Windows Reminiscent of Other Windows, now Lost

In the sunlight of day, (or in the churchyard-gray if your day is like my day was), you forget about this. You forget about these rooms, as days turn into weeks and weeks to months and months to years to a lifetime, however long that might be. You come back to places like this sometimes, to nights when the ceiling seems too low, and the window too reminiscent of some other window, some lost window, from a childhood home perhaps, that you can't quite remember. You might think about watching a film, but the thought of the television screen fills you with a dismal kind of euphony. I've not been here for years - forgotten these places existed, I mean really existed. I might have been aware of them in half remembered dreams, or afternoon daydreams on peculiarly rainy and spring-cold days. These places are real all right, and now I'm here again, they don't seem to have changed at all... except they're more ragged, more ramshackle, more seemingly prone to a kind of internal collapse at any moment than they seemed to be before... Not that they will collapse though. They can't. These places only exist because they are constant. Immutable architecture, an unholy spirit made out of concrete. It is us who are transient, but wherever we are, these rooms always exist, in their silence, in their Saturday nights with the ceilings too low and the windows reminiscent of other lost windows, whose locations you now can't recall.

The White Sky Days are Here

The sun has gone in.
The white sky days are here.

They hang over the shallow streets with a torpid portentousness, a superstitious tangle of memory and fear. Restless days, nowhere and everywhere. Walking back from Em's this afternoon, and everyone I pass seems flat and not there, and I taste the blossoms in the air. A taste that has not been there for years.

Greeted like an old friend.
I am afraid some places might remain locked and lost forever.

I get to thinking about rainy Sunday afternoons, watching it get dark on obscure streets, and the air all church spire wet and Sunday evening melancholy.
Oh yes, the white sky days are here.

What was Found in an Old Notebook

When I was getting ready for work this morning, I picked up an old notebook that had been lying around my room lately. This is just one of a legion of notebooks and sketchbooks that follow me around everywhere. They pop up, disturbed for a while because I am sorting through some old drawer or a cardboard box, then vanish again, until the next time they are disturbed. Sometimes I open them, sometimes I don't.
I had noticed the red A4 notebook about a few times over the past week or so. I think it was disturbed from it's resting place when I was looking for wage slips for the students loans. I knew it dated from 1999 - and as I opened it, I was expecting to see song lyrics from the days when I would try to write songs back in Worcester. I found a story instead, and reading it made me feel oddly nervous - a nervousness that only makes sense if you read yesterday's post about Worcester and why it continues to haunt me. I wrote in there about how Worcester - in the 'heavily mythologised' guise of Clovelly Heath - used to feature frequently in the stories I wrote in my first few years of Brighton.
The story that is in the old notebook is one of them. It is called 'Vanished' and starts with a description of the view outside of my then window up in Moulscoombe in Brighton. The narrator in the story (obviously myself) begins to remember:

'Clovelly Heath - walking along the paths of the river Nerve in an autumn only a handful of years - the dark red of an October night - a raw cold clutching him - clutching them, for he had not been alone then - underneath the brooding curves and angles of the vast cathedral and the boughs of trees that probably remembered Oliver Cromwell and civil wars...'

In my post yesterday I asked 'what is it that brings me back again and again to that place?' There was another passage a little further on that spookily seemed to answer that:

'He was not fooled by his memories into believing that he had been happy then, but he did believe that he had felt more alive then. Life then, though certainly more difficult, more painful than now... seemed to have been full of a potential ...'

I wrote that story back in the autumn of 2000. I was 28 years old. I wonder what I would have thought had I known that I was writing an answer to a question I would ask twelve years later when I had just turned 40?
As I wrote yesterday, only Clovelly Heath is real.
Only Clovelly Heath will continue to be.

Only Clovelly Heath is Real

An internet cafe down Western Road. Time to kill between finishing work and (hopefully) joining others down The Cricketers for dinner - though I may only stop for a pint and head home.
Another blindingly sunny day - no clouds in the sky and the sea from the call centre window still and tideless; drifting boats, a lone swimmer, water-skiers, and larger ships on the horizon. At lunchtime I take a walk to Dave's Comics down the North Laine, and everyone looked summer-y, pre-sunburnt, and in all the yellow-dusty air I'm thinking what's happened to spring?

(and by spring I mean those white-grey days under flat but churning skies, churchyard afternoons under incongruous willow trees, and the evenings gold as September, the taste of blossoms and rivers and electric with all those lost and forgotten arcana of the spring-time gothic)

These days feel likie drifting in summer-water, perhaps a pool in a cathedral wood, or a calm lake shadowed in lake monster territory. Happy drifting in the water, happy under the shade of trees in too-hot days, and the summery air buttery and languid. Then there is a cold thread in the water, and you feel as if something has opened up below you. Look around. The colour of the water has gotten darker, and thicker, and the day is shifting down afternoons to a more sober time. Drifted into deeper water, and the deeper water is colder, less trustworthy (more undercurrents) and dangerous. You don't know how to get back.
There is a shadow here.
There is a snake in the grass, and it all seems somehow inevitable.

(waking in the night, and under the wind and the rattling and the creaking you hear the unmistakeable sound of a footstep on the stair, and you should be alone in the house, so you turn over and pretend you haven't heard it, and you pull the covers over your head so you don't have to hear any more, but you know there's something there, a shadowy constellation in a sky full of stairs

They're playing some classical music in the internet cafe now. Erik Satie? They were playing him earlier certainly. What they're playing now reminds me of the film Picnic at Hanging Rock. I don't know why. I look at the corner of the screen, and they've forgot to reset the time. Only 17:11. Sudden panic, did I leave work too nearly at 4:00pm? Of course not. I would check my phone for the time but it's in some pocket somewhere and I can't be bothered to reach it.
A woman sits two seats to my left tapping away, a man to my right, scrolling down the page of a website I can't see.
I remember leaving a bag in here back in autumn 2010, and they kept it safe for me till I returned the next day.

