Thursday 31 May 2012

Nine Lines from the Last of Spring

Drag-out of bed, unlock and lock the door. Quick tramp into town.
The day passes.
The Cinema, a film about nazis on the moon.

Walk home through the stretched out twilight. Late and still light, and it makes me think of the sea stretched back from the sand, the pebbles. A wide expanse of something exposed.
Driftwood. Rubbish. Things you lost.

Things I lost.
I think of a dark room with drawn shutters. A room I've not seen - only in dreams of Malta - and these dreams only half remembered.

Wednesday 30 May 2012

Sleep like the Old Men I One Day Hope to Join

(walking into fog)
I thought there would be silence, intimations of movements in white, but the birds sang as normal... No, I can't remember if they did or not. There was nothing different, just that the horizon disappeared into nothing. When I left the Mews it was sunny, but those white skies that had descended - they hung over town, a pall of an appalled and rebellious season, faulty anti-summer weaponry - it made everything seem like the jungle.

(the stairwell)
The cool sigh of the stairs? Not any more - the area outside the lifts is hospital-hot - a tropical zone that feels like malaria or typhoid - some illness picked up from the above jungle. This place used to taste of quiet and sleep and a few angles away from it all. I can't help but imagine a mattress here. Oh, hello. Some Meditterenean hell-hole prison. The tiled floor. Leaves on the floor. A tiny window that lets in all the bright light. Someone forgot to lock the door.

(the pavilion gardens)
Sleep with the old men and their cups of tea, and through the warm hardly-there-drizzle, watch those people sat on the grass. Me? I could lean back here and sleep. let go of the day and the phone calls, spend my hours out here like an old man I one day hope to be. Sleep and dream, and wake when it gets dark and the air is like vodka, and the cries of the drunks replace the seagulls.

Summers in Uxbridge, 1989 - 1991 approx

Roadside ditches full of cow parsley and shadow. Tangled embankment hedges hiding yellowing fields. Saturday evening taste of electric air. Thrash metal cassettes bought from Our Price on Uxbridge High Street (Deathrow, Exhorder, Mordred...) Crossing Uxbridge Common. The patchwork labyrinth of the Middlesex Fields. Drifting on bright yellow days.

Tuesday 29 May 2012

A Sound in my Room

There is a sound in my room. I do not know where it comes from, cannot even adequately describe the sound. It seems to emanate from hidden place - perhaps even the walls themselves. It is a kind of hissing sound - like the static of an untuned radio. A crackly and rumoured static. It sounds like the sea also, a rushing kind of noise. Water over stones. No, more like a river than the sea. There is no rhythmic pulse of tides. What is it? I thought it was my dinner on fire at first (grilled fish and mushrooms) but these have now been eaten and the noise continues. Perhaps it is some kind of interference on the laptop, but it seems to be making the usual heaving groaning sounds, and the sound now seems to be coming out of the air... and now it's stopped.

Monday 28 May 2012

Heatwave Note

Days stretch.
Joe messages me 'it's not even summer yet'.
Time, for once, slows. It feels like it should be July.
It's not even June.
On the beach at lunchtime, the pebbles taste of dust.
Yellow light.
Walking home.
Keeping to the shadows of buildings.
The sun is everywhere.

Sunday 27 May 2012

Shadows cast by Garages

I walk Em home, then make my way back through the pre-midnight streets. The sky is an icy blue - a half moon in the sky lighting that vast nothing. The heat settles into the pavements, into the streets, into the very space I breathe. Other spaces open up. An alleyway I have never noticed before - more like a narrow lane, or an old track. It leads - or seems to lead to a set of garages, lit by a single street lamp. I cannot remember if the street lamp is amongst the garages or in the street beyond. The shadows cast by the garages are deep and appealing, and look like pools of geometric water, a pond covered with algebra perhaps. There is a silence and a peace here, a summers night kind of mystery, and summer undoubtedly is deep with often overlooked mysteries. though The windows are open in my room. I hear the sound of distant cars. probably Portland Road, but I imagine it as a road in the country. A place heard in the distance at night from a remote cottage while falling asleep.

Saturday 26 May 2012

7:53am Postcard

The gap in my curtains shows me that the summer continues. A near-parallelogram of perfect blue sky, the narrow broiwn tones of the roof slopes below. Everything hums with an odd energy - that odd invisible tiger - of this early summer. You can taste it every time you breathe in, a sense of nervy anticipation, and each of these new senses is loaded with nostalgia for times which, for no real reason, are not usually remembered.
I can hear an air plane in the sky, a sound which somehow only serves to increase the sense of timelessness already in the day.

