Here come the Tangled Days

8:32pm and it's twilight outside.

That other country s creeping back.

For a second I felt it today; that intimation of unfocussed paths that curve through afternoons, slow honey-creep till drawn out nightfall.

But only for a second.

Deep summer starts now, and despite the less-than-warm season, it feels like the tangled up days of August are here. Mornings and nights locked in a jungle, and the horizon shimmers. 

Passers by have those crazed eyes of holidaymakers.

Postcard from Owned-Time

Sunny walking into work this morning, bright and hot. A pleasing temperature. Despite the heat, the air was happily lacking that humid claustrophobia that has been a common element to this mostly broken summer.

Oh, that Monday morning walk to work, like a jouney to the gallows. The streets pass reluctantly by. I glance with jealousy at the men and women, happy and relaxed sat on the pavement chairs outside of cafes. That rich smell of morning coffee, remniscent of happy train journeys and days that have no plans, nothing to do, certainly nothing unpleasant to do anyway. How I long to join them, but cannot, as I have to work. I have to - finally - give up the weekend. Own-time is over, and now it is owned-time. The odd thing is, after half an hour of being actually at work, it becomes oddly enjoyable, catching up with people after the weekend.

The strange dread of Monday mornings actually infects almost all of Sunday as well. I guardedly watch the time, unwilling to commit to any activity that might make the day pass by any quicker. When night falls on Sunday night, it is with an air of almost superstitous portentousness. Dismal are those evenings when the time comes to turn the light on. You try and make the best of it though; another three hours before bed, enough time to read some more / watch a film / do some more drawing.

The only thing that really allays this Sunday evening anxiety is an evening walk. I like to set out about half an hour before twilight, and come back when it is fully dark.

I avoided walking by the cemetery on the Old Shoreham Road last night, and that edgy atmosphere of vulnerable isolation that has accompanied recent Sunday night excursions there. I went up Sackville Road instead, past my old flat on Wilbury Crscent, and then in a kind of circle back home. Never mind about these Sunday evening walks laying to rest the ghosts of Monday morning, it is the only time I actually feel relatively untroubled by life (even with the toothache which is going to necessitate a long overdue trip to the dentist...)

That same toothache kept me in a state of restlessness all night. as I woke up every few hours with a dismal feeling of dread. This wasn't because of the pain, which is light and barely there, but because the existence of the toothache, and the fact that its progressive quality, is meaning a definite trip to the dentists. It is like that fear of Monday morning, but worse.I dread to think the last time I went. When I get to going to the dentist, there is the fear of an inevitable medical procedure to contend with. I find having an eye test at the opticians horrifying enough, thank you, but the going to the dentists makes that pale in comparison. I have to go, it is inevitabvle, otherwise it will only get worse.

At least my broken sleep last night meant I remembered my dreams. Or at least a dream. In it I had returned to the house I lived in during adolescence down Woodstock Drive in Ickenham. I had - for some forgotten reason - been allowed access to the interior of the house. The interior of the house bore no resemblance to it in waking life. I remember the garden of the dream house, the tall and narrow trees, fluttering leaves, silver bark. I wish I could remember more but it is now twelve hours later and much of the detail has now gone. The interesting thing about this dream (which I have had before) is that in the 'Woodstock Drive' dreams I am actually back inside the house. In the 'London Road' and 'Southside dreans' I am always trying to get back to the houses I once lived in, but never quite make it.

I did dream the other night of being opposite 136 London Road. I was outside looking in, and I could see that the whole interior had been refurbished, and that the first floor was now some giant room, where huge windows let in a bright blue sky from outside.

The Strange Melancholy of Sunny Sunday Afternoons

Sunday afternoon 4:23pm.

That strange full-bodied melancholy of sunny Sunday afternoons when slightly hungover. Enough time to relax but too much guilt to be able to do that. Make the most of your weekend. That endless mantra. Everyone else is having Sunday dinner at some pub on Southover Street (aside from Em who is working). Slightly hungover and back at work tomorrow, I have elected to stay in (I have gone into town though and bought some albums -seven!- at Residents summer sale). 