Spring-time in Worcester hangs over today. The images I associate with it (well, today anyway) make little sense; railway tracks, a narrow path through a field full of high weeds, a garden I've never seen of a house I've only dreamt of and a path stretching to a knife-sharp distance full of poplar trees).
I remember a day in the back garden of no 37 Bransford Road - my second house on that street. No-one went into the garden much, too scraggy and desolate, and the few trees there all stunted and full of insects. One experimental day out in that garden, smoking cigarettes, looking up through the branches of one of those trees stays with me, looking up into grey skies, but warm grey skies. Don't get those kind of days down here.
I miss Worcester.
Or do I?
What is it that brings me back again and again to that place? After I left there in 1999 and moved here to Brighton, I spent the first few years writing stories set in a heavily mythologised version of that place called Clovelly Heath. Clovelly Heath was the Worcester of my imagination, of what I remembered and dreamt about, a place constructed of ghost stories and lacunae and those tales swapped with the friends (Joe, Al, Sarah...) who had moved down here too. It was with some surprise that we all discovered that Joe B had moved to Worcester through his job. My first return to Worcester was in 2006, a rainy-grey November weekend, where I lost my glasses and only found them again an hour before leaving. Then there was that second return in May of 2010 - where I found out that Telegen - my old job - had gone bust. A few weeks later I met Em, whose home town is Worcester. We went back October that year, and a few times since too.
It is easy to mythologise a place that is distant - a remote place from childhood, or some holiday destination perhaps. I visit Worcester regularly (ish) and I find that it's mythological power only seems to increase.
When I visit Worcester now, it feels like I am visiting that other Worcester.
Only Clovelly Heath is real.
Worcester is a ghost.
Worcester is full of ghosts.

(I remember sitting on Fort Royal Hill with Joe on a blazing hot Saturday in May of 2010, watching the sun seem to sink into thye spire of the cathedral. Fish'n'chips and cigarettes. I remember being with Ross here back in the winter of 1998, trying to light a cigarette in December wind and darkness. Only a few matches left and we somehow succeeded. Was that Clovelly Heath? Was that Worcester?)

When I left the flat this morning, there were workmen in the Mews, somehow connected to the workshops below us. White vans and snatched fragments of overheard conversations. Talk of tools and jobs, anhd I slipped past them, and I thought the sky looked new and blue, and the air tasted as fresh as any I had ever breathed.

Vulgarity, Paranoia and Mexican Drug Cartels

The sun, the heat, and coming out from everywhere, a myriad of tourists, drinking and shouting, turning Brighton into a simulacrum of vulgarity. Em and myself passed a couple of rough looking types who shouted something about 'your legs aint broke yet' as we passed them by. We run into Anwen on the sea front. The news that one of her friends is travelling to Mexico leads me to start describing the intricacies and atrocities of the Mexican drug war, the various cartels and what places she should avoid, (this knowledge was all gained from one book I read a couple of years ago and didn't actually finish). Walking back from Em's tonight a man stinking of beer and business shouts into his mobile phone, stood in the middle of the pavement. Down at the beach, barbecue smoke obscures the sea, and there is laughter everywhere, but the laughter is not kind and has a cruel, edgy quality to it. A man walks too close behind me in a dark street and I cross the road, and to avoid skulking shadows at the top of one road, I am forced to 'go the other way'. I do not like their silence, the way they seem to be waiting for something.

Old Evening

The sun hangs there all day, and everyone heads down the beach at lunchtime, but the blueness of the sky disturbs me and I spend my lunchtime in Waterstones instead. Book-cool floors, the calming influence of paperback spines and hardback covers.
I catch the bus home after work, and the evening outside seems an old one, as if it is being remembered. Some remnant of a more innocent time, remembered in old age, or on the verge of a reluctant sleep. An old man plays a single drum in the doorway of a shop. The sunlight on the pavements is gold and yellow. The bus fills up with people. A baby cries happily next to me. The old woman sat opposite me makes cooing faces to the infant, and I think this has been going on forever.
The year speeds up now, lurches into the first warm phase of the year. There is something naked and vulnerable about it all, and the euphoria is laced with a certain feverish quality. A delicate trace of concrete and tarmac and playgrounds late in August (so hot you could cook an egg on the slide!). I think instead of woods and rivers, fields on the edge of town, and something cooler in the ice-cream sticky air.

Cosmic Silliness

Exhausted from the sudden push into days that remind me of summer. As is so often the case, the days which bear only intimations of a season, seem somehow more of that season than it does when it comes. Today feels more like summer than summer ever will.
The Pavilion Gardens at lunchtime full of people. I sit with my lunch on the edge of the sun, my back in the shade. I am afraid of sitting fully in the sun though I don't know why. Too exposed, and summer is not my home anyway, even if today is only apremonition of summer, and not summer properly.
I get swallowed by the shade though. The earth moves. The sun doesn't shift. We're on a rock spinning in space. A sudden cosmic dizziness. I drink my tea and think of planets rushing round suns and stars and rocks and everything spinning in some impossibly vast and absurd display of impossibly complex physics.
Then I headed back to work and took some phone calls.
The universe suddenly seemed a very silly place.

London is Everyone's Foreign Country

From the train windows I watch London, sunset roofs, a labyrinth of streets and forgotten slices of city shadow. it stretches on forever, a distance of power stations and tower blocks. The sunset out of the other window is apocalyptic but no-one looks - at least I don't see them look - because they are all reading books. The carriage is mostly silent - just the chugging of the wheels - but there is a teenager with an old Irish voice 'John, John, John, you'e a jackass, an idjit. Outside. Fight now'.
The train was, of course, moving at the time.

Earlier.
In McDonalds at Putney, queuing up. A gang of teenagers, all knife crime voices and jagged, angular somehow jugular movements. Beta male un-heroics. One does something another is not pleased with. 'Suck my ass!' is his unintentionally homo-erotic retort. Em and me see them briefly upstairs shouting and swearing randomly.
We sit downstairs instead.

Before Putney we went for a long walk along the Thames. The Thames is a wide river, and under the sun in an unblemished sky an unreal one, a swimming dream of a river. Across the water the forbidden landscapes of factories and power stations and dockland sites. There seems to be a waste-ground island, covered in weeds and grass, accessible only by water. There are boats on the Thames, empty vessels, rusting and rotting, bobbing in the undulating tides. Against the edge of the Thames an old man jogs slowly and malevolently, spits in the undergrowth and punches the air like a boxer. Dark man, an old gangster ghost and we do not see his face but I imagine it may be as unlovely and hooked as a crows.

A morning of parks, Hyde Park and Kensington Park. The size of the trees here surprise me with their size. Only a few have the first signs of spring leaves on. There are hundreds of joggers and scores of happy dogs. We rest under trees and listen to London about us, outside of this interior deceptive countryside.

The breakfast room in the hotel we stay in is a noisy place, full of scraping chairs and foreign voices, and women filling up the little packets of marmalade and cheese. I do not understand the queuing system and feel hot and stressed, and I let Em do everything instead. The place smells of toast and mornings and I think that this room is someone else's foreign country.

I sleep well, lulled to sleep by the sound of a generator. Outside of the window a narrow space of pipes and a high concrete wall that cuts off the sky. This small, tall room would forever be cool in shadow. A secret place that no-one might love but might always pass through.

