.
I could smell no blood.
I flicked through the Sunday newspapers. There was nothing interesting in them.
The mild illness continues on its strange course. The symptoms are so minute as to be almost indescribable. It feels like I have a depression of the body, or a virus of the soul perhaps. I feel disconnected from the world, looking at everybody passing by in the late winter sun like I might look at people in a dream.
When we got back to Em's flat I curled up on her bed, and fell into a deep dreamless sleep for an hour or two.
By the time I returned home, I was subject to a creeping unanchored melancholy. These feelings I find are not uncommon to such mild illnesses. I spent the evening changing my room round, which made me feel better. Battling with the heavy bookcase, making a makeshift table out of boards of plywood, an old portfolio and a half finished canvas happily occupied me instead.
Andy stood on the threshold of my room. 'I can smell blood' he said 'like when you cut your finger'.
For some reason, this spooked me out a bit.
I don't know why.
I could smell no blood.
Postcard of a Late Winter Virus
The postcard shows a landscape showing a twisted tree on a jagged moor. The white sky is bright and gloomy, and makes you think of cold lake water and cold rain. Headaches on Sunday afternoons and falling into twisted uncomfortable sleep in front of an open fire that does not warm you.
I thought I was feeling better, but this mild illness has come back again. A second wave, like I've eaten some non-fatal Devouring Angel. Thought I was getting better, but all the time... The headache is now constant, as well as a sense of continually being cold. The headache worsens when I cough, which is happening more frequently. There aren't any signs of it being a cold though, as such. I suppose this is some late winter virus.
Its made my room look melancholy.
Its very quiet here on Sunday morning in suburbia. No sound of anything anywhere, not even a seagull. Feels like we're in the middle of the night, but for the pushes of light that sneak in past the blackout curtains.
Time to put this postcard in the postbox anyway.
I thought I was feeling better, but this mild illness has come back again. A second wave, like I've eaten some non-fatal Devouring Angel. Thought I was getting better, but all the time... The headache is now constant, as well as a sense of continually being cold. The headache worsens when I cough, which is happening more frequently. There aren't any signs of it being a cold though, as such. I suppose this is some late winter virus.
Its made my room look melancholy.
Its very quiet here on Sunday morning in suburbia. No sound of anything anywhere, not even a seagull. Feels like we're in the middle of the night, but for the pushes of light that sneak in past the blackout curtains.
Time to put this postcard in the postbox anyway.
Saturday 18 February 2012
Blossoms
I remember the blossoms, a plague of pastoral pinks and violets and whites. Early spring days, inedible and delicate, fluttering like moth wings in the still cold-breeze, and the sun in the sky was still cold too, but it always felt like spring had come.
I never really noticed it till I was nineteen, nearly twenty. It was on a tube train, oddly enough, that I first felt the inaudible click of the year switch to a new groove. I was probably on one of those endless trips to London on gloomy Sundays, looking round the second hand shops for albums by old punk bands; Black Flag, The Necros, Fear, Dead Kennedys, Vice Squad... I remember the carriages moving through the deepening blues of early night, and there was the sound of birds, and they sounded electric, the sound of suddenly remembering something.
Spring in Ickenham was different to springs elsewhere though. I always found something slightly sinister about those blossom covered trees, beautiful as they might be. The lengthening days and warming nights would mean that we had more time to delve further into the unexplored territory beyond the suburbs of Ickenham. There was one place I was always fond of, a sprawling collection of man-made lakes and quarries, tangled woods and clogged rivers that did not have a name, but that we somehow ended up nicknaming The Psycholands. Edward and Simon were not as fond of them as I was. Simon regarded them with suspicion and Edward with less than enthusiasm. There were sections of this odd landscape that you always felt relieved to be out of, like you were being watched there the whole time. The odd thing was that you never noticed it until you had left, and I'd promise myself I would never go back again, but I always did.
It was only in spring we seemed to go to these places. In winter it was unthinkable, too harsh and cold and remote, and in summer too dusty and rural-industrial and the kind of place you could vanish in, another Picnic At Hanging Rock region.
There were trees there too, and these trees would also be covered with blossoms. I would daydream about stories I would never write - or sometimes did - about the trees in this tangled wasteland covered with a particularly deep red blossoms that would be the only sign of an incursion, some invasion from another dimension. In another story I wrote (The Sometime Sinister) the blossoms heralded the appearance of a seductive malevolent vampire. As I went to sleep at night in the house on Woodstock Drive, which I believed at the time to be haunted, I would be haunted also by images of these blossom covered trees, alone in their desolation by the quarries, and the man made lakes that were so large they seemed almost tidal. As I fell asleep, I would promise myself I would never go back there again.
This was early in the blossom season. It was 1992, so twenty years ago from when I write now. I was probably bunking off college from the course I was soon going to drop out of. Edward, an eternally unemployed school friend, and myself had plunged ourselves into the amnesiac depths of The Psycholands. To get to this unnamed place, you had to take a tiny alleyway by an old gospel oak, walk through the private roads of the rich where I used to have a paper round, and finally through a private threatening golf course.
It was early in the blossom season as I said, and seeming earlier because it was such a dark day. There was a huge downpour at some point and we took shelter in the woods where one day we saw a dwarf who cheerily wished us good morning, and another time we both thought we saw a giant black wing moving in the trees beside us. By the time we made it to the canal the sky was darkening, and we hadn't even made it to the lock gates yet. I remember looking at Edward in the gloom with glee and a little fear. You know I said we're not going to make it town before dark?
What I really meant was when it gets dark we're still going to be here.
