A Dimension Away

A sudden breath of summer when walking home. Heavy yellow scent of early June days, and I look up and watch the sky. the sudden M.C.Escher perspective of New Church Road, I'm still by the churchyard, all neat symmetry of tombs and street drinkers. Light dusting of green on the trees, shimmery and vague. Still got to cross Sackville Road, and it all seems a dimension away.
Yesterday afternoon, with Andy in the kitchen. The kettle has just boiled. I point out that it's Sunday afternoon, and because we're both in on Sunday afternoon, we're bound to run out of electricity. I have forgotten about the kettle. I switch it on to boil the water again.
Nothing.
We have run out of electricity.
In my room. Sunday evening darkening to night. My I-pod is on random, and both quote the same line by H.P.Lovecraft; 'Not in the spaces we know but between them...'
There are rules to coincidences though. If something happens three times it is a pattern, and ceases to be a coincidence, and if something happens twice it is only a sign, perhaps, to be on your guard.
I woke in the night from dreams I couldn't remember, and lay in the dark of the ox-hour lots, listening for footsteps out on the landing I don't remember hearing.
I fell asleep before I could remember.

Out past the Marina

The sea is cold against the rock.
The tide here is left to its own devices, an industry of brown frothy mechanisms, of spindrift violence against the rocks. A ship or two on the horizon. A darkening of the sky there - memories of typhoon photographs from childhood. Rain starts and the wind rises - and dies - rises and dies, a faulty resurrection breeze.
The slow and heavy rain, a sparsity of inverted heart-drops, is lulling and lolling, a rhythm that hypnotises like certain snakes are supposed to, like the distance. I feel like a rabbit caught in the twilights of Sunday evening.
We pass by the cafe at Ovingdean, the clusters of families and dog-walkers, and I laugh as a man cycles past and says to his companion, quite seriously, that 'the problem with those two is that when they feel they have nothing to say they have nothing to say'.
By the time we get to Rottingdean, it is churchyard-Sunday cold, and I am glad when the bus arrives, and the rain has grown uncomfortably heavier.

Afternoon

Drops of rain on the panes of glass. I must have slept through it. I don't remember it raining.
The sky is flat and heavy, a grey tone, fluid and pregnant. The angles of the Saturday houses are still and watchful, strange geometries protecting their rooms. Wombs full of sleep and the need for lamps to be switched on.
The branches of a tree, caught in one of those back gardens, dances in the breeze, a double-glazing silence shimmy. The leaves are a fresh green, and the shadows under the leaves are a pool-deep black. The small tree is the only thing I can see out there that could not be measured with the straight edge of a ruler.
In it's silent dance lie all the rhythms of these lost afternoons. All these luxurious bed-bound hours spent flipping through Saturday papers or half-sleep, dreaming half-dreams of things forgotten when woken. I would like to sleep on a bench under the boughs, feel the rain on my skin, the sticky taste of spring days catching in my throat.

Dream Echoes (Haunted Attic Room)

Oh yes, here we are again. I've not been here for a while. This time some kind of holiday cottage in Cornwall. But there. Up the stairs. You were investigating and we were watching weren't we? Next week, you have to investigate the mysteries... but these are too dark. This old place. You know it don't you - the peeling walls, the white paint. The thought of all those tiny cluttered spaces in shut up rooms...
Then I am here. I am investigating it. Joe Bird? You say your dog has run. Oh, that room. Am I play acting or am I possessed? I sway and dance and think I'm pretending, but I'm in the room I have always avoided. That attic room at the top of the stairs, and its all dark and empty - wide empty spaces - an interior agoraphobia. Haunted. That same mixture of fear and fascination. Oh, this is familiar. This is so familiar.

Evening after Rain

The sudden shock of a face at one of the windows across the Mews. Twilight quickly turning to night, and the air hanging heavy with the rain. On the window panes, single drops cling like insects, like stars, like the irradiated workers of a lost factory I dreamt of when I was 21.
The diagonal waves of the sea, sick and frothy tides, an unhealthy, untrustworthy grey. Watching the street lamps from the fourth floor of the call centre shift and bend, slightly, in the wind. Keep watching the sea. From where I sit at work, it looks like it has devoured the beach. A merman coup, a kraken invasion.
I imagine the terror of a tsunami, watching the flood come up West Street, tear up cars and people and Wednesday afternoon.
I swear those waves keep glancing at me.
The damp blossoms that hang from the burgeoning trees look heavy and narcotic. The dim light, and the darkness behind the blossoms taste like old days spent slumbering on sofas and dreaming of churchyards and ghost stories in cheap anthologies bought from school fetes.
Watch the sky. It looks too heavy for the night to hold up.

Two Dreams

I only remember fragments from the first dream. The insides of attics. Dark wood panelling. Windowless rooms. There were television screens that had somehow become haunted. The screens were showing the 'floating head' illustration from 'The Hamlyn Book of Ghosts' I had as a kid. The image on the screens was more terrifying than the original image itself, if that's possible.

I woke up with that supernatural sense of incursion. It took a while to bring myself back to normality. I still have a copy of the Hamlyn Book of Ghosts in my parents attic. I come across it occasionally, and flick through it till I come to that picture. It's as disturbing at the age of 40 as it was at the age of 10. A terrified man staring at a bloodied floating head with the most awful agonised eyes you can imagine... The stuff (literally) of nightmares... The Hamlyn Book of Ghosts, by the way, was aimed at children...

I was not involved in the second dream but was watching it as a dissociated observer. This seemed to be set in some kind of medieval period. Two men - one a deposed king - were fleeing invaders of some kind - or an army that had usurped them. Galloping horses under drizzly skies. It was hopeless. There was something heroic and noble about the king and his friend. They knew the fight was hopeless and were surrounded. They lost their horses, and began to engage in hand to hand combat - well sword to sword. The king whipped out some kind of crossbow / gun and started shooting the pretenders. There was something brutal and real about this dream. It felt I was witnessing mob violence rather than some fantasy battle.

Underneath

Rain flung at the windows all day.
Blustery hours of rain splash, and that sky looks like its thinking about something old and unresolved.
In the break room at lunch, street lamps move in the breeze, a mess of seagulls, a man standing by the back entrance of a building waiting for a delivery. In the double glazing silence, they have all the temerity of a dream. The day is a fragile, inconsequential thing, and it feels like there are deep tides under these hours.
Watching the waves, perfect equations like the ribcage of some washed up whale.
Afternoon slows to evening. 6:00pm tastes of the distance; brackish woods and a disused branch line. A cold wind on the edges of things, and on the wind the sound of a solitary bell. A signal for something that will not be heard, never mind understood.
No rain now, just a flat shade of sky slowly darkening.

Sunday Night Scrag Ends

My i-pod is on random as I write.
Kate Bush's 'Pull Out the Pin'. Memories of buying this on cassette tape, summer 1990, just turned 18 a few months before. Tube journeys into London, hot days full of the smell of tarmac and disorientation at having left school and not knowing what I was going to do yet.

A sudden night out last night. Lying in bed at 9:00pm when a text from Al arrives. With Em, I join Claire and himself in some new pub in the North Laine. Al had somehow got himself talking to a man who claimed that he was once a bodyguard for Keith Chegwin. No-one thought to ask him why Keith Chegwin needed a body guard. Went next to the Evening Star - the same half familiar people wandering about - the same half familiar bar staff - and the man we call Doctor Occult looking as suave and mysterious and oddly comforting as ever.