London is full of such places.

7:54am

The last few minutes before leaving for work. I think I can make them last forever, but I am always late in leaving the flat. Saturday morning Western Road is deserted but for old men and the unfortunates who work Saturdays. 7:54am. Six minutes. It feels like I have hours left. It is very quiet. I wish I could go back to sleep.

Half-Night Voices

A quarter-finished drawing on the floor; a half-inked man drinking from a pencilled bottle, whilst a pencilled woman stands at a two-line window looking out onto a still white paper landscape.
The windows of my room are open, the curtains half shut. A towel hangs from the windowsill. Out of the window I see a sliver of light from some unfixed window on a half-distant house.
I hear the sound of voices from the night, teenage girls howling like wolves in somebody's garden.
I light incense and think about my clothes I need to take from the washing machine. The album has finished and I watch the curve of my white guitar leaning against the precarious stacks of compact discs.
I imagine, in the night outside my window, the sound of trains or the sea or a distant country road. I hear none of these of course, just the sound of those teenage voices, laughing still, lost halfway through the first half of the night.

'Hunter not the Hunted' - a night walk with the new And Also The Trees album

The following is a response to the first listening of the new album, which I did whilst walking through Hove at night. All words in quotation marks are lines taken from songs on the new album... or are the titles of the songs. This started out as an attempt to do a straightforward review, but turned into something else instead.

Close the door of the flat and step onto the Mews. The lamps strung across the passageway lie still. No breeze tonight, and the night-sky up above is a silver-blue dark, an upturned bowl holding only a few stars.
I press play on my decaying i-pod and start walking.
A new album by a favourite band is an odd thing, familiar and unfamiliar simultaneously. Coming home tonight, walking fast down Western Road and not daring to hope the albums might have arrived. Forcing myself into Tescos and the newsagents. No point rushing. They won't be in. Get home just after 8:00pm, and there at the foot of those steep and narrow stairs, that familiar spiky handwriting on the envelope, ink-stamp on the back And Also The Trees
Took an age to put it on my i-pod. Bad internet connection and slow technology, faltering leads, old-age for the USB. Close down the laptop and start again. Syncing i-pod. Do not disconnect
Leave the Mews behind and start to listen.
'Only' a desert dream of a song, a whisper of some Victorian exoticism like a half glimpsed dream from childhood. Blue, summer nights in an emptied land. Something victorious and dark and luxurious. Grandfather clocks and the taste of attics. The guitars sound like a long train through a night country, an elegant elegiac passage; 'you come closer through the slack, umbilical streets'. Head up onto Portland Road and they've covered the crumbling massive building opposite in wrapping, an industrial cellophane, and I can't remember what was there before.
(Or where I'm going. I search for the street that leads up onto the Old Shoreham Road but can't find it)
'Hunter not the Hunted' A muted brown and sleep-coloured afternoon autumn song. Sky all overcast and laced with something cooled and alluring. Drenched in gold September, a heavy moorland call, and something like ancient birdsong hanging over it all. 'I know where all the birds hide'. A geography of a slow landscape that has been here forever.
'Burn Down this Town'. I'm somewhere in the streets between Portland Road and Old Shoreham Road. I've been here before but I've lost my sense of direction and everywhere begins to look new and strange and I begin to feel unsure of where I am. The streets are empty, and the song is cool and beautiful, and like looking across a wide river at dusk, boats shifting on the swell and recess of a tide. A harbour song, and I search the words for a sign of the sea, but I find a town instead, where two women walk its outskirts, its borders, and 'will never return'. Disquieting words over a song now that seems too calm. An inland song, but I see that deep-black, beautiful water, empty of reflections, emptied of stars.
'Bloodline' Footsteps in a house at night. Waking up in a narrow room and listening to the song of steps outside. This sounds like the small hours, quiet and watchful, an M.R.James or H.R.Wakefield moment. 'You never know whats waiting there'. Another room for Lucy. Remember that utterly terrifying version of that song they did on 'When the Rains Come?' This is like that, something cold and 2:00am. Deep English folklore, whispered myth 'a cold hand on your skin'... and then the song opens into a fairground of an ending, rags of tents in the breeze and the taste of fields, and I can't tell whether this place is deserted or sleeping or just waiting for someone to arrive.
'My Face is here in the Wild Fire' Transmissions from somewhere. Faulty wireless playing songs in an empty room. The sound of trains, and a certain sobriety and certainty to the words of my night-companion's voice. The streets this end of Hove are so still. The halos of the street lamps seem frozen, but in the distance I can taste summer - or at least the premonitions of summer. Walking alone and thinking of photographs. But it's starting to feel like I'm being followed. This feels a deep-in-the-night song, somewhere remote and haunted, 'a ghost wilderness of pollen and seeds'.
'Black Handled Knife' We're nearly halfway through now. These transmissions continue. I remember back in the 90s walking through the streets of Worcester, listening to 'Farewell in the Shade' or 'Green is the Sea'. Lost in my mid-twenties, and here I am, walking through other streets in another town, listening to the new album by the same band, and I am glad of this. I turned 40 yesterday, an impossible age to be. I remember buying cigarettes in the petrol station halfway up London Road, the blossom covered lane where I would phone Corin from a phonebox, and it all seems just a few hours ago, but it isn't even last decade but the decade before. This song is still, a sinister cast of a shadow over another moor. Sound of something in the distance, a night-factory, some nocturnal industry... and it starts to feel like the desert again. Too many stars in the sky of this song. A mexican sky perhaps, a place full of Mediterranean constellations... but I'm in Hove and there are only a few stars above me.
'The Woman on the Estuary' Three chords, and this is the crown of the album, something beautiful and eerie and oddly heroic. I pass under the black bridge over Sackville Road, and I feel the pulse of the Old Shoreham Road in front of me. Pass under the bridge and a man walks past me and vanishes into a garden. Something here in this song, something from Worcester that reminds me that the past is still here. These empty streets are beautiful and haunted, and again I'm feeling followed, 'bring it up to me'... and I could be 24 again, in a narrow room in a house in Worcester.
'What's Lost Finds' A sudden urban shift... and in 'the rotting lanes of this town' there is a sound like farewells
and wastegrounds. Icicle-hours and bicycle wheels twisted and shivery, leaning against half-brick walls, weeds pushing up through the spokes. Back in Hove I pass by a house all boarded up, and also the petrol station where I used to work. See Mike behind the counter, but don't stop and say hello. Pass by Hove Park, and these places I know more at night than the day.
'The Knave' Staccato steps, a wooden leg fairground lurch. Pass through a fraction of Hove Park, and I start to see foxes in front of me, still in roads, and watching me, but as I approach they race off in the lamplight shadows and vanish. Before I heard this album, I was sure this was going to be an instrumental. Another deep-night timed song. The small hours have been passed and there is no dawn, but 'I feel the rains slowly passing'. Even if this night is elongated at least it is as elegant as it was begun.
'Whiskey Bride' Summer. 'Secret doors secret rooms'. We switch from something soft and yellow and like mornings to those certain kinds of afternoon that come sometimes in late August, slipping into the shadow of autumn, a melancholy slumber in the sudden cold of open windows.
'Rip Ridge' Another river song and I'm nearing Wilbury Crescent again. Pass by my old house, and the guilty darkness of my old room. This was where I first heard '(Listen for) The Rag and Bone Man' half a decade back. In a nearby front garden, overgrown and covered with weeds there is a squat tree where hanging from the branches are rusty unlit lanterns. I pause to almost take a photograph but curtains stir and I am afraid of being seen. This feels like standing on a river and watching someone watching you across that slow moving deep-rhythm water 'with its ghost ships and lies turning like a beast in its sleep'. All these songs are like tides, like rivers, the deep and haunting waters of estuaries, half sea and half not-sea. Something pushing up and pushing back, and its in these halfway places that bits of driftwood are cast about like ghosts, and in the waters of these places, whirlpools merge and are lost, hidden in the ebb and flow, the wax and wane of untrustworthy water.
'Angel, Devil, Man and Beast'. I am tired now and it feels like I have been walking for days. I pass by no-one and I am suddenly lost, unsure of what direction I am heading in. I try to head for home, try to seek between the houses glimpses of the power station chimney near Shoreham, its cyclops red-light eye like a signal fix me, but I don't find it, and the houses round here begin to expand and become strange. Mock tudor mansions that look like they should be on the outskirts of Worcester, and I play with the idea that I am back there, in some street I've never been to before. The stars in the sky, and the black branches of still-leafless trees... I could be back there couldn't I? 'I wasn't pushed I wasn't led'. I can't work out which way is north.
'The Floating Man' The melancholy that accompanies the last track of an album you've waited what seems an age for. 'He strikes out in the dark falling...' A last and desperate reaching back for something, not some memory, but something never there... but should have been. White bulbs of lamps up in the trees, and there are suddenly so many trees. A deep haunting to end their most eerie collection of songs, this tidal-river of an album, full of shadows and cool water, whose currents and eddies will, without doubt, prove the soundtrack to these next few months.
It ends so beautifully, like something hopeful and sudden. Something that might linger, that might, or might not be, be the sun rising.