Al's 40th last night. Lots of people not seen since Al's wedding, nearly a year ago; Ben, Graham, Hazel, Danny. Kegs of beer in West Hill Hall. Those high windows, squares slowly darkening as it edged toward midnight. A taxi-ride home in the small hours for Em and myself, a deep sleep, then Sunday.

The strange melancholy of sunny Sunday afternoons.

4:28pm

Sake

Half a bottle of Sake, and the base of the glass I'm drinking it out of is smeared with ink from my fingers. Forgot the Olympics had begun and watched an old episode of Doctor Who from 1986, listened to Sonic Youth and got on with the drawing I begun three weeks ago. Don't think I've ever done a figurative piece this large before. About A1 size. However big that is.

Andy came back from work about an hour ago. Said that as he went to enter the Mews there was a man standing with his back to him. The man was wearing a white shirt, and stood in the dead centre of the empty Mews. Andy rattled his keys. The man shuffled on toward the arch at the end of the Mews - through which the dead street lamp waits for autumn. Andy opened the door, looked up and the man had gone, presumably into one of the flats, or more sinisterly, into the darkness through that arch at the end.

More sake.

I've got work tomorrow morning. Should go to bed. Can't be bothered. Hear Andy move about in the bathroom.

Have broken the 'i' key on my laptop keyboard. Surprising how many times you use 'i' when writing. Or not. I wonder what happened to it?

Ah well.

More sake.

Not the First Day of a Long Holiday Unfortunately

For some reason it feels like the weekend.
This is worrying for a number of reasons. The first being that today is only Thursday. The second being that I am working Saturday morning. The third being that I am also working the following Saturday as well. Weekends will not exist for me for another two and a half weeks.
Actually worse than it feeling like the weekend the weekend has begun, is the fact that it feels like the weekend has begun on the first day of a long holiday. There is no reason for this - particularly as I had a week off last week, even if that does feel several months ago now.
Maybe it will feel less like the weekend / a holiday tomorrow when the rain and thunderstorms start that have been forecast.

Random Image that Came to Mind at Work

A caravan park at sunset. A site, not for holidaymakers, but the travelling commuinty. Not full of caravans but trailers. A birds eye view - or a film camera-view perhaps. A slow motion cruise through the late summer air. The maze-like winding and curve of the roads are empty. There is no-one here. Tiny cul-de-sacs leading to clusters of cream-coloured mobile homes. Everything is clean and empty. I don't know where this site is - or why the place is so empty. There are signs of residency though; polished cars parked, a child's bucket, an open window, curtains moving in the breeze, and on a window-sill little objects, antiques, or cheap trinkets. I'm not sure. I can't see them properly in the siking light.

Holiday Town

Sat in the kitchen, full up and sleepy after a dinner of grilled kippers and (exotic) mushrooms, all washed down with a can of diet coke. Watch the sunlight on the roofs opposite, the long drawn shadow of the chimney on the tiles, the church spire beyond, that summer blue sky.
Rumours of it reaching 30'. When I leave work at lunchtime, I step out of the office environment into a holiday-summer. My head is still full of child trust fund accounts and ISAs, stakeholder investments and 'I'll just pass you over to the bond team, as I only deal with the childrens savings on this line here'. Outside is very different. A whole swathe of people are heading to the beach, some in their bathing costumes, topless men swigging cans of beer, children clutching toys. I forget I live in a holiday town sometimes.
I would have been very disappointed with Brighton Beach if I came here on a childhood holiday though. The beach is made of stones after all, and I would have missed making sandcastles.

Breach

Summer built up behind floodgates that obscured everything; planks of rain, steel sheets of endless gray skies, all nailed together with a dismal suspicion that there would be no summer this year. Then the barriers were breached, and with a vast rage of power, worthy of a natural disaster, all thoughts - memories even - of that desolation were swept away.