I remember how the light changed, how everything turned grey and somehow yellow at the same time. The woods on the other side of the towpath became a dark smudge of shadow.
We hurried through the rain coming down, and as we passed under the trees we were showered with unpleasantly wet blossoms that clung to us like something you can't forget or can't quite remember.
By the time we reached Uxbridge it was nearly dark, just that full late winter / early spring blue, the street lamps reflected in dark puddles and the rush hour traffic an ever present soundtrack. I had a blazing headache by the time we got there, the kind which verged on being a migraine but not quite. There was some kind of discount bookstore there at the time that I remember nothing about apart from the fact that that day I bought a book of poems called 'Archaic Figure' by Amy Clampitt that I never read.
Even when I got home - I probably took the bus - I was still covered with those damned blossoms.
I never really noticed it till I was nineteen, nearly twenty. It was on a tube train, oddly enough, that I first felt the inaudible click of the year switch to a new groove. I was probably on one of those endless trips to London on gloomy Sundays, looking round the second hand shops for albums by old punk bands; Black Flag, The Necros, Fear, Dead Kennedys, Vice Squad... I remember the carriages moving through the deepening blues of early night, and there was the sound of birds, and they sounded electric, the sound of suddenly remembering something.
Spring in Ickenham was different to springs elsewhere though. I always found something slightly sinister about those blossom covered trees, beautiful as they might be. The lengthening days and warming nights would mean that we had more time to delve further into the unexplored territory beyond the suburbs of Ickenham. There was one place I was always fond of, a sprawling collection of man-made lakes and quarries, tangled woods and clogged rivers that did not have a name, but that we somehow ended up nicknaming The Psycholands. Edward and Simon were not as fond of them as I was. Simon regarded them with suspicion and Edward with less than enthusiasm. There were sections of this odd landscape that you always felt relieved to be out of, like you were being watched there the whole time. The odd thing was that you never noticed it until you had left, and I'd promise myself I would never go back again, but I always did.
It was only in spring we seemed to go to these places. In winter it was unthinkable, too harsh and cold and remote, and in summer too dusty and rural-industrial and the kind of place you could vanish in, another Picnic At Hanging Rock region.
There were trees there too, and these trees would also be covered with blossoms. I would daydream about stories I would never write - or sometimes did - about the trees in this tangled wasteland covered with a particularly deep red blossoms that would be the only sign of an incursion, some invasion from another dimension. In another story I wrote (The Sometime Sinister) the blossoms heralded the appearance of a seductive malevolent vampire. As I went to sleep at night in the house on Woodstock Drive, which I believed at the time to be haunted, I would be haunted also by images of these blossom covered trees, alone in their desolation by the quarries, and the man made lakes that were so large they seemed almost tidal. As I fell asleep, I would promise myself I would never go back there again.
This was early in the blossom season. It was 1992, so twenty years ago from when I write now. I was probably bunking off college from the course I was soon going to drop out of. Edward, an eternally unemployed school friend, and myself had plunged ourselves into the amnesiac depths of The Psycholands. To get to this unnamed place, you had to take a tiny alleyway by an old gospel oak, walk through the private roads of the rich where I used to have a paper round, and finally through a private threatening golf course.
It was early in the blossom season as I said, and seeming earlier because it was such a dark day. There was a huge downpour at some point and we took shelter in the woods where one day we saw a dwarf who cheerily wished us good morning, and another time we both thought we saw a giant black wing moving in the trees beside us. By the time we made it to the canal the sky was darkening, and we hadn't even made it to the lock gates yet. I remember looking at Edward in the gloom with glee and a little fear. You know I said we're not going to make it town before dark?
What I really meant was when it gets dark we're still going to be here.
I remember how the light changed, how everything turned grey and somehow yellow at the same time. The woods on the other side of the towpath became a dark smudge of shadow.
We hurried through the rain coming down, and as we passed under the trees we were showered with unpleasantly wet blossoms that clung to us like something you can't forget or can't quite remember.
By the time we reached Uxbridge it was nearly dark, just that full late winter / early spring blue, the street lamps reflected in dark puddles and the rush hour traffic an ever present soundtrack. I had a blazing headache by the time we got there, the kind which verged on being a migraine but not quite. There was some kind of discount bookstore there at the time that I remember nothing about apart from the fact that that day I bought a book of poems called 'Archaic Figure' by Amy Clampitt that I never read.
Even when I got home - I probably took the bus - I was still covered with those damned blossoms.
Friday 17 February 2012
Flu-like Symptoms
These were, and are, the symptoms and history of the short flu-like illness that I am now recovering from.
I attempted to go to sleep at around 11:00pm last night. I woke, what seemed to be hours later, convinced the alarm was about to go off and that I would have to get up for work. I could hear Andy moving about - he was obviously getting ready for work too. I looked at the time. It wasn't even midnight. Andy wasn't getting ready for work. He was probably still drinking the cup of tea he had made when I last saw him. It felt like hours and hours had passed, but it was only three quarters of an hour later. I went back to sleep.
I say 'sleep' but what followed had very little in common with sleep and a great deal to do with fever. My body was in a way that is indescribably and incredibly uncomfortable. I was freezing cold and tropically hot at the same time. There was a headache that seemed to affect my skull rather than the brain it encased. Each time I cough a wave of nauseous pain would rip through me. What most marked out the night though and almost always marks out a period of 'true' illness for me were the feverish visions. The visions started off as a repeated geometric shape that looked a little like a post against a grey sky. This was accompanied by a kind of impossible theorem centred around being in two places at the same time. I'm not even going to attempt to describe it. The kind of thing that can only ever make sense when your ill. There were other feverish images connected to this; pixels on the internet, a strange ritual connected to the internet (something called a 'minute'?). After a while these feverish images settled into some kind of narrative featuring characters from 'The Big Bang Theory' TV show. Leonard, one of said characters, was stressed about something he had to do. This Big Bang Theory delirium made my body feel incredibly uncomfortable. These feverish visions were not dreams - or did not feel like dreams - as I remember being awake - but more like extended involuntary daydreams.