Well I'm back home now, sat on my bed, and it's twenty minutes to 1:00am. I've listened to the album around three times or so.
These were my first impressions.

The album can be purchased at their website here, along with the rest of their rather startling and fantastic back catalogue.

The Doomed House

It's not a particularly good piece of art, nor a good photograph. It's not finished either (and I'm so displeased with it, I might not finish it either) but no matter either. It's one of those pictures that anyone who draws (or paints or sculpts or whatever) comes across from time to time to; the piece that creeps you out. I'm sat watching the television now, and I've got the drawing (in a sketchbook) leaning against the walled up chimney breast on top of a pile of DVDs. It seems less a drawing in a sketchbook, and more a window, and she's looking from her own malevolent world into ours. Something about her face... but not just her face... the background too... the absoluteness of it all. Someone at work noted 'the doomed house' in the background. I've been thinking about that all afternoon. It is a doomed house, but what do I mean 'doomed'? What did she mean 'doomed'? More importantly what does the doomed house mean to the woman in the picture? I showed Andy the picture when I got home. He noted the 'look of disgust' on the woman's face, the way the expression seemed to change, and that old cliche of the 'eyes following you'. It's all accidental. I messed up the eyes really, somehow... shifted an angle too much here on the face... drew the lips a bit too thin, a little too parted... Of course, I am quite pleased I have drawn something which has unsettled me so much... even though it's completely accidental. All I wanted to do was draw a picture of a woman in front of a house at night in a Charles Burns-esque style.
Oh well.

Orbit and Insanity

Just watching the end of the Blakes Seven episode 'Orbit'. My god, this is bleak. Avon tries to kill Vila - he thinks he'll be able to save himself by throwing Vila off a shuttle craft they're on. There's that moment on Avon's face when he realised that he'll have to kill his oldest, well, friend. That expression in his eyes - Avon's gone insane. He cajoles Vila to come out of his hiding place (Vila has overheard) with the voice of a madman. We see a shot of Vila hiding in the darkness, terrified. We cut to a shot of Servalan, who learns that Avon and Vila have escaped her plans again. A look of despair on her face, utter exasperation. Egrorian crawling on his kness, insane now too, pleading with Servalan. Egrorian's companion, Pindar, also now insane, 'reversing fields' and turning himself and Egrorian into old men, then skeletons. Insanity rules. It all seems to foreshadow the end, two episodes later. The end of four years, when all the main characters are shot. No relief, no resolution, no hope. Television was brilliantly bleak in the eighties.

Sun-Dappled and Drowning

At work today.
The glittering on the sea, keep having to pull myself back to phone calls and finance and coffee.
Reminds me of something I read somewhere once, some urban legend that stuck with me. Thread on some message in the small hour forums of the internet. The effect of sun dappled light - under certain conditions anyway - creating some kind of hypnotic effect. Flickering sunlight the colour of leaves. I'm not sure how this this sun dappled effect was created - through trees and leaves in a wood on a windy day I presume. Not sure about the sea. Actually it would be days like today thinking anout it, all those pulsing rhythms of the tides. Anyway. The effect was to create some kind of hypnotic response in the viewer, and when affected, the viewer would just walk on, and keep walking, lost in the sun... Sinister apocryphal tales of people walking into the sea and drowning, unable and not wanting to pull away from what thrall held them. Tales of train drivers too, that the very design of trains had been changed to accommodate this effect. The early days of train travel, the effect of the train travelling through sunny, windy cuttings causing train crashes because of mesmerised drivers.
I don't believe a word of it obviously, but it's what I started thinking about at work today.

Impressions of a Late Night Walk

Red brick walls.
Grassed slopes.
Limitless skies. Stars hidden.
Closed shops.
The Old Shoreham Road is silent and remote.
The front gardens of dark houses.
The railway bridge across Sackville Road is a nervous place.
Small parades of late night shops are quiet and always autumnnal.
My footsteps are hollow on the ground of Sunday night.