As I walked along the summer road, I passed the same edgy man I passed last week. He rolled his arms in the same aggressive manner he had seven days previously, even his movements made me nervous. I passed him at the same point, except that last week we were both heading in the opposite directions we were to the week previous.

Perhaps he's my dark mirror image, escaped from looking glass and shadow... or maybe he just felt like walking a different way to the one he does normally. It was a beautiful night for a walk after all. Maybe it was someone who looks exactly the same as the man I saw last week. I saw him outside that strange seafront building that unnerved me so much last week. I wonder if he lives there. Probably just a passer by, but in these recent unnerving twilights such things seem sinisterly and pleasingly probable.

Ignoring the Shadow

5:55pm.
Back home in Brighton, sat in my room (got the internet working again - touch wood) and listening to Ministry's 'Land of Rape and Honey' album. Bright blue skies outside, a few white wisps of refreshing cloud. It's hot and it feels like summer. Pale yellow streets of Hove, an afternoon of trains and stations, passengers and expensive coffee in plastic cups.
Em and myself left Worcester at 11:30 this morning. We had coffee with my parents (in the process of moving to the near-Worcestershire village of Cleobury Mortimer, a name from a Thomas Hardy novel or a ghost story perhaps).
Strange to think I shall not be seeing Perranporth again.
There is little more pleasant than a train ride on a sunny morning through the Worcestershire countryside, except perhaps one at the beginning of a holiday and not the end. The landscape is so much more absorbing than Sussex, so much greener, and deeper, and somehow more ancient. Shadowy clumps of trees, meadows that seemed full of hidden paths, winding brooks, and from the train window, it all looked unreal. A dream of a countryside perhaps. A glimpse of something perfect; a winding stream through a cluster of trees on the rise of a field, and amongst the trees a hut. I thought that I would like to sleep here, and then the hut and trees and stream were gone forever.
As we drew south the colour of the landscape changed, from the deep greens of Worcestershire to the pale dusty yellows of Sussex. Even the colour of the stones of buildings changed; from sandstone - red to the somehow lacking white - yellow of down here.
There was some kind of delay at Oxford and we had to change trains. I continued reading Bolano's 'The Savage Detectives' throughout the journey.
Home now. Summer is here, the sun is out. I try to ignore the thought of the alarm in the morning, or of returning to work, or of that shadow of that always comes on the final evening of a week off from work.

The Apple Tree

The last time I was in the Apple Tree was just over thirteen years ago. It's not called The Apple Tree now but The Firefly. Or maybe just Firefly, without the 'the'. It's darker than I remember and less of a rocker's pub, but still very similar. I remember saying to someone back in the 90s that I 'didn't want to become one of the 30-something stoners who drink in the Apple Tree'. Now I'm 40 it seems strange to look back at that quote which has always stayed with me. The Apple Tree would have been a nice pub to drink away my 30s in. This was the pub I had my last drink in in Worcester. It was a night or two before I left Worcester, end of June 1999, and Joe and myself had ended up here. I can't remember why. I can't remember much of that drink either. I think both Joe and myself were in shock that our time at Worcester had come to an end (Joe left a day or two after me).

Sun in Worcester

Sat at the desk in Em's parents living room. Watching a line of washing hanging from the line in the backyard. There is a wheelbarrow, a green bin on which sit a pair of trainers. Beyond the paved yard there is the huge red brick wall of the swimming pool. The sunlight falls without shadows onto that great wall - as blank and blind as a prison wall - and falls onto the back gate of the yard in sharp swathes. The sunlight is sharpened here, brighter and deeper than in Brighton. There is none of that yellowy haze that accompanies Brighton when the sun is out. Not that the sun has come out much down there. This is the first sun I seem to remember seeing in weeks.