Thursday 24 May 2012

Invisible Tigers

After a curry and pint with Em at the Wetherspoons next to work, a slow walk back home along the seafront. The heatwave continues, but really, it isn't a heatwave, just a sudden surge in to something that actually resembles summer. It wasn't just the heat, but the hazy light too, and the way that still sea vanished into a white and hidden horizon.
Jugglers and joggers, the oddly melancholy smell of barbecues, happy dogs chasing balls, buskers, skaters, cyclists... the usual cavalcade of people along Hove Lawns. The other side of Sackville Road was more interesting. There is more an air of slight decay and wasteground industry. The unreal nature of that slowly fading sky above the crumbling cracks in the walls of buildings gave everything the air of some foreign country on the edge of Africa. Tunisia perhaps - or at least my memories of the two weeks I spent there twenty years ago. The slow air, that beguiling touch of some coming apocalypse, a languorous judgement day.
By the London gangland looking gym, a patch of wasteground fascinates me. A low wall looks down onto it. I imagine dropping down into the long and weedy grass, running down the path that lines the centre of it. I remember seeing a syringe a couple of summers go. An addict place, hidden between the ever busy boulevard and the road to Portslade, to Shoreham, and all those tiny no-places between, sinister names like Fishersgate, Southwick, Aldrington... Near the centre of the wasteground field, a square of ground, the size of a large garden shed perhaps, is surrounded by a tall fence topped with vicious looking razor wire. The fence seems to protect nothing, keeping the onlooker safe from the emptiness contained inside. I imagine there must be an obscured entrance to some kind of underground works, an entry into Brighton's vast and Victorian sewers. It looks like a cage, and makes the emptiness of the air there look dangerous. Breath of some tiger with perfect camouflage, a fur made of the sea, and eyes the colour of razor wire in sunburnt twilight.
We walked further down, towards the industrial zone. Shoreham power station chimney. Intimations of that kingdom of quarry machines and fenced off contamination sites, a place out of John Burnside's 'Glister' perhaps. Head up onto New Church Road. A quiet tree lines street, and I feel some part of the past trying to nudge its way through, but I can't quite work out what - where - when it is - Worcester? Ickenham? Forres? Being in my twenties? Adolescence? Childhood? There is something lost and beautiful on the air, and I remember when summers - when the very beginnings of summers - would promise some kind of revelation. June, July, August... these months would surely prove something would be revealed, something occult and magickal and forever - a mystery at least, seven magpies, a secret never to be told.
I'll leave the windows of my room open, hope to breathe in those things that are not even rumoured any more as I sleep.
Maybe they'll slip through my dreams with the sure and elegant deadliness of invisible tigers.

Wednesday 23 May 2012

Air-Raid Meanders

Suddenly we're deep in summer now. Spring (which felt more like a rainy winter) feels like years ago. The suddenness of the heatwave makes it feel like August. Springtime is a rumour, autumn is a myth, all there is is this... Come next week, I'm sure the heatwave will have faded, so I'm trying to enjoy this odd disorientation while it lasts.
I was in training all day today, so at first break I sat out on the fifth floor balcony, and continued to read John Burnside's 'A Summer of Drowning', set in the endless summer of the Arctic Circle. The absolute summeriness of the balcony surprised me, the sun, the heat, the shimmers in the distance, the shadow of the netting that hangs over the balcony... I swear felt the shadows cut fall onto my skin like delicate knives.
Seagull song, the sea, the sky, and the air itself seems to perspire. Watching the boats on the mirror-still sea. From the windows of unfamiliar floors, spying the wooden gargoyles on the wooden spire of the church next door. Bombed in world war 2, they rebuilt the spire from wood, though you can't tell unless you look really close. Bombs falling on Brighton. Seems impossible now. I think of the last drawing I did; a boy on a bed kneeling at the window, looking out onto a landscape of buildings beneath a yellowed portentous sky. The buildings are those outside the window where I sit at work, and the picture I called - with little reason - (as ever) 'Waiting for the Air Raid'. I wonder if anyone waited for an air-raid from where I sit and take calls? I remember a taxi driver once telling me how he had been machine-gunned at by a German fighter plane down London Road... and to think I believed him. I remember Nan telling me about the outbreak of World War 2. Houses she knew being bombed, streets destroyed, and Dad not even born (he was born in 1943). I read somewhere that they barbed-wired off the beach during the war. No sunbathing, no drinkers, no deck chairs, just the gulls and the tides over winters and summers and sudden heat-waves, falling onto the pebbles with a noise that must have sounded like a guilty, lucid silence.