Last Night on the Seafront

Last night, walking to Em's along the seafront. Leave the house as twilight begins, and by the time I reach the seafront, twilight still hasn't begun. The light has that undeniable air of beautiful tension that accompanies the last of the light. Stone and concrete deepen, exude something, as if night is not an absence of light, but a presence of something generated by matter.
It has rained, a rain I missed because I slept fitfully through the afternoon. Seafront lights glisten and lengthen under my footsteps. The air tastes of autumn, of some tipping point, and I think of hills and lamps, and grey skies above branches and birdsong, churchyard afternoons and prayer dust.
The sea is still, a tide barely moving. People move on the pebbles. I can hear their footsteps on the stone, risk glances and am rewarded by the angular shadows of movement, jagged-elbow dance, crooked bending knees.
By the time I reach Em's, it is night and the sky is a deep undersea blue and tastes of rain.

Transmitter

Start picking up the signals when I should be falling asleep.
A wireless radio flooding the air I breathe with transmissions from a radio station lost in the confines of an internally collapsing factory, or perhaps a series of factories. A single industrial entity does not fully describe the labyrinthine feel of this internal geography, so, yes, a series of factories, a conspiracy of rust and machines and quarries and aluminium poisonings. It makes me think of the sea, a foamy untrustworthiness creeping in under a similarly untrustworthy night sky. The stars are in the tides and they cut like knives.
The only dream I remember from last night was being in the model shop down Western Road, looking for a lost room that had been there the night before. I didn't remember the dream till I passed by after finishing my Saturday shift.
Wake with a headache that worsens over the four hours at work. It drizzles all morning, and when I get home I collapse into bed, a strangely dehydrated and restless sleep. The headache has left me hollow, and I think the drizzle continues.
Transmitter still sending out those signals.

The Windowsill

A glass lamp, waiting for a candle.
A sage incense stick, burning, stuck in a an empty can of Diet Coke.
A sketchbook, showing a half finished drawing provisionally titled 'Our Lady of Fairground Disasters'.
A paperback copy of the book 'The Gunslinger' by Stephen King lying face down.
A lighter, used to light the incense stick.
A Tupperware container holding tubes of acrylic paint.
A copy of The Independent newspaper from January 13th this year.
A toy model of the spaceship 'The Liberator' from the television programme 'Blakes Seven' I have had since childhood.
An old pair of glasses, one lens slightly warped.

A Day Benighted by the Student Loans Company

There I was this morning, happily making my way to work when I thought I'd check my bank balance. In goes my card, out comes a statement, and... At first I was pleased because I thought that my cheque for the new And Also The Trees album had cleared. I was quite worried about this as I thought I had written out the cheque incorrectly - all blown over! The money was out of my account, I could sit back and relax and look forward to 'Hunter not the Hunted' and 'Driftwood' (their previous mini album) coming through the post. I looked again. There was rather more taken out than a couple of albums worth... in fact £155 more... I looked at the statement. No cheque had been taken, but instead those dread words 'Student Loan Company'.
I had sent off my deferment form a few weeks ago, along with the necessary documentation to defer payments for yet another year. I hadn't heard anything back yet but was not surprised as they can be notoriously slow in replying to any correspondence. I spent the morning seething, in a foul mood at (possibly) losing £155 for whatever reason. I remembered a time previous that I ended up owing them £1,200 because they had sent out the forms to the wrong address. It took nearly two years to pay that off even if that had been their error too.
The lunchtime was spent in HSBC trying to see if I could get the money refunded under the direct debit guarantee.
The afternoon crawled by.
Despite working in a call centre, I have an actual fear of using the phone to sort out any business pertaining to myself. All I wanted to do was to get home, call them, and get everything sorted out so I could go back tow orrying about whether my cheque for the And Also The Trees albums had cleared.
I reached home, put some credit onto my phone when there was a sudden knocking at the door. No-one ever knocks at the door. It was Ben, returning some money for Andy. Ben left, and finally I could get on with trying to sort this thing out that had been worrying me all day... only to be told that their systems were down and to 'call back tomorrow'.

Petrol Station Spring-Times

I remember the early springs of the mid-petrol station years, back when I lived in the studio flat on Buckingham Street.
It was always an absolute joy when it got warm and light enough to enjoy being outside again. I hated that flat so much that any time I spent there passed by in a mixture of depression and anxiety. I lived in fear, for little reason, of my landlord, the sinister Dr Ra, and the place was so cramped and unhomely, it made even the bedsit look like a beacon of palatial splendour. Winters would drag by, cold and miserable, and having to spend time in that flat...
The first few days of spring were an annual revelation. If I was on the afternoon shift at the petrol station (2:30pm - 10:30pm) I would often find myself at the beach about 11:00am. This time of year it would be quiet, but the coffee stalls on the seafront would be open. I would sit on the pebbles of the beach, drinking large coffees in plastic cups, smoking roll-ups, and I would euphorically languish in the sun. The sky would always strike me as being a remarkable shade of blue, and the air would taste of all those possibilities that springtimes used to bring. The mornings would pass all too quickly, and I would have to set off for the petrol station.
The streets would taste of sunlight and metal, and there would be something undeniably magical, almost occult, about it all. Some great mystery below the first few days of sunlight in March. Wading through Brighton and Hove to the Old Shoreham Road where I worked, the landscape would change, become mundane with retail parks and industrial estates. Then there would be the shock of the light inside the petrol station - shadowy and dark compared to the brightness of outside. The afternoon shift would begin, and the coffees and paperback books of the beach would seem a lifetime away.
That sense of magick wouldn't quite fade though, even when darkness fell and the rush hour began and the forecourt would be packed full of white vans and office workers heading home. There would be something undeniably different about it all. Premonitions of summer, intimations of the day lengthening extraordinarily. Things would seem deeper, filled to bursting with an odd sense of mystery and intrigue after the drear reign of rainy February.
Even walking home through the crow-like lamp-lit darkness of the Old Shoreham Road felt touched, transfigured by the day too. Even with the returning cold, and the still-bare branches of trees. Something had changed, something had tipped, and you could taste it in the air, something that would taste like the distance, the dark promise of fields on summer nights.