136 London Road is Haunted

Em takes photographs of me stood outside 136 London Road, Worcester, just before twilight. She says that someone looks down from the adjoining building at us. 136 itself is surely abandoned; bushes hide the ground floor windows, weeds cover the front path. The house would have had all the air of an avoided house, but the building seems to have shrunk in on itself, as if trying to take itself out of existence - out of having ever existed.
136 London Road belongs now to evenings like this, to a ragged and obscure rain, to barely remembered twilights, and dreams that haunt with far more brightness in their shadow than those cast on these barely-summer days.

Brighton on Edge

Grey close skies - glimpses of summer. Another internet cafe opposite the big Tesco's near George Street. Cramped seats and everything feeling odd. I caught the bus into town (the 'usual' internet cafe I use had a broken internet) and the town centre felt amphetamine fueled, everyone moving too fast and too aggressively. Packs of marauding foreign students, gleeful as a pack of dogs, sweeping from everywhere. A hippy driving a van beeps his horn aggressively at a Spanish man who wasn't even really in his way. Be glad to get to Worcester for a few days. be glad when it gets to autumn.
The trouble with having a week off work is the amount of time spent watching the time, counting the hours until it is time to go back, scared to do anything in case it is the wrong thing to do. Fear of holiday-commitment. Spend hours not really doing anything till you leave the house and try to find an internet cafe that is either comfortable or working. Onl;y time I do seem to feel at peace is over those long, meandering evening walks... except of course these twilit walks are lately threaded through with an air of underlying disquiet.

Labyrinth under Grey Skies

Sat in an internet cafe down Western Road, just round the corner from where I used to live in the bedsit on Brunswick Place. Internet connection down at home, so am forced to use (again) the joys of the internet cafe... Actually this one is quite nice. I used to come here quite a lot over the late summer / early autumn of 2010. There is some soft easy listening jazz in the background. A man from Russia is at the counter talking with the man there about something wrong with his phone. A couple of girls - maybe Mediterranean - sit in a corner by the window, talking quickly with hushed urgent voices. Actually, I think it may be a girl and a man - not two girls - my description is going on sound only. I sit and face the wall.
It is a little warm in here, but outside it is horrible. Gloomy thick rain. Slow drops. No-one can remember the colour of the sky, or what it is like being hot. Summer is an urban legend people have given up believing in. The sound of the vehicles passing by sound wet; tyres on the damp road, slick-wheel curve, a sound like all those headache-y Sunday afternoons when you're a kid.
The man at the counter counts out money. The man taking the money is jovial and loud. He laughs raucously, and joins the group in the corner. They leave. Out into the summer-rainy street and the cafe is quiet again).
I tried going for an evening walk last night, but that same summer edginess came down - even though I had elected to walk along the seafront road instead of the panicky length of the Old Shoreham Road. The road along the seafront is odd - felt quite unlike Brighton, quite unlike England really, though what country it felt like escaped me, somewhere ragged and sinking into an odd obscurity. There was a certain building there that fascinated me, somewhere vast and overwhelming but also oddly hidden, whose purpose remains unknown - though I think it may be some kind of hotel. I approached it from the back, and the sight both fascinated and unnerved me. A labyrinth of fire escape ladders and pipes, myriad blank windows, and the stone of the building was blackened, as if infected by some industrial haunting. It was the rooms of this building that so unnerved me, or at least certain of these rooms. The rooms in question seemed to be some kind of extensions to the main building - there were no adjoining rooms to the left or right. Just a kind of 'pillar' attached to the main building. The top rooms of these 'pillars' (the only ones I really noticed) would be even more isolated - no one above either, capsules that seemed to hang there. Couldn't imagine the rooms within, and thought suddenly something terrifying happened here. I think it was the silhouette of the building against the twilight-darkening sky that did it, and I felt on the edges of some unstable country. Walked quickly past a man in front of me who rolled his shoulders in a casual aggressive manner. He stumbled slightly as I walked past. Sunday night walks where everything seems wrong. I hope they'll fade with the end of summer.
When I got home - and after ringing Emily - I spoke with Andy for a while. He had just finished two weeks off work (and is due back today actually) and he was heavy with that Sunday night gloom that precedes the first day back at work after any period of absence. 'I was looking out of the window as it got dark' he said 'looking at all the roofs and it was just like autumn'.
There was a long programme on about gypsy / traveller bare knuckle fighting. This was both haunting and interesting; feuds between families stretching on over decades, blood and bouts lasting hours, cries of 'fair fights!' and 'no biting! no biting!'. There was much documentary footage. The fights took place in an odd dream-like landscape - an England of heavy grey skies, estates of one block chalets that felt -somehow- oddly American suburban - and in the clearings of forests. Oh those clearings. Sudden jolt of something, pricked with some memory. It was a memory of a dream. An old, old dream that I don't remember much of, but is one of those dreams that stays with you forever. The fighting bouts on the television seemed to be actually be filmed from the dream - or at least on those memories of the dream.
Anyway, the dream concerned itself with a gypsy fighting bout. There had been a long rivalry between the two fighters, big men who, in the dream, worked on a fairground. There had been fights between the men before, but this came to a head, and they met in a forest clearing late at night to finally settle their differences. There was no audience (the only real difference between the documentary and the dream) and the two men fought for hours. There was an odd twist to this dream too, as the two men managed to kill each other simultaneously . No-one knew where they were, so their bodies were never found, and left lying on the leafy ground of the clearing. I had no 'part' in the dream, and was some kind of omniscient observer - not so much 'watching a film' but alomst being the film. If that makes sense. Anyhow the dream is well over twenty five years old.
Talking of dreams, I shall be back in Worcester later this week. With Em's help I'll hopefully be able to photograph one of the images of my dreams; being at the base of London Road hill as it gets dark and walking up. I would post the photograph on here, but with no internet access at home, the as -yet-untaken photograph might remain un-uploaded for a while yet.