A song I don't recognise... Sounds kind of dance-y though. Electronic beats... Hmm. Sounds like an 80s remix of something. Still can't quite tell who this is... Killing Joke? Ah... No... Is it Into A Circle? Oh yes, that trumpet - It is Into A Circle. Bought this on vinyl back in Southampton, maybe 1996, and never liked it much then. Sounded too much like gloomy Sundays in nowhere suburbs. Rediscovered it back in 2005 when I bought a cheap record player from Argos. A work of genius. Still sounds like gloomy Sundays in nowhere suburbs... but I like those kinds of days now. Bought it on CD last year in London. The song is called 'Forever (extended remix)'.

After the Star, we ended up at Al and Claire's flat in Seven Dials. A cosy place, a cave of books and instruments and oddly tuned guitars. Al tells me his memories of the summer of 1997, which would have been helpful for the series of blog posts I'm doing at the moment detailing that summer, but I was too drunk to remember much of what he told me. Something about a drawing I did of him chipping bits off a pint of frozen milk. I do remember the incident that inspired this though - the fridge was working too well and just froze everything. We kept the solid block of milk in a saucepan and would chop bits off for our tea. He also reminded me about the dwarves. There was a lot of dwarves around London Road for some reason. Al said that one time he opened the door to one such little person who offered to sweep the steps for him for a couple of pounds. He broke the broom (our broom I must add) in doing so but Al still gave him two pounds anyway. I do remember once though coming back from town and discovering another dwarf looking very grumpily into Al's window. We never found out why. We stood across the road and smoked roll-ups till he had gone.

'Veangance is Mine' by Morbid Angel.
No memories much connected to this song. I only bought the album ('Covenant') last autumn.

The Lost Landscapes

They first occurred to me in dreams, as these things often do. The dreams were not all the same, in fact, I cannot remember very much about the contents of the dreams themselves. I remember the landscapes that these dreams centred about though, and the odd sense of something that came with them.
The dreams all centred in on flooded landscapes, or at least landscapes with lots of lakes. These dreams were always bright and sunny - not a cloud in the perfect blue skies. There was a sense that though it was warm, it was some kind of winter landscape. There was little sign of habitation in the dreams, though in one dream there was some kind of hut (involving a rare forested region at the foot of one of the hills that led to the lost landscapes). The lakes were as blue as the skies, a crispy deep-winter blue.
When I woke from these dreams it was with a sense of euphoria and nostalgia. I could not explain either. There was something oddly victorious about these flooded landscapes, a feeling of implacable triumph. The sense of nostalgia was so strong that sometimes on the mornings after these dreams, I would lie in bed, and almost be convinced that these landscapes actually did exist in some forgotten chamber of my past.
The landscapes of these dreams, as I have said, was not all the same landscape, but similar, as if they were regions of the same country, and not necessarily the same place. There was always the sense that these landscapes were 'north from here', in some liminal place between the poles and, well, 'here in the south'. That being said, there was no sense of coldness in the dreams. There was a sense of winter, but without certain aspects of wintriness.
In some of the dreams, I discovered that I had 'lost' the landscapes and was happily searching for a way back into them again. I remember one dream where Pam was driving me about what looked suspiciously like the Scottish Highlands, trying desperately (but with an odd sense of peace) to find these flooded hills and mountains again.
As the years passed, the sense that these landscapes were real - or at least based on a place I had visited intensified. Sometimes these landscapes just seemed 'sideways from here' - just slip down a few alleyways, cross a few fields and traverse a few fields... and there they would be, where they had been all the time.
I have not dreamt about the lost landscapes for a while though, but the feelings of triumph and nostalgia, these almost-memories, remain.
The positioning of these landscapes has lately changed though. Whereas before I imagined them to be in Scotland, or some unreal and not-chilly Scandinavia, now they seem to have located themselves in the mundane and everyday. The sense of euphoria is still associated with these landscapes, and still that sense of known intimacy... but if I try to remember them now, it is with the suburbs of a town I've never visited, a semi-urban area as familiar and unreal as the dreams were. A thin strip of woodland accessible only through a hole in a fence perhaps, a hidden tangled place where there would be some kind of glade and a hidden pond, clear and perfect.
On the train to London a month ago I was looking out of the window, and saw a strip of bare brown wintry branches. The ground of the wood was covered with twigs, and was bumpy and uneven. The few seconds I had of observing the woods gave me that same shivery sense of euphoria as the dreams did, and the phrase 'Saturday morning woods' popped into my head. It felt almost like deja-vu, but this was a feeling not of it having happened before, but that I was about to remember something I had forgotten... something obvious but that had been always there.
The 'Saturday morning woods' phase of these flooded landscapes has occupied me over the past few weeks. I remain sure I am about to remember something about them, and it feels I am on the verge of something revelatory. I also remain sure that this revelation will not come - that the landscapes are only a mixture of dream, childhood memory, and maybe a film or two - or more probably some nature documentary I watched in childhood.
Despite the probable mundaneness of their origins, the sense of mystery they hold over my imagination continues. It feels as if they are searching for a way into the landscape of the everyday, trying to position themselves in our reality, almost like these lost landscapes are looking for me. The landscapes not only alive, but self aware and somehow conscious.
Anyhow, its nearly twilight now. I have an hour or two before Em arrives and Andy finishes his shift. I might sleep for a while and try to dream of these landscapes that seem to be coming closer every day.

Fragment from the Nearly Ox-Hours

1:50am.
Must get to bed. Up for work in five and a half hours.
Watched 'Demons' at the cinema.
I remember watching it on VHS video in 1987.
Got a lift back with Mark.
Watching all the drunk people on West Street,
and suddenly feeling very old.

Summer 1997: The Heights

The languid and luxurious melancholy of the beginning of that summer of 1997 - the first month or so living in 136 London Road Worcester, began to dissipate as we neared the end of July. This was partly due to the fact that Al seemed to be about more and more and became not uncommon for him to be home from the Kays factory as early as 1:00 or 2:00pm.
He was involved in some kind of amateur dramatic production in Ledbury, though what his involvement was, or how it came about has always remained a mysterious proposition to me. I'm not even sure if Al was acting (he was studying drama as well as English) or whether he was just engaged in some kind of backstage assistace. I tend to think the former as I remember him studying typewritten manuscripts in the play room of 16. I had never been to Ledbury, and the Ledbury he described to me was a quaint and picturesque village, albeit replete with certain sinister qualities, -a place of cats on sunny Sunday mornings languishing on quiet doorsteps belonging to inbred murderers. Or something to that effect. There was also talk of how this Ledbury theatre troupe had access to some kind of 'helmet' that 'belonged to Judi Dench'. This was some kind of trophy or prize that was greatly coveted by the members of this pastoral acting group, and Al would speak of this in hushed and revered tones, as if afraid that too harsh a voice would somehow shatter the sacred resonance of such an object. I would listen with a similar awe, and wished, quite genuinely, that 136 London Road had access to such an icon, though what acquiring this object might mean for the house - and the three residents of the house that summer including myself- I never actually thought about.