Morning came.
As I lay in bed I was still unsure as to whether I would call in sick that day. This was decided when I had to go to the newsagents to get credit for my phone and I realised I was shivering again, and my body was wracked with a sense of freezing exhaustion, an almost cellular desolation. The man in the newsagents looked unreal. The newsagents looked unreal. I idly wondered if I was about to feint, as things started to get very blurry at the edges.
I called in sick and slept for the day. I feel much better now. Nearly anyway. I still have that exhausting headache, but I have stopped shivering now anyway.
I attempted to go to sleep at around 11:00pm last night. I woke, what seemed to be hours later, convinced the alarm was about to go off and that I would have to get up for work. I could hear Andy moving about - he was obviously getting ready for work too. I looked at the time. It wasn't even midnight. Andy wasn't getting ready for work. He was probably still drinking the cup of tea he had made when I last saw him. It felt like hours and hours had passed, but it was only three quarters of an hour later. I went back to sleep.
I say 'sleep' but what followed had very little in common with sleep and a great deal to do with fever. My body was in a way that is indescribably and incredibly uncomfortable. I was freezing cold and tropically hot at the same time. There was a headache that seemed to affect my skull rather than the brain it encased. Each time I cough a wave of nauseous pain would rip through me. What most marked out the night though and almost always marks out a period of 'true' illness for me were the feverish visions. The visions started off as a repeated geometric shape that looked a little like a post against a grey sky. This was accompanied by a kind of impossible theorem centred around being in two places at the same time. I'm not even going to attempt to describe it. The kind of thing that can only ever make sense when your ill. There were other feverish images connected to this; pixels on the internet, a strange ritual connected to the internet (something called a 'minute'?). After a while these feverish images settled into some kind of narrative featuring characters from 'The Big Bang Theory' TV show. Leonard, one of said characters, was stressed about something he had to do. This Big Bang Theory delirium made my body feel incredibly uncomfortable. These feverish visions were not dreams - or did not feel like dreams - as I remember being awake - but more like extended involuntary daydreams.
Morning came.
As I lay in bed I was still unsure as to whether I would call in sick that day. This was decided when I had to go to the newsagents to get credit for my phone and I realised I was shivering again, and my body was wracked with a sense of freezing exhaustion, an almost cellular desolation. The man in the newsagents looked unreal. The newsagents looked unreal. I idly wondered if I was about to feint, as things started to get very blurry at the edges.
I called in sick and slept for the day. I feel much better now. Nearly anyway. I still have that exhausting headache, but I have stopped shivering now anyway.
Thursday 16 February 2012
Warming Outside, Cooling Inside
The cold has shifted.
The day was mild - warm in places - the slow shift of the light, the trickle of the air - the angles of the wooden gargoyles on the church next door to the call-centre seemed sharp and optimistic. As I walked home tonight, the violet layers of twilight reminded me of spring nights by the sea rather than under siege in rooms surrounded by freezing darkness.
It crept over the day though - a slight cough, a growing feeling of discomfort. I have been home for a few hours now (It's 8:40pm as I write) and I am freezing. It is not the cold that comes from outside but an interior cold. The kind of freezing that prefaces a period of suffering a common cold, or, hopefully not, the flu. I have only had the flu once properly - seven years ago - at the end of February 2005. It started like this too, with a strange plunging in body temperature and a sense of odd foreboding.
Time for another cup of tea.
Maybe that will warm me.
The day was mild - warm in places - the slow shift of the light, the trickle of the air - the angles of the wooden gargoyles on the church next door to the call-centre seemed sharp and optimistic. As I walked home tonight, the violet layers of twilight reminded me of spring nights by the sea rather than under siege in rooms surrounded by freezing darkness.
It crept over the day though - a slight cough, a growing feeling of discomfort. I have been home for a few hours now (It's 8:40pm as I write) and I am freezing. It is not the cold that comes from outside but an interior cold. The kind of freezing that prefaces a period of suffering a common cold, or, hopefully not, the flu. I have only had the flu once properly - seven years ago - at the end of February 2005. It started like this too, with a strange plunging in body temperature and a sense of odd foreboding.
Time for another cup of tea.
Maybe that will warm me.
Sleep is the Only Elegance
24 minutes past midnight. Not even half an hour into the new day. What absurdities shall we call up as we lie here on the edges of sleep, about to cast off these sentences of cells for a while? Sleep frees everything, even if that freeing is an illusion - a freedom even created by that illusion - at least then it is a kind of nepenthe, even if the effects of that nepenthe are to be remembered. We sleep not to forget sorrow but to forget entropy. This is the solace of the ill, or at least of the convalescing. Sleep is a freedom and a luxury. I remember recovering from the flu seven years ago and the ecstasies of sleep in the three months it took me to recover. I remember the sleep while the flu was in its full throes too- I didn't eat for eight days in a studio flat that had run out of electricity. White snow and freezing days and a continual dream of a medieval magician balancing temperatures with his right hand. Sleep now is like a coma. The blackout curtains cut off my dreams, and in that forgetting I recover sorrow. perhaps I shall throw the curtains wide open. Sleep in the night and remember sleeping. Sleep is, after all, the only elegance.