A Dream of London Road Again

I was back in Worcester, travelling down London Road hill. Usually in these London Road dreams, I am at the base of the hill going up. This dream was, for whatever reason, in reverse. It was both dark and sunset, and the angles of everything were a mixture of a night-deep red and velvety black. As I approached the base of the hill, I realised that I was at the point of the hill I most dreamed about. I wasn't aware in the dream that I was dreaming. The street light was strange and muted. I wanted to take a photograph of the street lamps going up the hill. I leant against a wall - or fence. There was some commotion behind me. London Road began to resemble a narrow alleyway. Two children came past me, heading up the hill. I was momentarily afraid in case these children - they were about ten or so - were in any way aggressive. They did not seem that concerned with me. I had a feeling that this was to do with my attempt at a laid back, slightly eccentric attitude.

1037 / 510

1037.
Slow-reach, a honey drip down from eyes nervous with bad sleep. Grey lands sink about me; flat hills, still rivers, and earth that tastes of old, and best forgotten days, of afternoons in endless rain, churchyard-grey skies, and the future stretching beyond muted horizons.

1127.
What will I find there? What in the angles of that city will be waiting for me? The ghosts of cigarettes bought from newsagents that look like sheds, the shadows cast by imagined trees, narrow rooms I once slept in, the bridge across the river.

1216
Objects do not think and turn and haunt. Their geographies are peaceful as old rakes left in tangled gardens on autumn days.

143
As I was walking to work this morning a cyclist on the road next to me lost his grip. A sudden shock of movement and he crashed to the tarmac. I remember the wetness of the road (it had rained last night again), the damp look of the light. I didn’t know whether to help him or not. He picked himself up. The woman walking in front of me looked round - a brief glance. We both continued walking. The cyclist mounted his bike and sped past us.

420.
In the BBC Radio Sussex shop at lunchtime. I eventually buy the Doctor Who dvd boxset ‘The Trial of a Timelord’, after flicking through the many Doctor Who titles they stock. Someone is being interviewed in the studio. Some novelist talking about a book inspired by his mother-in-law, something about Victorians, something about… -no I can’t remember the rest. It didn't sound interesting anyway. I thought they were sitting on the chairs in the other half of the shop. I thought that the actual studio was there - I am sure that I have seen bands perform live here for radio shows before. I look up and discover a set of speakers instead. This is not a studio, and there is no-one there, novelist or otherwise being interviewed.