Tuesday 22 May 2012

More July than May

Like walking into another dimension. The sudden heatwave is disorientating. Now it does feel like summer. in every breath, in every footstep on the morning pavements, it feels like summer. The trees down New Church Road are deep green with leaves, and the air tastes, as all early summers do, of electric fences and fairgrounds.
In the Pavilion Gardens at lunchtime with Em, sat in the shade of trees, and the park is packed with people. I remember I used to come here so often. The cups of tea from the cafe never change, that same langour, the Ta--Chi man is back, practising the same movements in the same place, as he has done for at least ten years.
There are the angles of all summers - or the beginnings of all summers - in these days, those both experienced and remembered, and those that are imagined, or rumoured. Strange how the very beginnings of seasons (when ir really isn't the season concerned at all) capture the essence of the coming season far more than being right in the middle of it. The end of May feels more like July than July ever does. August feels more like October than October.
It seems unbelievable we are only a month away from midsummer.

Monday 21 May 2012

May the 21st 2010

It seems barely possible, that it is two years today that I lost my job at Telegen, the old call centre. Two years! I was in Worcester at the time, with the two Joes, walking along the banks of the river Severn, to some pub deep in the ridiculously lush countryside. It was Claire who phoned me. I remember asking her if everything was okay, to which she replied 'no, not really, Telegen went into administration this morning'. The rest of the weekend was a highly charged and surreal affair. I had about £40 to last me indefinitely, bills to pay, rent to pay, and there I was wondering around Worcester, that most mythic place of mine, wondering what on earth the future was going to hold.
That weekend is etched deep into my mind, one of the reasons why it doesn't feel like two years ago. Everything was dripping with meaning and resonance, hyper-real and dream-lucid. I remember a lone Friday night walk to the petrol station where I worked over 1998 / 1999, past where I used to live on London Road, to buy tobacco. I remember the stroll around Worcester with Joe on the Saturday, 'closing down the dark heart of Worcester' as we nonsensically (and pretentiously) called it. I remember sitting on the hill of Fort Royal Park, watching the sun sink into the cathedral, pierced by the spike of the spire in a perfect blue sky. I remember that last night there, unable to sleep in the spare room, watching it get slowly light in pulses, till finally, I remember the cathedral bells, bright and clear and full of all those years I had spent living there over ten years before. Last of all I remember that train ride home, watching the countryside change from the deep green of Worcestershire to the dusty yellow emptiness of Sussex, and whatever unknown future awaited me.
Worcester changed from then on for me. It became, by some kind of mental alchemy I don't quite understand, the Worcester that I had mythologised since I finished uni there back in 1999. Worcester became the 'Clovelly Heath' that I had written so many stories about when I first moved to Brighton. I have been back a few times since then, and that feeling of Worcester being occultistically charged with some strange power remains. I had expected it to fade over time, but I am glad that it hasn't.
I have seen so many things in Brighton today that have reminded me of Worcester that weekend; the deep green of the sudden summery trees down New Church Road, the sound of birds, the ways the light falls. Today seems to burn with that odd nervy energy of two years ago. As I've written before, somewhere else in Bridge 39, only Clovelly Heath is real.

Morris Dancers, Portland Road Freakouts and no Quiet Anything

Tried to go for a 'quiet pint' with Em after she finished work last night. As soon as we hit Portland Road, the various screams and dismaying air of male drunken aggression pushed us down the seafront instead to the Neptune. A man was being told off at the bar 'and you just come in and cause problems and annoy the customers - that's why you were banned!'. A skinhead-looking man next to us sat on his own, muttering schizophrenically into a beer that was as dark as he was.
Tried to for a quiet cup of tea this afternoon with Em. Thought we'd go to the Pavilion Gardens. Sat down with cups of tea on the green chairs, watching people walk to and from (it is an outdoor cafe). Then there was a jangling of bells. Then we were swamped by five or six different groups of morris dancers their trousers jangling with bells. The morris dancers cluttered up the cafe. They all seemed quite excited about something. I think they had all been having some kinf of morris dancing contest. Now there was a display of rowdy morris dancing, and accompanying medieval folk musicians and lots of shouting and clacking of sticks and bearded men and middle aged women chanting 'hail the ale!'.
With a growing air of surreal bemusement, Em pointed out how one of the morris dancers looked exactly like Jow would if he had taken up morris dancing...