Wednesday 15 February 2012
Notes from an Anonymous Day
Slow shift on, year clicks forward. No real news but the days lengthen and the cold snap passes. Looked like spring from the call centre window today, and last night, walking up to Seven Dials with Em it felt almost warm.
One thing I have noticed this year is that there seem to be more homeless people on the streets of Brighton. As I walk down Western Road in the mornings I see them sleeping under sleeping bags in the doorways of shop. I have never noticed so many before. Maybe it is something to do with the homeless shelter closing down. St Patricks? I am sure I passed by tonight and it seemed open for business as usual.
Too much cheap sushi on the way home. Too full up to make dinner properly.
A sudden memory today of walking back from Uxbridge College in 1991. An overwhelming generic atmosphere. It was spring though - I remember the green of the moor, the Middlesex fields, and everything pale and shallow and yellow. In this generic memory it felt like mid-afternoon.
The suddenness of this memory was quite distracting.
One thing I have noticed this year is that there seem to be more homeless people on the streets of Brighton. As I walk down Western Road in the mornings I see them sleeping under sleeping bags in the doorways of shop. I have never noticed so many before. Maybe it is something to do with the homeless shelter closing down. St Patricks? I am sure I passed by tonight and it seemed open for business as usual.
Too much cheap sushi on the way home. Too full up to make dinner properly.
A sudden memory today of walking back from Uxbridge College in 1991. An overwhelming generic atmosphere. It was spring though - I remember the green of the moor, the Middlesex fields, and everything pale and shallow and yellow. In this generic memory it felt like mid-afternoon.
The suddenness of this memory was quite distracting.
Tuesday 14 February 2012
A Disused Waiting Room in a Ragged Hotel
The house emits a sense of gloomy edginess, for little apparent reason. Last night I lay under siege in my room, slipping into slightly anxious dozing, waking up with a start, and the yellow of the overhead light seeming dull and dazed and headachey. There was a certain sense of coldness about the rooms, and the living room itself seemed decidedly unfriendly. It was laughable that anyone could relax in there. It felt abandoned and unhomely, a disused waiting room in a ragged hotel. I spent the evening in my room, listening to music (The Ravenous,F.U.C.T,Sonic ViolenceEzekiel Honig) and reading a story - which is seeming to tske me forever - called 'The Things' in 'Best SF 24', my first foray, surprisingly, into the realms of literary science fiction.
Ten minutes until I leave for work. I hope that the atmosphere of the house has righted itself by the time I return tomorrow night - or, to be more accurate, I hope that my internal atmosphere has righted itself by then.
Ten minutes until I leave for work. I hope that the atmosphere of the house has righted itself by the time I return tomorrow night - or, to be more accurate, I hope that my internal atmosphere has righted itself by then.
Monday 13 February 2012
The Clockwork Sea
The sharpened angles deny peace. Wonder through the hospital corridors in twilight. No-one here. There is no sleep here, or rather, there is sleep, but no dream. No voices and no echoes.
When I walked home tonight, the sky was a nightfall-blue, cold and curiously spring-like. The street lamps came on, slowly it seemed, and the air was surprisingly mild.
It rains when I am not here. I return to pavements full of reflections and everyone wrapped in coats in a way that people used to thirty years ago. More even, if I am honest. Waverley Crescent echoes. Red phone-box doors and the green typewriter on the lunchtime news before the childrens TV shows.
A sigh of resignation and expectancy. An anchor wrapped around a suitcase, thrown in the grey-green seas. The kind of sea you might find in Worcestershire on dreary spring days. That sea is everything and there is no tide, no current, just an endless reflection of an iron-grey sky that has forgotten both sun and rain.
The clockwork starts to tick again.
I always knew it would.
When I walked home tonight, the sky was a nightfall-blue, cold and curiously spring-like. The street lamps came on, slowly it seemed, and the air was surprisingly mild.
It rains when I am not here. I return to pavements full of reflections and everyone wrapped in coats in a way that people used to thirty years ago. More even, if I am honest. Waverley Crescent echoes. Red phone-box doors and the green typewriter on the lunchtime news before the childrens TV shows.
A sigh of resignation and expectancy. An anchor wrapped around a suitcase, thrown in the grey-green seas. The kind of sea you might find in Worcestershire on dreary spring days. That sea is everything and there is no tide, no current, just an endless reflection of an iron-grey sky that has forgotten both sun and rain.
The clockwork starts to tick again.
I always knew it would.
Sunday 12 February 2012
Fragments of Snow on the Hills
Snow out on the hills, no horizon, just shades of white and blue-grey. Deep snow on the tracks - up to your ankle. The snow hushes everything, mutes sound, robs voices of their echoes. Could be anywhere here. There's some transmitter behind me, a television transmitter I think. Looks like something lost from World War II. A suddenly steep descent causes us to slow for fear of slipping. Lewes is in the distance. I think of cups of tea and warmth, but despite the snow, it isn't that cold. Everything looks like a childhood memory - or a memory of an imaginary holiday taken in some mountainous region some years previously - a fourth or fifth country in Scandinavia perhaps, or some new region in Scotland. Were it not for that motorway like road in and out Brighton, we would be alone here in silence, and we might be anywhere and also any time.
Saturday 11 February 2012
Teenage Sky
According to the temperature it is 0 degrees outside, and as has been noted before, this cold snap has bought with it a peculiar side-effect of the act of remembering becoming sharper. Not all the memories it has bought back are of inter seasons strangely, as I would have expected. Over the course of the morning the following have come to my attention:
1) Playing computer games in my bedroom in Ickenham when I was 13. Specifically playing a game called 'Sorcery' on my Amstrad that I had got as a present for the Christmas of 1985. I think the light of today (bright and sharp and icy, if light could be described as such) is responsible for this. I remember my bed in the light that fell from the window, everything blue and unreal -at least in my memory. Waiting for the computer games to load. Sound of Radio Two in the kitchen. The sound of the yellow fluorescent light there, a low comforting humming. Bruno the dog sniffing round the cooker.