We were moving into deep summer by this point - that time of summer marked by unchanging days of crushing heat, blue skies and an intense surreal lucidity. Nothing exists nor can exist but deep summer, like finding oneself amnesiac in a fevered afterlife. With Al about more and more we embarked on a few excursions away from 136 London Road, mostly to nowhere more exciting than Worcester town centre. One day we went to Ghulevelt Park, on the other side of Worcester, where we saw a man a carrying a rolled up carpet along by the river. There was something sinister about him, shimmering in the mad-dog sunlight of the afternoons. We laughed about there being a body in there and then forgot all about him. I didn't think of him until the next summer when a number of bodies began to be found in Worcester's rivers and canals, and the local papers began to talk of a waterways serial killer. I remember being on the banks of the Severn as the police pulled one of the bodies from the water. I was with Corin at the time, and all she said was 'the river man knows, the river man knows everything'. This was all to come of course. As July eased slowly along I hadn't even met Corin yet.

Al and me only took one daytrip outside of Worcester, and that was when went to Bretforton. My parents had lived at this village for a couple of years while I was studying illustration in Southampton. I had spent a couple of isolated summers living here (Why did I never learn over my university days and just get a job?) and I hadn't been back since Christmas, shortly before my parents moved down to Cornwall. Bretforton was truly picturesque (the BBC shot at least one period drama in the village), but like much of the Worcestershire countryside, there was always something dark beneath the surface. There were any number of murder stories centred around the village, and (more interestingly to us) a considerable number of ghost stories; headless women roaming the fields, a nasty presence in Bretforton Manor, a phantom funeral procession and a pub haunted by the spirit of a former landlady. The pub in question, the timber framed Fleece Inn, had 'witch marks' on the floor, symbols scratched into stone, and meant to combat malicious sorcery. It was a long walk from Evesham - the nearest train station to Bretforton - and the flat miles of countryside between both tired us out. We were glad to be back at Evesham, though perturbed to be accosted by a group of youths at the railway station (I think they only wanted a light). That nervy deep-summer heat of the walk had made both Al and myself wary. As they made their roll-ups and lit cigarettes, we made quite sure our backs were against the wall. No sneak attacks on us - and we weighed up the oods. Could we take them? What was our best means of defence?

Another day we found ourselves in and around Worcester Cathedral - just past the base of London Road hill. This was the only time (apart from our graduation in autumn 1999) that I was to actually go inside. The vast interior was as dark-cool and calm as only English cathedrals can own, a welcome relief from the endless heat of the summer outside. In the gardens we met a woman with an odd, soft voice. She said I looked like Jesus Christ with my long hair and beard, and referred to herself as a 'brown angel' because of the colour of her skin. There was something unreal and ghost-like about her, like much connected to that summer, and she melted away into the day, a sunbeam, a sundog, a sunfever, a ghost cast from the stained glass of those meandering afternoons.

We thought 136 London Road was haunted.
This was to be inevitable, judging by our interests and the age of the house. We had no real reason to think this, and there were no strange experiences to relate (there were to be a few odd occurences, but these were to take place in the autumn term that followed). The room that we had decided was going to be haunted was Sal's room, and we decided this because it was so much colder than the rest of the house by a good few degrees. The fact that it was a windowless (and then empty) basement room, and got no sun, didn't figure into the equation at all. It was haunted, of this we were certain. We used the room to cool down in. If we had been out and came back sweating and half sunburnt, the first place we would head to would be the haunted room, where in the slightly eerie gloom we would slowly start to feel more comfortable. We wondered if there had been a murder in the room, or some other dark event that had caused the haunting. All that mattered to us was it was the only place in the house we could cool down, but as we did I kept thinking about out landlord, and the part of the garden he was scared to dig up because he was afraid there was a body buried there.

There was a flurry of activity toward that summer's apex at the end of July. Jim, Mick and Dave visited from Redditch for a couple of weekends. These were strange times, marked by an increase in alcoholic and smoke consumption; Saturday nights having jam sessions in the living room, a time when midnight walks along the canal and quay were aborted because we became convinced that somebody was following us along the towpath. Al's sister, Corin, was visiting from Middlesbrough with her (nearly) one year old daughter Anna. Willowy and oddly mysterious she provided the silvery queen to our ridiculous pack of jokers... (The latter a metaphor I appropriated from Donna Tartt's 'The Secret History' - I'm nothing if not honest. I gave Alistair the book to read that summer too. I remember him taking it to his mysterious rehearsals in Ledbury). I was too shy to talk much to her, though I was pleased she liked the supermarket cardboard painting I was doing in the room she was staying in. I hated it though. Can still picture it now, of a blue figure in soem kind of woodland glade. the blue figure looked like a bald alien, some new Hindu god, arms awkwardly held aloft in the attitude of some new and unsure messiah.

It was one of those rare periods in life where you don't want - or need - to be anywhere else in life. Periods like that obviously don't last, and when Corin and Anna left there was a strange emptiness in the house. I remember when their Mum and Dad came down to pick her up - accompanied by Al and Corin's youngest sister Hazel, who then was only 12. She had a cardboard box she called her 'goth shop' that she sold various dark and cheap ornamental objects from. I bought a black candle -very cheaply it must be said. It is one of those things that I do a double-take with when I think that Hazel is going to be 27 this year... two years older now than I was back then.

It was only to be a couple of weeks (I think) before Al went back up to 'the Boro' to see his family before term started. I remember acconmpanying him to Birmingham, where I went record shopping, and he went to the hellish environs of Digbeth Coach Station to carry on his journey north. I remember him in the sun, laden down with stuff, guitars and bags and all the other stuff needed for journeys by coach in the probable Augusts of youth.

I remember returning alone to Worcester, slightly dreading coming back to 136 London road. With only Paul and myself rattling about the four floors, the house seemed suddenly vast and sinisterly empty. I walked back along the canal - the still shimmer of the water, the yellow gravel of the towpath bright and glaring - and there was something different and shifted in the heat of the day. The album I bought that day was by a band called Legenda - some kind of side project of members from Impaled Nazarene. The album was called 'Autumnal', and it seemed an omen at the time.
I could feel the end of summer, somewhere about, and it felt, indefinably, like being followed.

Bad Weather Report

The kind of day out there that makes you want to drink cups of tea and read books all day on the sofa in between afternoon snoozes. A blustery rain - wind-strewn - sounding cold and unfriendly. A heavy sky, burdened with grey and the threat of further rain and a coma-like sleep.
I could hear it this morning as I lay in bed (I am on my late shifts this week), that unmistakeable sound of springtime rain at the windows. It seemed to thread into my room, and laced my dreams last night with oddness; the ghost of something in our hallway, that turned out to resemble our landlady, only younger.
The cat-flap rattles, and the door of my room is uneasy against the frame. Looking down the stairs, I see the corner of a van through the frosted glass. The kindly cut shards make it look like a person staring in, unmoving and frozen. A sinister watcher (though what watchers could ever be described as not sinister?).
The sound of the drills and the saws from the workshops do not disturb him.