Saturday 19 May 2012

Fading Birdsong

Light fading in here, but despite the gloom I am loathe to turn on the light. Music is on low (Storm Corrosion's self titled album of quiet and melancholic half-lullabies) and it seems to replicate - almost replicate - the gathering dusk outside the window. This time of year is always heavy with nostalgia - I can hear the songs of wood pigeons - a bird whose sole purpose must surely be to instil nostalgia in the listener. If I look up, in the suddenly vast skies, the silhouette-flash of bird wings, a lonely-seeming flight. Where are they heading to now I wonder? Finding somewhere quiet to settle for the night no doubt. Some nest, I hope and imagine, in the bays of some unmapped, unknown wood, just north from here. There are other birds I hear now. I know nothing about bird song and species. maybe a thrush, or a starling. Some small and comfortable bird. It doesn't matter, because in the grey-blue of this light, it only sounds like one thing, and that is the past. Not necessarily any particular bit of the past, maybe not even my past - it sounds like a time that is gone, something that was probably never really here.

Random Saturday Morning Stuff

I am still unused to Saturday mornings to myself, and since contracts have changed at work and I now work one Saturday in every two, there are many Saturdays mornings to get used to. Saturday mornings when you were a kid were fantastic, pajamas and Frosties in front of the TV; Star Fleet, Saturday Swap Shop, Fantastic Journey... If you were really lucky there might be a random Space 1999 episode on. There was always that sense of headache-y gloom that would come down when the kids TV had ended and the Saturday sports shows would start and there would be nothing on until Basil Brush or The Tripods or Doctor Who or The A-Team (depending on how old I was).
Saturday afternoons could be excellent if friends were about and there were ghost hunts to be had in sunlit woods, or dens to be built in the barbed wire surrounding RAF Kinloss, (As an aside Andy has just sent me a link to a BBC news report about RAF Kinloss being investigated for radiation contamination stretching back to World War II). If no friends were about, or I was living in Forres where I knew no-one, Saturday afternoons were less happy. Well, not necessarily unhappy, but there was just more of that awful awareness of school again on Monday, and before then, you knew you had to descend into the existential Hell that seemed to define Sunday afternoons.
Anyhow. It's quite nice to have Saturday mornings back on a regular basis, even if there is only twenty minutes now left of this one.

Friday 18 May 2012

8:57am

Walking back last night. Lots of leaves on the trees of New Church Road. The shadows beneath them (it was twilight when we walked back) were that deep summer shade of blue. The sky was still light - kind of. In summer, it feels as if the night rises up from the round. In winter it seems quite often that the sky remains dark, but ground level retains some light.
Anyhow, I've got to get to work.

Thursday 17 May 2012

to co niemozliwe, okryte fioletem

Funny because I was thinking about her earlier on, that it has been six years since I last saw her, the usual thing with me; the passage of time, growing older, six years now being somewhere between a sixth and a seventh of my life etc etc
After an evening of watching the television I retired to my room shortly before midnight to continue the drawing I'm currently working on (a sixteenth century sailing ship augmented by ramshackle industrial looking pipes and chimneys,a woman's face looking at the ship, her chest a tangle of vines and leaves, three brightly coloured UFOs in a cloudy stormy sky). The drawing I had been thinking, began to remind me of a drawing I was doing over that summer, purely because both seemed to take forever, and got nowhere. I picked up something on the drawers to the left of the desk where I sit. A piece of paper. I unfold it, and in the dim light read the words 'TO CO NIEMOZLIWE, OKRYTE FIOLETEM'. It was the name that she had given to that picture I was thinking about, written in her script on a blank receipt from the petrol station. Above her writing, my own, an inaccurate translation 'AN IMPOSSIBLE NOSTALGIA, CAUGHT IN VIOLET'.
I hadn't seen the receipt for years, thought I'd lost - hadn't in fact thought about it all. I have no idea what it was doing on the chest of drawers next to the desk. I probably disturbed it over the weekend's influx of new furniture, accidentally released it from whatever nook or cranny it has been hiding in these past six years.