Fog, Earth, Sickness

Went to see 'drone doom pioneers' (as they are always billed) Earth last night, with support from O Paon and Mount Eerie. This was down at The Haunt near the seafront, by Pool Valley Coach Station. The coach station is an empty and desolate place - always cold - if ever I saw one, strangely soulless and disconnected from Brighton. A foggy night and Em and myself stood in the steam from a vent in the fog, waiting for Andy and Al and Claire.
White on white. I hope it had come in from the sea. Sinister driftwood, beguiling nocturnal void.
Inside. Narrow by the door, creating the illusion it was more choked than it was. Unhealthy pallor hanging in the air, heavy with fevers left from last summer. Brown wood and darkness, middle aged men and a conspiracy of tall people. Overpriced drinks at the bar, £3:70 for a can of Red Stripe lager. Not a glass, not even a plastic one to pour it in. Went to the toilet, covered with an inch of piss and waste. Black walls and sickness. Thinking to myself that The Haunt must be the worst venue I've been to for a long while.
O Paon (a French singer / songwriter) I enjoyed, Mount Eerie, not so much my cup of tea. Then Earth. Ah, Dylan Carson. The man rumoured to have given Kurt Cobain the gun he shot himself with, all lean and ex-heroin addict chic, chiselled cheekbones probably hidden by a deep desert beard. Drummer like an earthquake slowed down, cello player scraping out the last remnants of some rumoured apocalypse. The moustache on the bass player looked like it was watching me. 'This is a pop song' Dylan introduced to a hideous bray of laughter from someone in the crowd behind me, before playing another five minute hypnotic instrumental dirge.
Getting crowded at the front, everyone beginning to sway like monoliths uncertain there was an earthquake. Body temperature creeping up and wishing I didn't feel quite so hemmed in. Bad spiritual acoustics, sick building syndrome. Felt like the air was sweating some comedown. Followed Em to the back, she pale and drawn, and suddenly nauseous. Andy is at the back too, also sick and nauseous, a state of play that had come on when Earth started. I was feeling pretty ill too. Creeping comfort, a disquieted stomach.
Stayed at the slightly fresh air at the back and listened to Earth's armageddon from a distance.

Alchemy for the Nostalgic Man

A gap in the curtains, a foot, no more, and over the condensation on the windowpanes, the angles of the house next door are sunny. A steam pipe casts a long morning shadow. The colour of the sky is a pale blue, spring-like and pleasant, but still somehow cold.

I went for a long walk last night, headed up to Portland Road, then onto Sackville Road, before joining the Old Shoreham Road. I bought a can of coke from the unsmiling girl in Sainsburys on Portland Road. It was a warm and quiet night. A slight and sudden haze about the distance reminded me it was spring; the red of traffic lights shimmering, the halos of street lamps now transient and delicate things. Moth-wing lights, a butterfly darkness.
The petrol station I used to work at was still open. The same old white vans and their occupants on the forecourt. I watched a man scurry to the door. Knew that look on his face from my five years working there, a mixture of vacancy and boredom. Thinking about going home, the football, anything but paying for petrol in a petrol station in suburban Hove on a Sunday night. The boy -he surely could be no older than twenty- behind the counter I had seen before. He looked like someone who I might have worked with there. Long hair, a slightly harassed expression, all quick and thin wiry movements. I wonder how he came to be working there. I wonder if he keeps a sketchbook on the counter like I used to, and draw in between customers.
I sometimes miss working at the petrol station.

The Old Shoreham Road is a dark road, drenched in all the arcana of nocturnea , the abandoned institutional looking building near the recreation ground, lower windows all boarded up and the gardens all overgrown and winter-ragged. Then there is the house I used to call the House on the Borderland , after a story by William Hope Hodgson, where I would imagine in it's garden there would be a vast and bottomless pit stretching down into forever. Hove recreation ground itself was filled with pitch black night as always, a silent place, made sinister by thick bushes that line it's southern edge. The street lamps here are tall and unfriendly and look like crows. On the Old Shoreham Road it either feels like 2:00am or like you're waiting for it, a geography compomsed of the essence of those dark, remote lots of the imagination.

I passed by my old house on Wilbury Crescent, looked up at my old room, at the angles of the door I could just make out in the blue darkness there. I wonder what it is about these observations of past homes that so fascinate me? I wonder what it is I am looking for? There can surely be no more information to be had that may sharpen memory left to find... and yet I still pore over Google Streetview with all the fascination of an archaeologist, or perhaps more accurately, an occultist, trying to uncover some secret, some element, some chrono-alchemical formulae to snip those threads in time...

I took the footbridge over the railway tracks, ended up on Cromwell Road, where I passed by Andy's old flat. Yellow light against the curtains, and whoever is living there now is unaware of the nearly eight year tenancy that preceded them.

I woke sometime toward dawn last night. There was a noise in my room. A definite noise, like that of something falling, or something moving. I couldn't work out what it was, and drifted back into an uneasy sleep, thinking of rats in the walls and all the poltergeist stories I've read. It made me think of last night, where I walked from the kitchen into the hallway, and for a second, thought I saw a pale figure standing by my room wearing white trousers. Trick of the corners-of-eyes, a play of light. It was only my quilt cover, slowly drying on the radiator.
I tried not to think about it, and looked at the blue light of dawn at the gap in the curtains instead. It made me uneasy.
It was too easy to imagine someone watching me.

Dreams of a Gunman Coming along the Path

Em had an unexpected day off yesterday, and we all had some unexpected sun, the latter particularly welcome after the white sky apocalypse of the day before (walking down George Street with Andy, his comment on the gloom above us 'this is Hell'). Ambling from here to Em's house I actually found I was too hot. Em didn't believe me that it was warm at all outside, and for our walk to the Marina dressed as though it was the depths of winter.
We walked along the seafront, thronged with summer people, queues for the big wheel and the coffee stalls. On the other side of the pier two drunk men stood on the stone steps shouting obscenities, their heads all hot and red as if they had somehow got sunburnt already (It wasn't thathot).
The Marina was its usual soulless fascinating place. Em says she finds it claustrophobic and unattractive. It certainly is unattractive, everything all new and plastic-y and designed without thought to aesthetic. Well, probably designed for the aesthetics of the rich, who don't tend to have much in the way of taste. It was good to see the line of fishing boats on the quay though, far more interesting than the yachts, the smell of fish and seas far outside the sight of land. I saw the ship with the street lamp on it's deck. How I would love to see that lit...
Eventually we wormed our way through the labyrinth of the Marina, passing by the paint-smelling workshops, where invisible men hammered at unseen pieces of boat to the strains of classical music someone was playing on a tinny stereo. We slipped through the small exit onto the Undercliff Walk.
The Undercliff Walk, as the name rather cunningly implies, runs under the cliffs from Brighton all the way to Saltdean. Set into the cliffs at regular points are mysterious steel or metal doors. I have no idea what they open onto or where they lead to. The wide and zig-zagging concrete path is protected from the sea by a low wall. When the tide is out a strange landscape is revealed that resembles a moonscape, all chalk furrows and jagged rock. Occasionally man-made (or man-crafted) planks of woods are revealed. The whole landscape looks like it could have come out of a 1970s Doctor Who story.
We ate our lunch, bought from Asda at the MArina, on one of the wide concrete groins leading down into the sea. No clouds in the deep blue sky, and the sun hanging there, an example of incomprehensible physics. Flurries of sand flies, like little punctuation marks kept drifting up from the small strip of sand before the moonscape started. After lunch, I lay down on the concrete groin, used my rucksack as a pillow and fell asleep.
Falling asleep outside is one of those great luxuries of life. It is never quite the deepest sleep ever, but is languorous in a way that an interior sleep never quite seems to be. Yesterday, concrete had never felt so comfortable in my life, and my rucksack put my pillows to shame. I fell into light and troubled dreams, of a gunman coming along the Undercliff Path. It felt like I had slept for hours, but Em said it was only for twenty minutes. We resumed our journey onto Saltdean where we caught the bus back to Brighton.