7:00pm Sunlight

Walking into the sun tonight along the beach. Joggers and pebbles and the traffic. The sun looks like late August and I realise that I have never walked home along the beach before. By the King Alfred centre, there is a shift in the air and something changes. This is a sudden world of waste-ground and wooden boards - like blank advertising hoardings - hiding car parks. By the gym a girl waits for someone, leant against the wall, her face cast down, and about her an air melancholy. There is a sudden blast of cannabis by the steps to the car park, though I don't see anyone smoking. Across the street the hotels look scarred and slightly run down. I pass the bowling green, the shallow dip where the lawns lie, and across the grass, the low brown building that must be the clubhouse. If bowling greens have club houses. I never notice these things when I walk to work along the beach. In the mornings I am too concerned with listening to songs and the sea to note the elegant air of desolation around here. Walking into the yellowing, bloated sun, I imagine the road heading on into an industrial distance, an horizon promised by the Shoreham power station chimney I realise that I have not even noticed.

The Mid-Afternoon Deeps of Sunday Evening

It is hard to do nothing without feeling either guilty or restless.
I have been at least partly successful today... though there is that sneaky feeling of guilt that I should have done something 'productive'. Em is at work and Andy is in Kent, so I had a rare day to myself. I have watched the film 'Never Let Me Go', read bits of 'Mystery Animals of Britain and Ireland' and 'Brugges La Morte', snoozed numerous times, kind of tidied my room (at least so it is bearable) and had a short trip to George Street. I took a walk to George Street where I nearly bought Emile Zola's 'The Earth' for a pound from a charity shop, but didn't because I can never get past the second or third chapter about the legalities of dividing a farm between the children of the farmers, or something...
One of those cold bright spring days today. A few clouds in the mostly blue sky and bright sun which seemed to radiate coldness rather than warmth. This surprised me and didn't make me feel so bad about nearly spending the whole day inside, eschewing company and filling my time productively...
Now we have those strange overshadowed hours of Sunday evening. I suppose I'll end up doing some drawing or something, and try not to fall asleep again, at least not before bedtime. Looking out of the window it seems impossible to think that in a couple of hours it will be night out there. It feels like mid-afternoon and it will be mid-afternoon forever.

Summer 1997: The Drift

It took a while to settle into the rhythm of that summer in the new house.
It had been a busy year so far; I had already moved house once already, back in January, and had to get to know a new social group (the first of whom, Al, I had met in an 18th century poetry lecture back in very early February. There had been the dramas of coping with living in the Narrow House and dealing with the fractious atmosphere generated by the fact that the original tenants hadn't really wanted anyone else moving in anyway. It had been a springtime (and preceding winter) of drinking, tarot cards, new people and new places. This would be the first time I had had chance to catch up on myself for a long time.

I do remember, shortly after moving in - it couldn't have been more than a week or two, that I ended up going to Glastonbury Festival with friends I knew from my time living in Southampton back when I was studying illustration. I don't remember much about it except that it was wet and muddy and we somehow managed to sneak in with false wrist bands. Completely by chance, we set up our tent only a short while away from Al who was also there - along with (amongst others) Sal and Ross, who would move into the house come the beginning of the autumn term.

I remember the night getting back from Glastonbury. I had been dropped off (the friends I had gone with lived in the nearby town of Redditch) and the house had been a mess of people whom had come back with with Al; sleeping bags in the hallway, all sofas piled up with people. We had gone down the pub -The Seabright, a few doors away - and had returned to continue smoking and drinking, Al playing and singing songs on his guitar. Sal went up to ask Paul if he wanted to 'join us to have a sing-song'. He looked at her with horror, and later admitted that he was worried a lot of evangelical Christians had moved in.

The next day, in bits and rags, everyone who didn't live there left, and the summer properly began.

Long days with nothing to do, wandering the rooms and hallways and landings of the house. Paul and Al spent their days working, -Al was packing customer orders at the Kays Factory on the other side of town. With so much time to msyelf - and nothing to fill it, I fell into a kind of luxurious melancholy. I suppose I should have got a job, but the wonderful torpor of that summer had sunk into my bones, and I had £50 a week to live on anyway. I played with the idea of spending the summer 'writing a novel' and made a desultory attempt at beginning one called 'The Followers'. I gave the first (only) couple of pages to Al to read who commented that it would be 'nearly impossible' to mantain the stream-of-consciousness style I had (without thought) written it in. The novel was to be about a student, who, over the course of one summer, whilst writing his dissertation on the English ghost story, became fascinated with a writer of ghost stories called Vincent James who disappeared in the depths of the English Countryside over the summer of 1956. The last story he wrote, shortly before he vanished, was called 'The Followers' and was about a writer who himself vanished, after a summer of awareness that he was also being followed... The seemingly infinite regressions in the story fascinated me. What escaped me at the time was that I was a part of this regression too - or would have been, had I actually written it. Perhaps if I had I would have vanaished at the end of that odd summer too, and would remain some unsolved mystery in Al and Joe and Sal's life... but I didn't and I'm still here, writing about that summer instead.

I would wake late - often well into the afternoon - with that heavy exhaustion of too much sleep working its way deep inside me, like an illness, and I wouldn't really feel awake until the summer-late nightfall. The evenings would be spent with Al and Paul if they were about, and when they went to bed, I was left alone with the small hours again. I would often see dawn, wander through the vast geography of the house smoking cigarettes in the strange metallic light of the 4am dawn. I remember one dawn being in the garden as the sun came up. No-one was about, nor were they likely to be for hours. I hadn't seen anyone since yesterday evening, an infinity ago, and the garden - that long lawn leading to the shed next to a rusted hulk of a car - adopted an odd dream-like feel. I remember the shock of the dew on barefeet, walking to the end of the garden, feeling inexplicably watched. I don't remember heading back indoors afterwards, but I would have had another cup of tea, another cigarette, before finally heading to bed. Sometimes on these mornings, these 'dawn-reaches' as I called them, I would run into Al, getting up for work.
An odd melancholy had settled over me, as they are wont to do and I remember Al, in the coolness of the shadowy living room one day, asking me if I was okay. I answered that this mood was in fact quite normal to me, and that, previously, Al had only either seen me drunk or hungover, and this was in fact my normal mood.

Every week I would receive £50 into my account, and I would always buy myself an album. I only have one of those albums now (Tiamat's 'A Deeper Kind of Slumber') but I also remember buying Gehenna's 'Malice' and Emperor's 'Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk'. The latter album, despite being made by a band steeped in a Norwegian landscape of Fjords and mountains, described to me the topography of the summer that I myself was caught in, an English summer of green hedges and green trees, green woods on pale, indistinct horizons. Everything deep and feeling like it would last forever, a world of eternal, haunted, emerald green, a fecund fever. I could not remember spring, and nor could I imagine autumn. Such things seemed heresies. The empty rooms of the house felt as if they would be empty forever too, and that this odd life of mine would stretch into other seasons that would be just be summer under other names. Time had stilled, and swelled, and refused to flow. Summer flooded and possessed me, and all there was was the house, the local parade of shops, phone calls that lasted an hour in the cool of the hallway with Nileshvari who I had gone to college with at Southampton and whom I had a secret (or not so secret) crush on. Lying on the hallway floor, listening to the calm and quiet of the house during the day, everything stretching out and no rush or need to do anything or be anywhere at all, and Nileshvari's voice, full of the south coast and the sea and the shadows of living just underneath London.