Tuesday 15 May 2012

The Autumnal City

The autumnal city shifts like a tide beneath all cities. A current underneath the geographies in which we happen to find ourselves. It leaks through though, sometimes - like the light spilling out of late night grocers onto October pavements - and I almost taste the hallows of its sleeping, ever-stirring streets. I fry mushrooms for dinner, and in the sizzle and smoke, I hear the cluster-rustle of leaves of September pavements, blown from the branches of short thick trees. In the autumnal city the leaves can be fried and eaten, and only the apples might kill you. I hear the sleepers here, in this city that is a time, in this season that is a place - and their dreams leak too, run like streams down the gutters of smoke-dark rain on long drawn-out Sunday afternoons. Do they know they sleep here? I do not wake here, but always reach for this place, and the city slips away from me. It is here though, in everything I do, and I know that given a certain twist of a curving alleyway, or the steam train flicker of playing cards being shuffled, I might find my way into this city that has no end, no outside, just an infinity of ever-darkening and beguiling afternoons.

Monday 14 May 2012

Translation

Something produced from an infinity of steam-trains, a steam roller day. Everything pushed flat would be the colkour of that sky, it tastes of corrugated iron and electric fences. Below it all, the sound of something chiming. A bell from the woods underwater, the spinney just off the pier. Poplar trees beneath the waves, swaying like uncertain church spires, a merman-silence, a kraken-brood.
Walking home, and in those few places that are deep with trees and bushes - occult spaces by tiny obscure hospitals and that museum I've never been in down New Church Road, I notice the colour there is of someone vanishing. Wind through rhe leaves of woodland clumps, sun-dappled shadow. A movement like sleep and nothing.

Sunday 13 May 2012

Rooms, Dreamt of and Otherwise

My room is heavy with new / old furniture - desk, drawers, and a 'white thing' Em found in the street last year for storing small items on. This is all stuff from her old place that she does not need in her new place (and Em, in sharp contrast to me is happier the less she has...). I also have the old sofa in here too, as Em's (larger and more comfortable) sofa is in the living room. It was a diabolic process getting the sofa from there to here, and could not have been done without Em's Dad (here to move things) and screwdrivers, drills and trips to Homebase for more screws and (bits for) drills.
My room, vaguely chaotic and looking scatter-brained, feels inexplicably larger but with less space. It has a much more pleasing feel. Through the half open curtains I see sunlight on the houses, and in the coolness of this always-shadowed room, a pleasing day-dreamy serenity. A very familiar serenity, though I can't think from where. It reminds me of sunlight falling through branches in the wind, leaf-shadows on the floor of an imagined childhood room, high up in a much loved and mythical house. Sleep and afternoons, summer stretching on into dusty Augusts. I don't know the room now reminds me of this. Familiar things are often those things we have never seen before.
I dreamt of Woodstock Drive last night, the house I lived in as a teenager on the western edge of London. In the dream the house was accessed through a building that looked very much like the Mews. I was there with Em, and we were staying there over a number of days. The house was full of other peoples things. I was worried in case they were a) either still there or b) had just popped out and would be back to find strangers there. I knew that they had disappeared though and would not be back. I knew that this was because the house was haunted (of course) by a dark and invisible malevolence. I realised that the source of the haunting was my old room. At the end of the landing, the white door closed, hiding something. This was the last room in the house that I was to go into. With trepidation I opened the door - the room was covered with someone else's belonging, but still looked like my old room. I knew that the room belonged to another teenage boy.
That's all I remember.

Friday 11 May 2012

A Place Almost Two Years Old

Pale blue sky. Wispy clouds. Strawberry yoghurt. An empty dinner plate.
One of the lamps strung across the Mews moves in the evening breeze. Summery air, but its still laced with some kind of coolness, a thread of something slipped into a drink, a snake moving through a pool.
Last night sleeping at Em's last night (she moves tomorrow) and the flat is emptying, beginning to belong more and more to that feeling of abandonment. Voices echo. Footsteps, even on the carpetted floor, clatter. The bare walls are too white, and the thin blinds (instead of curtains) let the morning sun seep through as if they weren't there.
I lay there waiting for the alarm.
I remember this place, from almost two years ago now. I will help move her stuff tomorrow, and after the weekend the interior of that place will be lost to us all, another memory-geography, another past-landscape.
With Em in the Pavilion Gardens at lunchtime, cups of tea and watching the green of the trees shift. There was something I thought to write about now, but now I am here, I cannot remember it at all.