2) Listening to Hawkwind's 'In Search of Space' album. I bought this album in the spring of 1988 as I was approaching my GCSEs. I have a specific memory associated with this album. I don't know why. It is of listening to the album at the 223 bus stop at Uxbridge bus station, back of Woolworths, waiting for the bus home. It is sunny in this memory. I may have been off school for GCSEs, though the memory seems to be earlier than exam time...
3) Walking down Woodstock Drive carrying a bag of comics. I am walking under overhanging trees and it is dark. This is a memory from about 1992/very early 1993. The odd thing about this one is that it never happened - or at least not as I am remembering it. It is more like a distillation of memories into a single image. Woodstock Drive in this memory feels ancient and old... as if in the memory I am aware of it being remembered; I know am walking through an old place. At the time of course it was just Woodstock Drive and I had no idea of the mythic power the road - and other roads - would come to hold in the future.
Hmm. Well, all these memories seem to revolve around Ickenham and my teenage years in London suburbia. Looking out of the window now, the sky does seem very reminiscent of the skies out of my bedroom window at Ickenham. Such a fallacy to think that the same sky can fall over different streets, let alone different cities.
Thats all I can be bothered to write anyway. Now playing Hawkwind's 'In Search of Space' album. On CD with bonus tracks... I remember I had it on cassette tape. I wonder what happened to it.
I might go for a walk.
There is that odd listlessness of Saturdays.
1) Playing computer games in my bedroom in Ickenham when I was 13. Specifically playing a game called 'Sorcery' on my Amstrad that I had got as a present for the Christmas of 1985. I think the light of today (bright and sharp and icy, if light could be described as such) is responsible for this. I remember my bed in the light that fell from the window, everything blue and unreal -at least in my memory. Waiting for the computer games to load. Sound of Radio Two in the kitchen. The sound of the yellow fluorescent light there, a low comforting humming. Bruno the dog sniffing round the cooker.
2) Listening to Hawkwind's 'In Search of Space' album. I bought this album in the spring of 1988 as I was approaching my GCSEs. I have a specific memory associated with this album. I don't know why. It is of listening to the album at the 223 bus stop at Uxbridge bus station, back of Woolworths, waiting for the bus home. It is sunny in this memory. I may have been off school for GCSEs, though the memory seems to be earlier than exam time...
3) Walking down Woodstock Drive carrying a bag of comics. I am walking under overhanging trees and it is dark. This is a memory from about 1992/very early 1993. The odd thing about this one is that it never happened - or at least not as I am remembering it. It is more like a distillation of memories into a single image. Woodstock Drive in this memory feels ancient and old... as if in the memory I am aware of it being remembered; I know am walking through an old place. At the time of course it was just Woodstock Drive and I had no idea of the mythic power the road - and other roads - would come to hold in the future.
Hmm. Well, all these memories seem to revolve around Ickenham and my teenage years in London suburbia. Looking out of the window now, the sky does seem very reminiscent of the skies out of my bedroom window at Ickenham. Such a fallacy to think that the same sky can fall over different streets, let alone different cities.
Thats all I can be bothered to write anyway. Now playing Hawkwind's 'In Search of Space' album. On CD with bonus tracks... I remember I had it on cassette tape. I wonder what happened to it.
I might go for a walk.
There is that odd listlessness of Saturdays.
Friday 10 February 2012
Spindrift Cast in Subterranean Attics
I can't ever remember it feeling this late at night before, even if it is still a quarter of an hour until midnight.
It is the cold that makes everything feel so late and remote and oddly abandoned. I don't feel like I'm sitting in a freezing room in a Hove flat writing this but in an empty room in an abandoned research facility on some remote island, - off the coast of Scotland perhaps. Draw back the curtains and I'll see a corridor. This night feels subterranean, and everything - even time - so utterly frozen. Feels like I'm in an attic deep underground. The cold sharpens things, sharpens everything, the air is like a knife and the only heat is from a cup of tea on the bedside table made out of empty cardboard boxes. I would turn the heating on, but like the best of haunted houses, it doesn't make a difference. I can see my breath as I write, a spindrift biology.
I can't hear anything. No noise. Utter, utter silence. I can't even imagine voices. I feel like I'm the last man alive. Which is an oddly pleasant feeling. Daylight is another land entirely, a continent, a lifetime away. There is something peaceful about it being this late at night, even if it isn't late at all.
It is the cold that makes everything feel so late and remote and oddly abandoned. I don't feel like I'm sitting in a freezing room in a Hove flat writing this but in an empty room in an abandoned research facility on some remote island, - off the coast of Scotland perhaps. Draw back the curtains and I'll see a corridor. This night feels subterranean, and everything - even time - so utterly frozen. Feels like I'm in an attic deep underground. The cold sharpens things, sharpens everything, the air is like a knife and the only heat is from a cup of tea on the bedside table made out of empty cardboard boxes. I would turn the heating on, but like the best of haunted houses, it doesn't make a difference. I can see my breath as I write, a spindrift biology.
I can't hear anything. No noise. Utter, utter silence. I can't even imagine voices. I feel like I'm the last man alive. Which is an oddly pleasant feeling. Daylight is another land entirely, a continent, a lifetime away. There is something peaceful about it being this late at night, even if it isn't late at all.