Paul would tell us - he had been living there since January that year - of how the house had once been a 'treasure trove' of things; antiques, masks hanging on the walls, piles of video recorders at every turn. The people who had lived there before us - he only referred to them as 'sports students' - had treated the place so abominably that the Landlord had removed most of the stuff.

Not all of the stuff though - there was a huge horn type thing hanging on one of the hallway walls, and a cupboard in what was to become Sally's room - attached to the basement living room- yielded all manner of treasures. Well, a pile of old papers, letters to our landlady from her university days and a self published book of poems dating from 1900 or therabouts. The book of poems was written by a local farmer, Jesse Shervington and were, to be frank, unremittingly dreadful. In the preface the author declared that he was 'one of the greatest living writers in the world'. His masterpiece was a lengthy series of long and rambling verses about how fiction was one of the evils of the (then) modern day, an Edwardian Daily Mail reader perhaps. I wonder what it was like for him then. I always imagine that time -those summers before the Great War- steeped in shadows, but I suppose it would have been like any summer I've ever had, free of premonitions and omens. Actually that isn't true. the summer of 1999 was steeped in portents of war... but the premonitions were faulty, and there was only autumn at the end. I still have the booklet of poems somewhere though, come across it intermittently, wherever it is, perhaps in an old suitcase I rarely open, or in a box of old papers I don;t know why I still insist on keeping. The front and end papers contain pencil annotations by the poet himself, dedicated to one of his chidren. Spidery thin letters, about to collapse. the writing of an old man whose health is failing. very unlike the photograph of the author himself, a hearty, if somwehat severe looking character, sat at a table with an unreadable expression on his face. Perhaps one of his chidren lievd at 136, or maybe one of his grandchildren. These things will never be known now.

We would see our Landlord occasionally, who would be engaged in the house on some kind of unspecified repair work. He was a cheery middle aged Indian man who would tell us of various unrealistic adventures that he had been involved in, of how he had seen a Pteradactyl in the Gobi desert, or of how he once knew Jimi Hendrix quite well (who was 'always laughing and joking'). We quizzed him about the rusting car at the end of the garden. He said that he didn't want to remove it as he was afraid that there was a body of a woman buried there. He said that in the 1970s a young woman had disappeared and was never found. She had come over here from Sri Lanka or India or Pakistan to be married. The Landlord had a suspicion that she may have been murdered and buried at the back of the garden. If this was the case, quite why he didn't want her to be found was a question we failed to ask him, and we never much thought about 'the body in the garden' again.
I did think about it though the next summer, when I found a book of poems in the shed. The poems were written in a school exercise book, by, as far as I could work out, a school girl in Kuala Lumpa. There was (presumably) a teacher's comments on the front saying that the viewpoint it offered was 'privileged'. The handwritten poems had the dates blacked out in felt tip pen, but holding them up to the light I could see that they were written in the seventies. I'm not sure about 'privileged' but the poems were certainly odd and unique things. I only remember one poem though, which stated that dances were 'outrages against discipline', shades of Jesse Shervington and his anti-fiction crusade perhaps. I still have that book of poems somewhere too. I think it's in my parents attic down in Perranporth, lost amongst my own old sketchbooks and old paperbacks I'll never read, another piece of driftwood that will never see the light of day.
I have no photographs from those summers on London Road, but I have enough poems though.

((A Name or two may well have been changed)

Drean of a Tangled Secret Path

I dream of a path running behind houses that can only be accessed by a twisting alleyway. The gardens to the right are set on top of a slope. The gardens are overgrown and tangled. Forgotten places, shadowed by huge trees. The person I am with has known this path for an age - he used to live in one of the houses. The path itself is tangled with yellow grass and weeds. A narrow path through undergrowth. Someone (there may be three of us) says that this is an 'attack-path' as if we were attacked here we would have nowhere to run to. I imagine drug addicts coming here for the solitude. I am a little concerned, but the forlorn atmosphere of the place appeals to me.

All I Can Feel is September

September suffuses everything, is lain over roofs and the sea, the gulls and the pavements, the shop windows and the shoppers, and my desk at work. I breathe in and taste September, that cool promise of autumns stretching over unknown months till the frosty plunge into winter. Tastes of fields on the edge of town in late afternoon sun, of a strange kind of wine distilled from the consolations of rickety railway tracks and the sound of leaves crunched underfoot.
Even now, as I sit in my room, in the glowering pre-twilight uneasiness, it feels like September. The sound of cars in the distance sound miles away. Everything is stretched out and languorous, drifting and dreaming. I imagine sleeping a Victorian sleep in a room I have never seen, drift through afternoons in a house just round the corner from old autumns I have now lost.
Bridges and trees, and the cool of alleyways at night.
A parade of shops, fish'n'chips gothic, that hallway smell of brown and night, and the slip up stairs to televisoion shows and the cracked spine of paperback books that will never be finished.
Strongest in the sky, in that play of deep blue against the white and ceseless clouds. Skies like this almost have a voice, almost have a song. A song that stays in your head all day and you can't get rid of, but neither can you quite remember the tune either.
A V-shape of birds heading south.
Watch their wings crease and fold in the deepening sun.
Springtime, and all I can feel is September.

Summer 1997

There used to be that old ritual of moving into a room, which is not so common now I am older, and I move into houses or flats. I suppose it was always seen as moving into a room because this was primarily a ritual of student days, when, most often, you would live somewhere for nine months - often shorter - and you really only had time to make a single room feel like home rather than the rest of the house you had moved into. The odd irony to all of this was that, without exception, all of the places I lived in during my student years were far nicer and luxurious than anywhere I have lived since. They all had gardens and more than one floor - sometimes a downstairs as well as an upstairs toilet - and my first house in Worcester even had a cellar that was carpeted. Housing since Worcester has been vastly disappointing, or maybe that's just Brighton, where it is notoriously hard to find anywhere even vaguely affordable to live.

The student bedroom then, was important during student years. I had some excellent rooms, and some mediocre. The worst room I had was in my second house in Worcester, in The Narrow House, as I ended up christening it. It was a tiny room - the smallest I've ever had - looking out onto Bransford Road, the sound of lorries - just below - would wake me in the morning. The room had a plush blue carpet and that pleasing new smell of fresh paint, -but it was just too small to do anything in, terribly claustrophobic. Aside from one other person (whom was a flat mate at the house previous) I didn't really get on with anyone else who lived in the house. So, it was with great relief that I moved into the house on London Road on June 20th 1997 (I remember the exact date). I was to share this house with friends and their friends - all fellow students - aside from one other person - Paul - who was already living there. Apart from Al and myself, everyone else who was to move in had gone home for the summer, and, apart from Paul, already there, I was to be the first to move in.

136 London Road was a terraced house, one of four, which - including the attic and basement level (the house was built on a slope, so the basement level opened out onto the long grassy garden) stretched over four storeys. The view from the street belied its interior size - or quite how tall it actually was. Viewed from the garden the house - or rather the four houses that comprised the terrace seemed almost imposing.