Wednesday 9 May 2012

Fortean Coincidence

One of my (mostly) daily rituals is checking out the message boards at the Fortean Times website. The forums are full of tales and discussions on various paranormal subjects; ghost stories, cryptozoology, poltergeists, folklore, the occult, psychogeography - all the stuff I've been interested in since childhood. Over the past five years, this has unearthed some odd, odd tales and emerging urban legend archetypes; dog-headed men, shadow people, black eyed kids, stick men, the weirder the better. This morning perusing the website at work, I was delighted that there was a new thread called 'Where is the real weirdness?'. This was exciting. A thread dedicated to all the 'mind blowing weirdness that doesn't seem to make any sense at all'. I got to page two of the thread and one of my favourite tales was mentioned - the fox wearing a top hat while walking on its hind legs, which I wrote about here. The thing with such utterly bizarre stories as this is that there never seems to be enough information to satisfy curiosity. They get mentioned in a book here and a book there, jigsaw pieces that never quite show the full picture. I've read accounts of the 'top hat fox' in at least three different books. Perhaps there would be some new information on this surreal story? The piece began with the poster saying how 'it's funny when read in daylight, but quite a different proposition in the middle of a stormy night' - which is kind of how I feel about it. He went onto say that as he didn't have the book (Affleck Grey's excellent 'The Big Grey Man of Ben Macdhui') to hand - where there was fairly full account of the incident - so he would take 'most of the following off the net'.
I settled down to read about the familiar but still intriguing incident. As I began reading, a strange feeling began to creep over me - this was all very familiar indeed, a feeling similar to the time in a nightclub when I tried to get past a figure who kept stepping the same way I was, at exactly the same time - it was a mirror and I was drunk... I read on, and kept being prodded by these angular jabs of familiarity, this textual deja-vu. I was, of course, reading my own post from last December. He or she had taken the account from Bridge 39...
I was delighted. It was such an odd feeling, to be reading something I've written almost objectively, and to be come across it, completely coincidentally, on a website I visit nearly every day was just the icing on the synchronicitous (hmm. Not sure that's a real word) cake. The funny thing is that I've wanted to join the Fortean Times message board since I started visiting five years ago, but have been unable to due to the type of e-mail address I have. One of the things I wanted to post about, of course, was the fox wearing a top hat while walking on its hind legs...

Tuesday 8 May 2012

Thread and Spindle

I think time gets caught on the air, scent on the breeze from somewhere else, a cobweb-tangle of childhoods, your own and other peoples, and childhoods that have never been, lost lovers, lost dreams, lost afternoons, lost ships, a fragment of a fever, of rain on the panes of glass in a tiny room, December blackberries tapping at the window, a walk to buy cigarettes down autumn paths, an unopened cupboard, a locked drawer, and that delicious feeling of being followed down summery lanes.
A suddenly unexpected walk home tonight, as I called in at Dave's Comics first to buy (another) expensive book reproducing 1950s horror comics. Walk up the hill, call in at Brighton Station to use the loo, up, up, up, and into Seven Dials, glance down Buckingham Street, splinter of an old studio flat, run into Greg, walking home. He tells me of his 50th birthday. As it turned midnight he was onstage playing guitar for his band Paradise 9. Down Cromwell Road - oh this old road, breathe in, and taste those petrol station spring-times, Andy's house for a coffee before the afternoon shifts, CD skipping in the walkman, and suddenly - recovering from a mild childhood illness in 1982 - I can taste that Burnside time - Pot Noodles and the Beano, the leafy shadows of the living room, Adam and the Ants and Peter Davidson still the Doctor, cub scouts on Monday, and the trees in wind-waving in the breeze on the path to school. Now we're back in the midsummer - the exact midsummer of 2006. Hazel down, and I had shaved my hair. Skinhead Stuart,and Opeth on my MP3, Blackwater Park, and everything green and early early morning and shimmery, and, ah, yes 2007, the yellow May, crammed with the euphoria of moving into Wilbury Crescent - and here, oh yes, I remember, back from New Zealand and my first early shift at work, deep smell of the trees that cluster above the wall of the old peoples home, black November, unbelievably cold, autumn 2003, and I had only just moved into that flat on Buckingham Street.
We're caught on that air too, observers of these endless pasts, these labyrinthine entwining mysteries, reaching for the air, swim up through these waters laced with stars, and a coolness as clear as a night scene delineated only in black ink and those spaces between black ink.
Sat in the living room, a purple shirt fallen from where it was drying to the floor, Smallville season one boxset, spilling discs under a copy of the Guardian from Saturday, a wine glass on the table next to the laptop, a shallow rim of slightly inky water (I used it to clean a brush yesterday).
Through the glass, the distorted cover of 'The Great Shadow' by Mario de Sa-Carneiro
I am full of salad and fat-free turkey yoghurt.
This is now.
I feel it getting caught on the air already.
Thread and spindle, nostalgia and drift.