Songs for Lost Saturdays and Desolate Sundays

This feels like Saturday morning. It must be said it actually is Saturday morning, so surely this should be no surprise, but to be more precise, it feels like a certain kind of Saturday morning... I'm reminded of 1986 or 1986, where I'd have a lie-in, trying to listen to singles and albums I never usually listened to (AC/DC, Black Sabbath, Kiss, Tygers of Pan Tang) and trying to 'get into them'. These were usually the albums I bought because a) a friend was selling them cheap b) I didn't have enough money to buy a proper (ie thrash or hardcore) album c) I felt like 'experimenting' or d) I was in a town where 'proper' albums were not available. In regards to the latter point, considering that I found The Depraved album 'Stupidity Maketh the Man' and bought The Accused's 'The Return of Martha Splatterhead' in an independent record shop in Kidderminster of all places in December of 1986, I'm not sure where these towns actually were. The Tygers of Pan Tang album I bought on cassette tape from the newsagents we would pass by on the way to school.
These albums would pile up, not necessarily unloved, but just not listened to as much as, say, Carnivore or Virus or Sacrilege. During the week, those depressing post school day evenings of undone homework, I would never listen to them and it was only on certain weekends, probably when my then best friend Leighton had left Ickenham when his parents loved to Langley, that these odd albums would come to be played.
There would always be something slightly dismal about them. A depressing aura of being too slow and too light and entirely lacking the excitement of the more extreme bands I preferred. It wasn't that I didn't enjoy listening to them as such, it was more like some vital spark was not present. These were albums that described an English landscape (even if ACDC were Australian and Kiss were American) of roadside cafes, grim Midlands towns, and all under a weather of headache and drizzle. The songs plodded by, leaving little in the way of impression but a curiously desolate melancholy.
I would only play these albums once or twice, and then not think about them for months. They would languish forgotten in the drawers of my bedroom unit or at the back of my record boxes, waiting for the next lonely Saturday or bored Sunday to emerge.
This ia all because of those two Black Sabbath albums I bought yesterday for £1:99 each from a charity shop, 1985's Seventh Star and 1987's The Eternal Idol. Both albums seem to sum up the spirit of those lost teenage days; a dismal dreaminess, a dreary somnlence, the deep desolate light as Saturday afternoon sank into evening...
Strangely, I never had either of the albums back them. I remember them being around though, lingering in bargain racks or in the cassette tape sections of provincial record shops. I only heard both of them yesterday for the first time.
What is stranger, and perhaps more worrying, is the fact that I am enjoying both immensely.

Tip my Hat to Spring Twilight

A long weekend off work, not back till Tuesday.

Drifting on the sofa this morning reading Stephen King, worrying at the greyness of the skies, lulled into a kind of reverie by the sound of the drills and the lathes and the sanders from the workshops downstairs.

A long meandering walk round town with Andy. Dave's Comics, Resident Records, that nameless coffee shop I only ever go in with Andy. Large Americano in the empty North Laine space, looking at my purchases (Seventh Star and The Eternal Idol by Black Sabbath, the 1973 reprint of The Crypt of Terror #1, and a French compendium of The Mighty Thor, the latter all actually in French, but this pleased me as well as its cheap printing, pulpy paper and general elegant shoddiness.
Afterwards Andy walks by the beach home, and I buy another sketchbook and catch the long bus home.

The 49 to Portslade. I feel it swing upon onto Portland Road. Counting the stops, trying to figure out which stop would be the nearest to come here. Guessing it right for once.
That old building like some Crumbling New York church in August. Portland Road is August, will always drip with heat and sweat and the rumours of unseen gangs and crimes behind closed doors when I am not there. Even in the fag end of winter it is August, that dark and bright flipside of summer. Sun sunset-bloated and deep streetlight red, hanging over the streets and watching, observing, mapping everything.
Even here, on this gloomy March evening.

Slip down the side streets to here, walk those odd roads between Portland road and New Church Road. Thin sliver of lost suburbia, slice of some memory. Something wakes here and it suddenly feels like spring. Not the bright and optimistic spring of falling in love and bright blue summery days, but that other spring, all rain damp air and lead skies, and this gloom laced with something electric and quiet and theatrical. Some stillness, a deep and mysterious serenity. Could feel it in the empty street, in the front gardens of houses I passed by, in the two school children who passed me by laughing about something, in the street lamps and that endless expanse of odd grey sky. Thinking this has happened before and will happen always. Not so much taken out of time, but being plunged even deeper into it.

Sat cross-legged on the floor of my room. The curtains are open and I watch the grey skies begin to purple. The streets out beyond the roofs, the tips of branches, the angles I see, seem vast and beguiling and ultimately unmappable.

Ferris Wheels, Rising from the Sea

Watching the the glittering shards on the surface of the water. Thinking there is Europe across there and after work I settle for the Churchill Shopping Centre instead. Makes me think of other shopping centres, of The Pavilions in Uxbridge. A strangely ragged place, but exactly the same as all other shopping centres, oddly comforting though, like some decaying hotel in the centre of some autumnal forest. I remember the book stall where Louise worked, and the butchers, and when I went back there last November it was all the same as over 20 years before. just slipping further down into its sleep-like euphoria of entropy.
The sea disturbs me.
Everyone faces the sea when they're down there, sitting on the pebbles and on deck chairs. Like they're waiting for something someone at work says. People staring at the void, fascinated by that nothing-expanse of the sea, by the italics of it all. I do this too though, between calls; stare at the no-tides, the dead currents, the absolute-zero calm. Try to imagine sea monsters and giant octopi and fail, but summon up in my imagination instead industrial fairgrounds rising from the waters. Black iron ferris wheels, chemical plant roller coasters, dodgems dripping with seaweed and aluminium mining relics.
No serpents though. Perhaps I'll leave them to the lakes.
The shards that glitter on the surface of the sea look irradiated

Observations from 7:45am

The flat smells of paint, an unwelcome incursion from the workshops below. Stinging eyes and half-dreams of factories in deserts breaking down.
The door slightly rattles in its flame.
When I switched the hot water on this morning, there were voices in the Mews, but I couldn't work out what they were saying.
Half-light of dawn, a strangely industrial air.
Slipping back into cold.
The mornings are all grey horizons and the afternoons uncomfortable intimations of rain.
An open notebook on my bed showing spidery drawings.
A plate on the floor from Sunday night.