I don't remember the actual moving itself. I remember the unpacking though, that strange luxury of unpacking. My room was on the second floor, if you entered from the back door, or the first, if you entered from the front. There was an open fire in my room I was too scared to use. If I stuck my head up there I could see, through the jagged chimney interior, a distant distorted square of sky. The wallpaper on the walls was floral and pink, but though it gave the room a certain feminine air, it was in no way girly, and sought more to resemble (or so I thought) something from the Victorian or early Edwardian period. My window looked out onto the garden two floors below. I could see the extensions stretching out from the main part of the building - the kitchen, which led onto a bathroom, which in itself led onto another bedroom. This could only be reached through the bathroom. There was also what we came to call The Playroom, running alongside the kitchen, another cheap addition. The roof of the Playroom was made from translucent corrugated plastic, and from my room I could see into the stretched out interior full of junk, a rickety shoddy pool table with uneven legs, and other odd bits of junky furniture - I think there was an old bed there somewhere. There was certainly a chair, as when it was cool enough that summer I would sit and stare glibly at the walls, at the mural that ran the length of the Playroom 'A for Apple'... and so on, This mural was the reason the Playroom got it's name.

I remember listening to the album 'Green is the Sea' by And Also The Trees as I unpacked, their English-deep and mysteriously summery album. Happy hours spent that afternoon sifting seemingly hundreds of books and magazines and records and compact discs. In my memory there was a coolness about the room that day, a flickering grey haze as if cast by tree-shadows in dreamy sun / cloud light. How true this is I don't know, as I remember the summer of 1997 as being (mostly) continually hot and sunny. The rest of the rambling house may well still have been a mystery but my room felt already mine. I met Paul that night. Another student house ritual - meeting the people already there. He wasn't a student but a computer programmer somewhere in town. He liked cricket and pizza, and was tall with absurdly curly hair and dreadful glasses (when he wasn't wearing contacts). We sat in the gloom of the living room watching cricket and I wondered if we had anything in common at all - As it happens, we did, and Paul was the first of us who moved down to Brighton in summer 1999. We lost him later to schizophrenia and psychosis (too many endless nights of cannabis that were to come).

I didn't spend that first night in 136 London Road. I joined Al and another friend - Suzanne - at her flat at the Halls of Residence. Suzanne was later to move into London Road - in December of that year. She would take over the room directly below mine, after 'History James' (who no-one saw much of) vanished into, well, wherever... I think he moved to a quieter, more tidy residence, but I don't remember seeing him around college. 'the house never really liked him' Al said darkly, sometime after he had moved out.

I remember walking back to London Road at dawn, that strange, almost guilty delight, of using a new key in a still unfamiliar house. That dusty, summery smell of the hallway. I remember my first bed there - the bed that would see me through the summer - it was shallow and not very comfortable, the mattress thin and plasticky. That first sleep there though was luxurious and strangely feverish, like a slumber in a period of mild but exhausting illness.

Al moved in the next day I think. I remember opening the door to him in my socks - a strangeness at the time - it meant that I would now be living in the same house as him, and that the days of the Narrow House in Bransford Crescent were far, far behind me now.

The Conspiracy of a Tuesday that feels like Monday

An unpleasant man behind me in the queue at Tescos. I was glad I couldn't hear what he was saying.
The sun is back, defeated yesterday's magnificent gloom, but the sunlight feels like autumn, and the shadows are long like something vaguely longed for and remembered.
An age to fall asleep, last night, an epoch. Empires rose and fell, and I twisted and turned, driftwood in the swollen water of no-sleep. The small hours feel like forever.
The morning was a shock. 7:00 am drift. Shower and no time for tea, and I walk to work along the seafront. Sunlight and joggers and the homeless people under the arches by the tennis courts.
London Road at lunchtime. It felt like August in New York. I have never been to New York, but I have never been to Baltimore either, but I know what twilight is like there though.
Twilight is not here. The sky is blue and the sun is shining, but not in my north facing room. The light is altered though and it somehow does not feel quite like day should.
I dread the alarm in the mornings, wake up an hour before its lulling fairground chimes. Promise of a sinister sleep, and you'll fall asleep, past the snooze and late into the day.
I found an album 'The Grand Venomous Conspiracy' by a band I never heard of called Ringworm. The album cost me a pound, worth it for the artwork, by Away from Voivod.
These lines in themselves a tenuous conspiracy, these elements that make up this Tuesday that feels like Monday.
I do not know to what ends they conspire but am sure that I will never know.

This Town is Ruled by Gulls and they're all Killers

I can hear the rain just above the sound of the music. The i-pod is set to random, and insists on playing either nostalgic or melancholic songs. In the sound of the rain is the sound of a bird, not a seagull but some other bird, a springtime bird that sounds lonely and lost and out of place. A bad place for birds like you I think this town is ruled by gulls and they're all killers...
The door of my room rattles in the frame, -I have both my windows open. The sound puts me in mind of footsteps. Perhaps Andy is back, but I do not think so. Beyond the closed door the hallway feels silent.
The melancholy of a wasted day. Kind of tidied my room and kind of read 'Fables'- - fitting as it haunted my dreams so much last night. I tried to do some drawing earlier, just as twilight began - but eye-strain and the lowlight of dusk depressed me, and I ended up tearing the picture I was doing into ribbons.
Bank holiday Monday always tastes of church spires and lost afternoons.
The house opposite is sillhouette. One of the windows is lighted. An attic window, perhaps a bedroom or a study. Everything feels abandoned out there. The sky is grey / blue, nearly black. The sound of the rain is slow and heavier, dripping in a cave.
I hear the sound of a seagull now, and I wonder where the earlier bird I heard is now.

Slightly Ill

All yesterday, incapacitated by a hangover. Lying on Em's bed, exhausted. Came home last night and fell asleep on the sofa watching 'Cold Comfort Farm', by this time thinking it may not be a hangover - thinking I may have picked up Andy's odd 'exhaustion sickness'. A feverish night follows with feverish thoughts which make no sense now - of how a comic series called 'Fables' makes no sense because all the characters look the same and there are too many words. My thoughts keep returning to this. At some point I have a dream about a crawling hand. I don't know where the hand has come from. It hides in a fish tank and whispers to me that it will come in the night for me. I realise I have to kill the hand and go off to look for a knife. The hand knows what I am doing and crawls away into the darkness of the skirting board. I cannot find a knife to kill the hand. They are all too flimsy or have disappeared. Nearly 12:30pm now. Still have a headache. Not going to do an ything today but lie on my bed and listen to gloomy metal albums I only listen to when I am only slightly ill.