Monday 7 May 2012

Someone Else's House Party

As I drew my curtains shut last night, I noticed something in the darkness outside, some kind of commotion. Some movement in the lighted window in the house across the passage, the one that looks across the one storey extension that is the back of Drury's coffee shop. A figure in the window, flailing his arms. Illuminated in the light of my room as I was, I felt suddenly vulnerable and went to switch off the light. In the darkness I went back to the window, to see what was happening. At first I thought there was some kind of domestic argument. A man was swinging his arms about and gesticulating wildly. Then other people joined the scene. There was much laughter and the low thud-thus-thud of music. They appeared to be playing some kind of game. I saw a man in a paper hat, someone else inexpertly holding a cup of wine, or some other dark substance. They were having some kind of house party.
Pleased I had discovered the source of the noise I went to bed. As I lay there listening to the vague sounds of the party (these old houses are very soundproofed it seems) I thought about house parties. I never really got the hang of them... would pretend I would be enjoying them, would even look forward to them, but I was always glad when they were over and I could go to bed or go home. I always found something a little bit threatening about house parties, something shifty and unpredictable. Sections of the house in which the party was held, even well known houses, even your own home, would become off-limits, new kingdoms ruled by strangers, by those friends of friends with their loud laughs and aggressive voices, and you were never sure whose friends of friends they were. I think that's what always unnerves me about house parties, that odd sense of aggression, of chaos about to spill over... which often does happen. Some parties I have attended have left the house in an unbelievable state of utter destruction the next day.
Even the sounds of a house party, like that relatively restrained gathering last night, sound vicious and alarming. All that they're doing I told myself as I fell asleep, is enjoying themselves.
I really must be getting old.

Sunday 6 May 2012

Stirring in Night-Waters

Yesterday slipped through those rainy gloomy hours with a fluid and conspiratorial air. I walked into town and back, I had a bath, I read for a while, and drew for an even small while. The day was mine and the flat also, though as the afternoon tipped into evening, I realised the flat didn't belong to me but something else.
Something which comes in all flats - and houses - all interiors, when the day has been spent alone and the daylight starts to fail. I love that phrase, as if the coming of night indicates some kind of wrongness rather than the next step in the perfectly natural cycle of things.
The rooms seemed to generate the night - the darkness, a blue the colour of pools and rain and days spent alone, a ghost story colour - seemed to sweep and swim from every room where I was not. If I was in the kitchen, my room seemed to generate the darkness, if I was in my room, then it would be the living room that would be the source of this night-river.
For some reason I was loathe to turn the lights on (aside from the room where I was), even though this would dispel this unsettling feeling of night time flooding the rooms, flooding from the rooms. There was a panicky feeling in the flat too, as if I was not meant to be witness to this. Something stirring in the night-waters.
I was due to meet Em, and I was glad when I stepped into the Mews and shut the door of the flat behind me. I headed off to meet Em, and in the post-rain air, all the houses and sky looked old and dreamy and uncertain too, as if whatever had stirred in the night-waters of the flat had stirred here too.