Chipping Away at the Ice on a Frozen Cinema

Chipping away at the ice, trying to see a tiny closed down cinema on the edges of a wood in winter. Keep chipping away, breaking icy bits of the past to dust. They taste like stars and poison. Watching myself walk up a path under white lamps under vast and black skies. Trying to work out this lost geography, hunting down Lacuna. Trying to bring you back again.
The Astra was on the other side of the Burn. A box-like building that I saw the first Star Trek film at. On the last day of term they sometimes allowed us to watch Disney films instead of lessons. Friday afternoon euphoria. Heaven of those hours before six weeks that stretched forever back then. Then it closed, and I didn't miss it, because the sinema in Elgin would show Star Wars and Ghostbusters and Tron. The Astra became another brick in a building made of myths. A friend I saw someone in there even when it was closed. Ghost-hunting, werewolves,The Secret Agents Handbook, summer holidays and below zero winter nights.
Chipping away at the ice, and I don't think I'll drown, I don't think I'll swim, I think I'll float. Underwater in this childhood topography. I look down at myself thirty years before, and what if I had looked up then, saw an older reflection lost in those skies.
Watching myself chipping away at the ice, trying to see a cinema I've not seen for decades.

Impossibly Autumnal Skies

A certain kind of sky, a certain kind of restlessness there - that mix if blue sea-like sky and red-gold tinged clouds. A sense of something vast and stirring, something ancient waking.
All wrong though, but it was certain nonetheless - this was autumn I was feeling. Coming into spring and I was feeling autumn.
Western Road was busy with people heading home - or to the shops, and they moved as people do in autumn, a hurried but luxurious gait something longed for is coming. The light from shops fell onto the slightly darkening street with a September solace. Traffic lights in the distance flashed red, amber, green in dream-like serenity. The church by the big Tescos was like something from an M.R.James ghost story. I stood amongst the graces and took photographs of its silhouetting architecture.
A taste on the wind. That turn, that switch, that phasing at the end of September - balancing on a needle between seasons. This was not spring, this is autumn. In that taste of wind, there was the layout of streets in old towns, of watches at windows of rented rooms looking down into dark gardens. Stir-fry and soya sauce, hallway lightbulbs, and all those strange arcana of autumns.
Outside the entrance to the Mews there was a single street lamp that had just come on. One of those beleaguered bulbs they are gradually fading out that burn a bright orange. When they first light up though, their start-up hue is a deep crimson, a sunset red, the tones of nightfalls from childhood. Against the greying, impossibly autumnal skies, it was a perfect colour, a transient thing, sober and portentous in the quickly swelling night. Rare as wounded emerald, mundane as coffees from the vending machines at work.
I tried to take a photograph of it, but each one failed, and the moment passed too quick, and it began to turn to its night-time orange instead.
I came inside, walked up the stairs, smelling with the sting of chemicals from the workshops below, and it still felt like autumn.

Home after the Pub Quiz (Nine Lines)

Dropped off outside the back entrance to the Mews.
Up the track by the dead lamp.
The kebab wind blows.
Four pints is too much.
Came fourth.
Cold air feels like the air from 2006.
Waiting for my noodles and peas to cool.
Not looking forward to the 7:00pm alarm.
Just Hiccuped.

Lukewarm Cold Afternoon

The angles of the house across the Drury passage are steeped in these Saturdays. This is because I only ever see it - in daylight anyway - on Saturday afternoons. It feels like spring out there, that warm but cold spring air. I hear the sound of a car, a seagull, voices. Probably coming from the seats outside the coffee shop.
Everything seems sharpened. Though it is warming, and the days lengthening, they lack the lazy, hazy air of deeper in spring, or even summer. Air that cuts like a knife - though it is warming. A lukewarm cold perhaps. The light that falls in this room is blue and sunless.
No sun falls here. I sleep in a room where the windows face north.
There is a privacy here that is appealing though, something quiet and restful and out of the way. The bright and sunlit lounge feels too much a part of the Mews, a part of the people living opposite, the workshops below. Out here, at the back of the flat is a world away from it all.
The only time I don't like seeing it is when the alarm clock goes off in the mornings and I would much rather be asleep.

A Kind of Infinite Regression

And here I am bound when I should not be bound. Restless I slip from room to room, from magazine to television programme I'm not really watching, trying to put off coming here and opening a sketchbook and doing some drawing, anything, using my evenings productively, making the most of my time...
...which is why it never works, not really, because as soon as I try to be 'productive' it stops being fun, as soon as I 'try and make the most of my time' I worry about wasting that time with blind alleys, and end up doing nothing, or having to rub out what I've done because its all so, well, just not fun...
When I get to work tomorrow I'll feel like drawing again though. I'll probably doodle if it gets quiet, draw between calls... and I won't be able to do anything productive really because I'll be at work, but I'll think when I get home, I'll put a few hours in, I'll make the most of my time...
I'll get home though, and be bound when I should not be bound, and if I'm not careful, the next 25 years will pass by like this, and I'll retire (if I'm able to) and I won't have done anything at all...

The Sea is in the Twilight

Crossed over Sackville Road and the twilight somehow deepened. There was a sudden taste in the air. It was the sea, I could taste the sea in the twilight, all salt and old ships and older suns.
It has felt like spring all day, the warmth of the sun in the hazy nudging me to remember other springs. Everything suddenly seems laid bare and naked and not safe.
I remember sleeping on the beach in times like this, drifting on the pebbles with cigarettes and paperback books unread, bought from charity shops in the mid-years of Brighton. I have been trying to define when this middle age of my time In Brighton is. It lasts, I think, from January 2004 when Andy moved down from Middlesbrough to March 2010 when Joe left.
A question keeps occurring to me, if that era is the middle of my time in Brighton, is this then my old age?
As I approach turning 40 - and ensuing middle age - such questions seems oddly appropriate.