Suburbia, Summer and Death Metal

I never really like death metal, despite the fact that I always felt I should. I had spent my teenage years listening to thrash metal and hardcore - the faster, heavier and mroe intense the better. I was aghast when the bands I loved - thanks to the commercial success of bands such as Metallica and Megadeth - began to aim for such mainstream success themselves with albums that were lighter, slower, and often contained dreadful, dreadful 'ballads'. Death metal seemed a reaction to this, even more concerned with a single-minded intensity than thrash ahd been. It was faster for one - with metal's first excursions into the realm of the 'blast beat'. The lyrics were all concerned with horror, death, zombies and decay (One commentator later wrote about death metal that the two main lyrical themes were 'apathy and disease'). Death metal appeared to have everything I wanted in metal. From 1989 - 1992 I would buy the occasional death metal album when they turned up. Some I liked (Obituary, Morbid Angel) while others I found interesting, but always felt like I should like them better than I did (Benediction, Dismember, Entombed, Cannibal Corpse etc etc).
I never loved any death metal band as I had done with thrash, and no band equalled my love of teenage heroes such as Voivod, Kreator, Sodom, Whiplash, Razor or Bulldozer.
Over the summer of 1992 this vague interest exploded into an odd fascination with the genre, all thanks to a cheap compilation of death metal bands I had bought from Our Price in Uxbridge. Over that summer I remember listening to bands such as Immolation, Unleashed, Baphomet, Deceased, Cancer, Monstrosity, Sentenced, Impaled, Gorguts, Therion and Vader. I invested a lot of time (and money) in death metal, and spent many a happy hour listening to the records in my bedroom while playing the computer game 'Elite' on my Amstrad CPC 464... unfortunately I never really loved them, like I had done with bands from the preceding thrash genres... It became a kind of game to me - could I learn to love death metal? Death metal seemed to require a more intellectual than emotional response, a conscious studying - almost an aural observation - of the riffs and the lyrics. listening to the sounds and not feeling for the emotion. Listening to death metal became a discipline in strange abstraction.
Summer moved to autumn and winter, and I lost interest in death metal, because there were other new metal genres which actually were emotionally and imaginatively exciting. There was the second generation of black metal including Darkthrone, Emperor, Mayhem, Immortal and the burgeoning doom scene involving such groups as Paradise Lost, My Dying Bride, Anathema and The Gathering. There was a certain wild experimentation wehich infected the various extreme metal sub-genres. Death metal, in its single minded obsessiveness began to seem more and more conservative and disappointingly one-dimensional.

I still return to death metal every now and again, go through these phases of trying to find some emotional or imaginative response to the genre. It never quite works, but my fascination with it, and my fascination with my own fascination continues. I'm going through one such period now, and my most played bands on my i-pod over the last few months include Bloodbath, Autopsy, Living Sacrifice and Vallenfyre.

One thing which has become apparent - and what I have actually noticed before - is that I associate death metal with summer, and more specifically, a certain type of summer. I don't think we really get summers like this in Brighton - too close to the sea perhaps, as the summery landscapes that death metal describes is a very inland one. Death metal is the sound of suburbia, but not just the suburbia of neat and tidy gardens where the air tastes of sun-sticky tarmac and car-metal, but another kind of summer. A summer where weeds grow in wild tangles of fecund obscenity, and deep roadside ditches are choked full of poisoned flowers and head high grasses, summers full of the dark green of shadows of clustered ferns and rhododendron conspiracies, of the languorous winding of canals full of sky and emptiness and Sunday walks with the dog. There is an odd frenzied element to this deep in summer where the landscape becomes feral and feverish and feels oddly infected with too much life. Often in these dripping summer topographies there will be signs of human intervention, but an intervention that is decaying in a strangely elegant and mysterious fashion; brick walls once belonging to a factory that no longer exists, overflow pipes that have been dry for years sticking out of the stained stone walls of footbridges over August-shallow rivers. I remember back in Worcester, two years ago, seeing what looked like to be a chimney rising up out of a chaos of rhododendrum leaves by the side of the Severn.

Deep summrs are strange places - contain strange places, but even the most mundane of places sometimes achieve an oddly portentious anxiety. I remember over the summer of 1992 leaving the doctors in Ickenham. I had had to get jabs for a holiday in Tunisia, and I remember listening a Gorguts song ('Drifting Remains' about a group of people lost at sea on a raft; 'It was a sunny day, our nice trip turned to gore'). I was crossing Swakeleys Road listening to this song, preoccupied with all manner of morbid thoughts. 'People like me' I thought 'walk with out own mortality'. By the time I had got to the other side of Swakeleys Road, I had (correctly) thought that this was quite a pretentious thing to think, but looking back on it, at a distance of twenty years, I did have some kind of point. The upcoming flight made me nervous (I hadn't flown since returning from Malta back in 1976 or 1977) and Tunisia, in my imagination, had become a country of deserts and serial killers and secret police and miscarriages of justice. I began to become convinced that we would all be arrested and sentenced to death, framed for drug smuggling or something equally ridiculous. I remember Philip having a dream I took to be some kind of premonition. In the dream he had entered a room where there were four coffins on a table, a coffin for each of us who were going to Tunisia. When we were in Tunisia Philip had another dream. In this one he died. He was quite shook up by the dream - in the dream he saw his own coffin carried onto the plane, and then his own funeral. In this dream he was some kind of disembodied, disinterested observer. We all became quite shaken too, and discussed catching an earlier flight back, convinced that Philip's dream meant the plane was going to crash. Nothing even remotely sinister happened. I'm just glad that we weren't in Tunisia when 9/11 happened. (I was in Malta instead - well a few days afterwards - thats another story). I do remember playing Philip an Unleashed track on the plane trip back though. He looked offended and said 'it sounds like a bunch of grunting pigs!'. I was quite pleased with this reaction.

Even now death metal captures that slight paranoid anxiety I associate with August heat and the outer London suburbs of my late teens and early twenties. I remember the river that ran through Ickenham, staring down reedy embankments into the shallow brown water that stank of overgrowing weeds and brackish liquid. This is the smell of death metal and deep summers, of late adolescence and days in a hot dusty room listening to records that I never really liked, no matter how hard I tried.

Brighton Station, Just Before Midnight

I met Em at Brighton station last night at midnight, thanks to her odd propensity for catching the latest train she can (she had been up to Bristol for a couple of days). I caught the bus from the Mews all the way to Brighton station for free - thanks to a bus pass someone had happily given me at work that was no longer needed.
It was the first night of the Easter holidays, and Brighton had turned into a simulacrum of the last days of Rome. Drunk people swaggered about swearing. Various shouts and screams were heard (even in the bus) from various points. At a junction down Western Road, a car had crashed into a taxi. Sirens and onlookers. On the bus, a group of three lads talked loudly about nothing in particular and didn't notice.
I got to Brighton Station with twenty five minutes to spare. W.H.Smiths was closed. The coffee stall was closed. I waited in the main area listening to the Sad Lovers and Giants album 'The Mirror Test (Redux)' and wishing I still smoked or that it was warm enough (it was freezing) to drink the can of Diet Coke I had in my bag. Trains came in, disgorging swarms of people who all seemed to a)be from London (or maybe Crawley) and b)were engaging in some kind of loud and aggressive chanting. The latter - football chants presumably - had an oddly medieval quality to them as they echoed through the main station concourse.
Someone came up to me, whom I didn't immediately recognise. A young guy - late teens or early twenties maybe, carrying a skateboard. 'I don't know if you remember me...' he began. It turned out I did remember him. He used to come into the petrol station when I worked there, always expressing an interest in whatever music I was playing. I ended up doing a compilation tape of 1980s hardcore / punk bands for him (Carnivore, Septic Death, Die Kreuzen). He said that the tape had had quite an influence on his listening habits. 'Must have been about eight years ago' he said. It was nice he remembered me - and the tape I did him. I wondered how he recognised me - I looked completely different back then, thin, with short hair and no beard.
We wished each other well.
I waited for Em to Arrive.