A Short-cut for the Railway Men
Walking from the Hydrant up to Seven Dials last night with the snow coming down. Didn't stick, ground too wet. Looking up through the spiralling moth-flutters at the railway bridge. A path up the embankment to the tracks - a short cut for railway workers? - and the path is lined by airport-bright lamps.
I watch a man walk down the steps.
There are two bridges here, a curiously indescribable gap between them. The bridges - both bridges - are huge. Dark and Satanically alluring mills of stone and lights and track-song, the earthquake-rhythm of trains making their journeys, unmappable from underneath.
Another man, from under one of the bridges, takes a picture with the loud click of a camera that sounds like an old SLR.
I look back to see what he has taken a photograph of, but all I see is a bleak February night; headlights and Thursdays and burgers in Wetherspoons and science fiction anthologies I didn't buy in the charity shop down London Road.
I watch a man walk down the steps.
There are two bridges here, a curiously indescribable gap between them. The bridges - both bridges - are huge. Dark and Satanically alluring mills of stone and lights and track-song, the earthquake-rhythm of trains making their journeys, unmappable from underneath.
Another man, from under one of the bridges, takes a picture with the loud click of a camera that sounds like an old SLR.
I look back to see what he has taken a photograph of, but all I see is a bleak February night; headlights and Thursdays and burgers in Wetherspoons and science fiction anthologies I didn't buy in the charity shop down London Road.
Wednesday 8 February 2012
Superstitious Months
No snow. Still. Each breath in tastes like needles. No colour and I cannot remember the sky but there is still no snow. I wonder if winter freezes time... if the plunged (drowned) temperature is a cousin to absolute zero. Time a physical plane, and the colder it gets the less time flows... and it seems to have been cold forever.
The river is made of transparent concrete.
Some summers seem to last forever too though. Deep August fever and everything tasting of cut grass and typhoid, hot tarmac and ice-cream. August like a set of steps through an abandoned building whose decay has stilled. Last month of summer and no movement and the last month of winter and no movement either.
These superstitious months are cousins. Mirror-twins.
Sat on the sofa in the living room earlier, wearing my leather jacket and still too cold. Occasional expeditions to the window to look for signs of snow but still none. I had a shower and dreaded getting out and even in the steam that fogged the bathroom like eye-strain I could still feel winter.
And the Old Shoreham Road swings through these days, scythe-like. I haven't walked it in months, but that black stretch of road in my memory is heavy with these days; the bridge, the walled wood, the electricity substation, -site of strange excavations, occult archaeology, deep digging, and orange tape round the railings.
the dark promise of a field
she looks back and the summer-blue
tastes of the distance in a France
i have never seen
I still don't dream in these nights, and in the mornings as I walk to work the boughs of the trees are jagged and upright, knives to cut the sky, bleed the blue from the seas we can no longer recall.
I have not walked there for months.
i am afraid the sea will kill me
Something I wrote in a notebook back in 1998.
In summers that seemed like winter and lasted forever.
The river is made of transparent concrete.
Some summers seem to last forever too though. Deep August fever and everything tasting of cut grass and typhoid, hot tarmac and ice-cream. August like a set of steps through an abandoned building whose decay has stilled. Last month of summer and no movement and the last month of winter and no movement either.
These superstitious months are cousins. Mirror-twins.
Sat on the sofa in the living room earlier, wearing my leather jacket and still too cold. Occasional expeditions to the window to look for signs of snow but still none. I had a shower and dreaded getting out and even in the steam that fogged the bathroom like eye-strain I could still feel winter.
And the Old Shoreham Road swings through these days, scythe-like. I haven't walked it in months, but that black stretch of road in my memory is heavy with these days; the bridge, the walled wood, the electricity substation, -site of strange excavations, occult archaeology, deep digging, and orange tape round the railings.
the dark promise of a field
she looks back and the summer-blue
tastes of the distance in a France
i have never seen
I still don't dream in these nights, and in the mornings as I walk to work the boughs of the trees are jagged and upright, knives to cut the sky, bleed the blue from the seas we can no longer recall.
I have not walked there for months.
i am afraid the sea will kill me
Something I wrote in a notebook back in 1998.
In summers that seemed like winter and lasted forever.
Tuesday 7 February 2012
Snowmen Built by Railway Tracks
The first time I've made it home after work and there has been light in the sky. The light was violet, fading to purple. Tasted as cold and beautiful as it looked. I caught the bus home, missed my stop and had to walk back a short way. I was glad I did as - not more than half an hour ago - a bloated moon hung heavy over the roofs of the houses. Caught in the gaze of lunar attention, I slipped the key into the lock of the front door, walked up those stairs with that milky-silver gaze tasting my imagined spine.
A glass of mercury, laced with ice-cubes, a sip of infinite drink of lemonade.
At work today, and looking out of the window between calls. Orange sunset on the buildings to the east of Brighton. Hospital spires and church wards, all set against that deadly cold of the sky. A sudden slipping back, the buildings like pictures from an old Ladybird book. Fragments of memories and flashes of childhood - Southside, Kinloss, that sacred hushed and sharp quiet of building snowmen by the railway tracks, ghost hunting with Carl Haslam and games of horror card top trumps on the front step of 66 Abbey Crescent. Those buildings on the hill put me in mind - and I don't know why - of the landscape surrounding the green fenced enclave of Southside also. Farmers fields and distant woods, one sandy knoll Craig named as Rabbits Hill.
I look for it on googlemaps but can't find it.