Saturday 5 May 2012

Grey and Glee

The sky, cut into neat rectangles by the black lines of the window frames, is a shade of bank holiday weekend grey. A nearly flat shade of no-colour, wet looking and swollen - in places - with lighter streaks of no-colour. A wet and day dreamy colour, cold and desolate and so utterly typical. So typical in fact that it threatens to become a cliche.
Everyone is complaining about 'the overcast weather' and it being symptomatic of 'typical England', whilst at the same time being quite surprised that it is grey and cold. I saw the headline of the Daily Mail warn that the 'cold spell' will 'continue into June' in tones suggesting that this outcome may be only slightly less unnerving than some kind of apocalypse.
I went out this morning to Portland Road for The Guardian. My god, it was cold. That kind of sinking wet cold that seems to creep into your fingers. Bones of old people, arthritic premonitions. The wet pavements had a kind of hypnotic glare to them. The branches of the front garden trees were heavy with blossoms, and the air was thick with their scent, and that fecund smell of late rainy springs.
I came back home and read bits of The Guardian and some fantasy novel I bought yesterday, toyed (and am still toying) with the idea of popping into town to buy Burzum's re-recorded versions of his early songs. Just waiting to sync my i-pod having put on yesterday's Tiamat album on.
I might meander through the churchyard by Tescos on my way into town, past the graves and the street drinkers and wish I could still smoke a cigarette sat on a bench while looking up into that old shadow of a church tower.
This is an M.R.James day, a day for Victorian ghost stories and meandering daydreams whilst staring out of the window, a sleepy midday creeping into a long slow afternoon and a languid half-light evening.

Friday 4 May 2012

Kiruna Stammell down North Street

A slip of growing twilight behind the curtains, Tiamat's 'Judas Christ' album on the stereo(bought for £1:99 from Oxfam down the North laine) a cup of tea and a pot of low fat strawberry yoghurt in the fridge, and the whole of the bank holiday weekend off from work.
Walking back to work from lunch, an oddly familiar figure catches my eye. I have trouble recognising people I see every day if they are out of their normal habitats (Prosopagnosia...) but have no trouble recognising people I have seen on television it seems. I recognised Kiruna Stamell immediately (she was in the last Ricky Gervais thing and also in 'Cast-Offs' on channel 4 a few years ago - oh yes, and she was in 'Moulin Rouge too I think'). I did that classic double take, which you always try not to do when confronted with people you have known previously from some performance capacity. At first you think that you may know them. I have waved happily at Caitlin Moran before, thinking she was a friend of Sarah's before realising with horror that I knew her from her writing in The Times. Another time I almost went to say hello to that annoying actress who is in Eastenders, (she was smug and grumpy so I won't mention her name).
Anyhow, I looked back, realised it was 'that woman from the telly' (I had to google the spelling of her name when I got back to work), had that surreal shift of perception when two-dimensional people are now three dimensional and walking down the same street as you and you realise they're real, and went back to work and took some calls about financial products and wondered what it was like to be an actor instead.
More twilight outside, and Tiamat sounding like some gloomy prog-goth band, a dreamy drizzle of an album, like falling asleep on drizzly afternoons on days where the weather is as gloomy and bank holiday weekend-ish as it is today

The Boy Between

A boy kneels on a bed looks out of the window. The ink-creases on the quilt of his bed look like blood. Beyond the pencil window frame is an even vaguer pencil landscape. Poplar tree smudges, a bluster of an imagined autumn. The taste of his room is of apples and attics, and on the wall above his bed (not even a pencil mark yet for this) is a poster of a sci-fi show he watches every Saturday afternoon called The Lost Ship.
To get the pose of the boy right - or at least vaguely accurate - I used the self timer on my camera and leant against my own windowsill. Not even a pencil autumn here. My curtains were closed and it wad night. I look at the photograph of myself afterwards. A 40 year old man in the attitude of a child. I still stare out of the window in the same way.
I don't know who the boy in the drawing is. Tempting to say that he might be, I don't think this is quite true. Yesterday afternoon, while between calls at work, I thought - suddenly and with a startling clarity - that I was creating another childhood.
Or recreating one?
I am not sure I can do anything that isn't autobiographical in some way. The ink on my fingers is the ink on the creases of his unreal bed. Creeping Sunday shadows, and windows open to cold skies, though whether it is autumn or spring I can't tell.
Yesterday it felt like I was chipping away at something, a bit at a time, then in a sudden shatter, that something shattered like ice, and now in the paper is a hole - no, a window - into this other place. A window looking onto a window, and a boy between.

Tuesday 1 May 2012

Evening Fragment

The kitchen.
Summery sunlight on the roofs across the Mews.
The flat smells of clean washing.
Voices from outside; children, their parents.
Mouth too hot from too much hot chilli and jalapeno flavour Branston relish.
A quarter of a can of diet coke left.
Conversation with Andy about how we don't enjoy listening to new albums.
Evening birdsong makes me think of old railway tracks through woods
covered with grasses.