Monika's Living Room

I only went round Monika's house a few times. Once was after her farewell dinner before she moved back to Poland, Jack daniels and coke and a taxi-ride to where she lived just past Seven Dials. I tried reading her future in a set of playing cards, but these cards were homemade, the suits drawn with W.H.Smiths biro onto thick packing box cardboard, and were cut into different sizes. Another time was during the day, after work, I can't remember why. I think we -Sil was with us as well - had all met up accidentally, though I can't quite remember how - or who would have been covering the shift at the petrol station where we all worked. I remember the day was hot though, a summers day full of brightness and heat. Remember walking the pleasant and dreamily lucid suburban streets on the other side of Hove Park, Monica kicking an apple along the pavement, Sil happy about something I can't remember. Monika's house was on the curve of one of the slopes that creased the ground around Preston Park train station

The living room was at the back of the house, and because of the slope the house was on, was accessed by a flight of stairs from the hallway. I remember having to pass through a succession of rooms to reach it - perhaps a kitchen and some other kind of little used reception area, but equally, these memories could well be architectural additions supplied by always less-than-reliable memory.

The living room struck me though.
At the time (summer 2006) I had been living in that hated studio flat on Buckingham Street for nearly three years. One room on the first floor, cramped with all my stuff and a tiny kitchen area. There was an adjoining toilet / bathroom, the size of a cupboard, and the hot water never worked. I lived in constant fear of running into my landlord, the sinister Dr Ra, and any of the other residents. I don't really know why. My room looked out onto the street itself, and I always felt conscious that people in the houses opposite could look into my room, even with the ragged net curtains hanging there. I think I kept the curtains shut for months on end, and I would always flee the flat during daylight hours if I could. The previous year, I had contracted a particularly carnivorous strain of flu and was imprisoned in the flat for eight days. I ran out of electricity (I used a key meter) and was unable to contact anyone. There was no food in the flat and I ended up not eating for an eight day period, lost in fevers and unconsciousness, -crawling to the toilet because I was unable to stand, let alone walk. I sometimes wonder how close I came to actually dying in that place. The flat never recovered from the flu, and I always it was somehow tainted. An unsafe place, not to be trusted. Oddly enough it is the place I have lived in longest over my adult life.

Compared to my one room hell, Monika's house seemed like some labyrinthine locus of mysterious cosiness (all those unseen rooms). The living room looked out onto a garden, consisting of a series of descending grassed slopes, accessed by a series of stone steps. I remember a wooden fence surrounding the garden, and trees too - certainly the garden was covered with leaves. I remember the sunlight, dappled and shifting on the grass and the leaves - the same effect as if the sunlight was reflected from water. This light - oddly muted in the bright summers day - transfigured the living room into a cool and sleepy place, full of shadows and a drifty timelessness. I could not imagine such atmospheric luxury being freely available to all who lived there. How did anyone do anything, I wondered, when they had access to such a place as this where, I imagined, one could spend languorous hours drifting and daydreaming? If I had lived in a place like this, the novelty I imagine, would have quickly worn off, and it would have bnecome just another room. I did not live there though, and compared to the unhomely un-private feeling flat I lived in then, a room like that resembled what I imagined a rented room in an Olympian Paradise might be like.

Less than a year later I would be leaving Buckingham Street for the bucolic suburbanism of the Wilbury Crescent flat, and it's own air of dreamy timelessness. I wasn't to know this at the time though, and thought that I would be stuck in the Buckingham Road flat for an indefinite amount of time - maybe until I got the flu again and actually died, or reached old age, or Buckingham Street got demolished, or I simply left Brighton.

I wouldn't even really know the street it was down now. It's out there somewhere though, and I wouldn't even recognise it if I passed it by, but I hope its as peaceful and dream-like and autumnal as it was on that summers afternoon six years ago

Notes after Rain

There was rain this morning, as I was walking to work. I was watching patches of sunlight on the ground, shimmering and cut by branch-shadows cast from the trees that lined the road, when I felt the first needle-surprise of a rain drop. Long, thin and sharp, it felt yellow on my face, -sunlight turned to liquid and quickly cooling. As I left the breached shelter of the trees I watched the rain turn heavier. It was a spring rain though, warm and young and hopeful. It tasted of cathedrals and Worcester mornings, my first spring time in Brighton, walking the dusty parallels of streets back from Hove after a job interview.

I ended up catching a bus from Tescos. The rain was getting heavier and I would have been soaked. I shared the bus with workers heading into town with the look of the outlying suburbs on their faces; Hangleton and Portslade, Southwick and Aldrington. Places I really only know after nightfall, on one of my meandering weekday walks.

The rain has gone now, and outside the call centre windows, a bright sun shines. I watch the sea under an only slightly blemished sky. There is a very clear 'after-rain' light which has sharpened the angles of everything and deepened the distance. The horizon of the sea - a shifting turquoise colour - seems closer to Europe than England. The light has an autumnal cast to it too, those first few days of that shift - gold September afternoons in cooling fields, watching the sky deepen and twist and curve. Deep as a sea, and the clouds floating there like ships made of skulls and birds and faces. A pareidolia season pumped full of simulacra and nostalgia.

I can see the glittering on the sea now, and it seems less like autumn. It gets me thinking of Cornish Coves, thinned-out fishing villages and seagulls looking down from cliff tops. I can't see any seagulls now - though there was a messy flurry of these avian thugs earlier. I can see a man in the stairwell of the hotel opposite. he stands at the glass, holding a balloon that floats above him. I can only see him in silhouette, a clown-shadow, and I look again, and he is gone.

The afternoon now. Lunchtime, spent buying comics and graphic novels from various shops, passed by in a summery haze of streets full of strangers and Easter holidaymakers. The after-rain autumnalism of the morning had gone. That sudden anti-glare of walking from the brightness of Western Road back into the call centre building jarred me. Waiting for the lift, and everything feeling flat and oddly colourless, everything drained away from the inside of things.

Halfway through the afternoon and the morning's autumn has returned. The sun is hidden behind an incidental cloud - the sky is mostly clear, a pale blue fading to white. I watch the shadows of the walkers on the promenade. The shadows seem fluid, pools of some night-essence distilled and velvety, even when cast by the light of a sometime autumnal sun.

A Postcard made from Driftwood

Tarot cards, here, somewhere.
A window behind me, like a mirror, showing branches that are not there.
A narrow and forgotten room.
Phone calls that lasted for hours.
I try not to think.
New versions of old songs.
Autumns slip away.
I watch them drift on tides from the sand of this time.
A postcard made from driftwood.

The Road is Lined with Premonitions

Drifted back into an old country.
The road was lined with premonitions, and the sky had begun to take on a once familiar tilt. The sound of the cars outside the window sound as they might have done years ago, and the coolness of the spring air makes me think of strawberry-yoghurt heavy drowsiness. I hear birds but the sunlight is too pale, too yellow, and the rumours of footsteps in hallways disturb me.
This is an old country. When you return to countries you once knew, it is hard to believe you ever left.
I imagine a fragment of myself on the pebbles of the beach, left from years ago, drinking coffees and smoking roll-ups. Lost in sea-air and the untranslatable dramas of seagulls. When I walk the Old Shoreham Road on one of my late evening walks I imagine that thinner, paler version of me walking just ahead of me - or perhaps just behind me. Rumours following rumour. An urban legend in the darkness with a familiar - half- familiar face. The topography of this place becomes heavy, sunk through with the cold air, and the snow they say will come. Newspaper warnings. Extreme weather alarm.
Of one sort or another.
As I said, the road was lined with premonitions.