Because I catch the bus one stop too far I have to walk back along New Church Road. Instead of taking the normal entrance into the Mews I take the back entrance instead. This necessitates walking along a short dark track (there is a lamp here but it has been dead since I moved here last year). Another shift in time - another memory - kind of... or perhaps not, as it didn't feel like my memory anyway. It was something about the cold, and walking through a patch of sudden darkness, all blue and luxurious, and the earth of the track frozen hard. Some memory, some resonance that remained just out of reach (Walking through the woods? Walking through a field in Worcestershire? A patch of frozen ice in the back garden of my grandparents house in Stone?)
The flat is almost silent. Just those noises that remind the listener -myself anyway- of silence; the sound of the cooker and the boiler, my fingers on this keyboard.
The flat has the air of a place where someone is sleeping.
I don't know why.
The sound of a door opening, someone -Andy- moving about.
Then silence again, and just those noises that remind me of silence remaining.
A glass of mercury, laced with ice-cubes, a sip of infinite drink of lemonade.
At work today, and looking out of the window between calls. Orange sunset on the buildings to the east of Brighton. Hospital spires and church wards, all set against that deadly cold of the sky. A sudden slipping back, the buildings like pictures from an old Ladybird book. Fragments of memories and flashes of childhood - Southside, Kinloss, that sacred hushed and sharp quiet of building snowmen by the railway tracks, ghost hunting with Carl Haslam and games of horror card top trumps on the front step of 66 Abbey Crescent. Those buildings on the hill put me in mind - and I don't know why - of the landscape surrounding the green fenced enclave of Southside also. Farmers fields and distant woods, one sandy knoll Craig named as Rabbits Hill.
I look for it on googlemaps but can't find it.
Because I catch the bus one stop too far I have to walk back along New Church Road. Instead of taking the normal entrance into the Mews I take the back entrance instead. This necessitates walking along a short dark track (there is a lamp here but it has been dead since I moved here last year). Another shift in time - another memory - kind of... or perhaps not, as it didn't feel like my memory anyway. It was something about the cold, and walking through a patch of sudden darkness, all blue and luxurious, and the earth of the track frozen hard. Some memory, some resonance that remained just out of reach (Walking through the woods? Walking through a field in Worcestershire? A patch of frozen ice in the back garden of my grandparents house in Stone?)
The flat is almost silent. Just those noises that remind the listener -myself anyway- of silence; the sound of the cooker and the boiler, my fingers on this keyboard.
The flat has the air of a place where someone is sleeping.
I don't know why.
The sound of a door opening, someone -Andy- moving about.
Then silence again, and just those noises that remind me of silence remaining.
Monday 6 February 2012
This Cold is a Means of Travel
Cold and exhausted, like some collision between the winter of 1996 and recovering from the flu in February 2005. Waiting for the water to heat up so I can avoid using the shower in the so-cold-its-haunted morning, echoes of the black petrol station dawns of 2002. Listening to some drum'n'bass album from the summer of 1998. Drifting into the dying year of Worcester. The first petrol station. My room looking out over that long garden. Winter 1995, Southampton, and dark and lost in a room looking out onto a street I didn't dare walk at night. Yellow light of being 23 years old. Records and turntables and grey, shallow St Marys Skies.
This cold is a way of travelling backwards.
Slip out the front door here, and I might be 30 or 33 or 23 or 25, and there might be any road out there but this one.
And what would I do if I slipped out into St Johns and it was the winter of 1996? Would I come back here to Bransford Road - Is this where I am now, and I'm only dreaming of a future by the sea, about to turn 40 and working in a call centre?
Perhaps I am asleep on that bed, and all that future that is my past is about to begin.
This cold is a way of travelling backwards.
Slip out the front door here, and I might be 30 or 33 or 23 or 25, and there might be any road out there but this one.
And what would I do if I slipped out into St Johns and it was the winter of 1996? Would I come back here to Bransford Road - Is this where I am now, and I'm only dreaming of a future by the sea, about to turn 40 and working in a call centre?
Perhaps I am asleep on that bed, and all that future that is my past is about to begin.
Sunday 5 February 2012
Night Corridor
The night is absolute. The vast plunging in temperature of the past week has led to a similar feeling of plunging in other ways too. These days feel as if they are lived underwater, at the bottom of some deep black pool perhaps, some uncharted darkly enchanted sea. I sit in the circle of lamplight that falls on my bed, and outside that circle (and inside the circle everything is hazy and unfocussed) my room seems a vast and uncharted region of sharp shadows and dark angles. The blue light of my stereo seems a continent away. My door, with the coat hanging on the back of it I haven't worn for years, seems another time entirely.
I daren't even think of the corridor outside.
At Em's earlier on, waiting for the kettle to boil, I stood in the coldness of her kitchen. Through the balcony window I watched the street. No-one passed by, and in those pre-twilight minutes, the pavement slick with rain, the reflection of the hotel sign (no vacancies) in that rain, everything seemed old and ancient, as if the moment were being remembered decades ahead.
I could reach forward with my left hand. Well, to the side really, and touch the glass of the window of my room. I would have to draw back the rubbery curtains first though. Why would I do it? It would be like touching a skin... No, not a skin, but some demarcation point between inside and outside. On nights like this, they seem absolutely opposed factions, matter and anti-matter, and if I opened the window, and breathe in the outside, I'm sure I wouldn't taste but a fraction. Night beyond our perception, colours we can't see...
I draw back the curtains, look out. I see the bathroom-angles of the house across the locked passage. I see the beige head of the lamp on the street. Vague and sharp angles of another house in the gap between buildings. I see the windows of this room are open.
Unknowingly, I have been breathing that impossible night-air.
The corridor outside shifts, shuffles off its skin of brick and stones.
It has been in here all the time.
I daren't even think of the corridor outside.
At Em's earlier on, waiting for the kettle to boil, I stood in the coldness of her kitchen. Through the balcony window I watched the street. No-one passed by, and in those pre-twilight minutes, the pavement slick with rain, the reflection of the hotel sign (no vacancies) in that rain, everything seemed old and ancient, as if the moment were being remembered decades ahead.
I could reach forward with my left hand. Well, to the side really, and touch the glass of the window of my room. I would have to draw back the rubbery curtains first though. Why would I do it? It would be like touching a skin... No, not a skin, but some demarcation point between inside and outside. On nights like this, they seem absolutely opposed factions, matter and anti-matter, and if I opened the window, and breathe in the outside, I'm sure I wouldn't taste but a fraction. Night beyond our perception, colours we can't see...
I draw back the curtains, look out. I see the bathroom-angles of the house across the locked passage. I see the beige head of the lamp on the street. Vague and sharp angles of another house in the gap between buildings. I see the windows of this room are open.
Unknowingly, I have been breathing that impossible night-air.
The corridor outside shifts, shuffles off its skin of brick and stones.
It has been in here all the time.
Saturday 4 February 2012
Another Two Minutes
22:39.
It's getting colder. Sat here tired and with a stomach ache, half-watching Brighton Rock and half listening to the washing machine in the kitchen finish its interminable cycles. Switched the radiators on but it doesn't seem to make much difference.
There is a drawing I am doing lain on the floor. Large planes of winter-black ink, and the white spaces between are smudged with pencil. Grubby February marks.
22:41
It's getting colder. Sat here tired and with a stomach ache, half-watching Brighton Rock and half listening to the washing machine in the kitchen finish its interminable cycles. Switched the radiators on but it doesn't seem to make much difference.
There is a drawing I am doing lain on the floor. Large planes of winter-black ink, and the white spaces between are smudged with pencil. Grubby February marks.
22:41
Two Minutes
18:23.
Keep waiting for snow.
In the living room with the curtains hut.
Andy moves about in the kitchen.
Fell asleep in my room listening to an album about a woman who vanished in a snowstorm in 1978.
Saw the sun rise above the roofs this morning.
Bought a 60 year old horror comic today.
The sky was all flat and grey and shallow
and the air tasted white.
18:25.
Keep waiting for snow.
In the living room with the curtains hut.
Andy moves about in the kitchen.
Fell asleep in my room listening to an album about a woman who vanished in a snowstorm in 1978.
Saw the sun rise above the roofs this morning.
Bought a 60 year old horror comic today.
The sky was all flat and grey and shallow
and the air tasted white.
18:25.
Friday 3 February 2012
Looking in the Mouths of Bees
I fail to find the Bees Mouth for half an hour, despite having been there before. I wander up and down Western Road, and everything is suddenly new and foreign and colder. I ask people in newsagents where it is; some know, some don't. Either they are mistaken or I cannot follow directions. I walk up and down Western Road two or three times more. I ring Claire and Sarah. The latter gives me directions and I finally find the Bees Mouth. Blue neon of the sign hidden above the smokers canopy. No excuse really, as I've said, I've been here before. Enter into the mouth of the Bees Mouth. Dark beer and shades of night and brown. Small corridors and backrooms.
They are not here.
They have already gone to the restaurant.
I cannot remember what restaurant they are going to.
I catch the bus home and promise myself that before I go out for Chloe's birthday next year, I will definitely
check directions beforehand.
Even if I have been there before.
Even if I do pass it every day.
They are not here.
They have already gone to the restaurant.
I cannot remember what restaurant they are going to.
I catch the bus home and promise myself that before I go out for Chloe's birthday next year, I will definitely
check directions beforehand.
Even if I have been there before.
Even if I do pass it every day.
A Side-Effect of Seagulls
Twilight seems to fall at odd times now, and the twilights themselves are odd; gold and muted, the colour of autumns and half remembered dreams. I am not sure why twilight seems to fall at an odd time now. It is certainly getting earlier. This is, of course, to be unexpected, but the precise time at which it starts to get dark - about half an hour or so before I leave work, doesn't seem to belong to either winter or spring. An odd side effect of this twilight is that the seagulls seem to react too. Throughout most of the past week, when I have noticed that gold feverish silence of dusk creep up, I notice a sudden flurry of wings. I would like to say the seagulls are in a frenzy of movement, but the opposite is the case. Despite this shadowy, blurry movement, the seagulls - as I look out of the fourth floor window of the call centre - seem oddly frozen. The effect puts me in mind of a painting, the anonymous V-shapes seemingly unmoving against the by-degrees darkening sea, the light-fading uncertainty of the sky. Twilights are so quick, and seem somehow to last forever. As I stood watching the seagulls today, it felt as if it could be any time. A memory perhaps, or something dreamt, rather than something experienced. The call centre felt ancient, as if it had been there forever.
The moment passed and the seagulls flew away.
I finished work, walked home through winter cold and pre-snow darkness
I forgot about the seagulls.
The moment passed and the seagulls flew away.
I finished work, walked home through winter cold and pre-snow darkness
I forgot about the seagulls.
Wednesday 1 February 2012
Before the Third
Walking home tonight at 5:00pm. A bit of light left. Between buildings above the sea, the sky pink fading up to a steely blue. A bitter cold though. A tension in the air though, waiting to see if its going to snow. The evidence is contradictory. The light points towards spring, and the cold drags us back to winter.
Have to go back out in a minute to Ems. Walk through the full dark past those places already passed by twice today,
Have to go back out in a minute to Ems. Walk through the full dark past those places already passed by twice today,
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