509.
I have to buy a bottle of port on the way home tonight. I finished the rest of Andy’s bottle last night.

510.
I have nine days off work now.
Summers make me feel lost.
I never really get the hang of them.

Hove Station after Midnight

I was due to meet Em at a quarter past midnight, which led to a great deal of gloomy anxiety over the day. The thought of those recent Sunday night walks where everything seemed edgy and disquieting played on my mind, and my already overactive imagination quite willingly distorted Hove Station (where I was meeting Em) into a locus of dark crime and unsolved murders. My mind raked up memories of (or made up) newspaper stories from the Argus; man's eyes gouged out in attack by Tesco's Express, Hove train station after midnight a meeting ground for mysterious muggers guild…

I sat in the living room, watching it get dark with a superstitious portentousness. The television began to slide into post-watershed violence. The lights strung across the Mews came on, their usual dull yellow glow the colour of all my memories of the late 1970s.

To offset my swelling sense of post-twilight agoraphobia, I took to the kitchen to open a bottle of London Pride ale to dull sharpened nerves. This made me feel full-up (this was just after dinner) and soporifically lethargic. I went back to the kitchen and found a bottle of port instead. This was much better, aside from nearly falling asleep on the sofa during Border Force UK on the television.

I left the house at a quarter to midnight, and immediately noticed that the suburban streets of Hove were not filled with gangs of knife wielding ‘yardies’ but with middle aged men heading home from the pub, and quiet groups of one or two people leaving restaurants. This general sense of ‘un-menace’ continued - thanks no doubt in part to the fact that I was slightly drunk too.

Hove Station was abandoned. No staff, no ticket guards, no passengers. Emptied of people the station itself began to seem somehow alive. In the bright yellow light of the station concourse I looked at the arrivals and departures screen, but could make no sense of it, so waited outside and watched the taxi rank and the dark road sloping slightly down to the distance. A couple were talking next to me, eventually parting, him in the direction of the closed-for-the-night Tesco Express, and she vanished somewhere around the line of taxis. Another man soon turned up and proceeded to enter the empty station concourse. He had with him a tiny, oddly hairless dog. While the man disappeared into the station, the dog stayed with me, nervous and friendly, while I waited for Em’s train to arrive.

Jumping at Shadows

Sunlight walking in, and it's all bright and blue and feels like summer, but I'm jumping at shadows. Never used to sleeping alone in a house that has more than one room. Feel those night-prickles in the day. Too many Sunday evening midsummer walks through those white-light evenings that feel like folklore and superstition.

Typhoon rain this afternoon. Watch it from the windows of the call centre. Unhidden rivers flowing down the gutter four floors below. That sea looks dangerous, pulsing with grey-green swells. Skins of an imagined giant octopus, prodded from a centuries old sleep. Old eyes watching the shore. Inscrutable gaze - irradiated awareness in Atlantean pupil. Jumping at shadows again.

Cleared up now, and the sky is blue with puffy white clouds that look like clouds from mid- late September. That turn of seasons. Autumnus again. It's becoming a lost season - or a season that has always been lost. We're lost too - all of us at times. I can't read the maps anymore - they seem too haunted, and here I am, jumping at shadows again.

Autumnus - Fragment of a Book that has Never Existed

1.

Remember this, only autumn is real.

2.

Old autumns are not dead autumns. Certain seasons may not be lost forever, like some discarded and barely remembered childhood toy. Though becoming increasingly harder to find, he found there were still traces of them around. A fragment of an October afternoon from childhood - a melancholy evening busy with shadow from late adolescence - perhaps even an angle of a street in those labyrinthine and nowhere towns that seemed to populate his twenties.
(His twenties. Like a decade in time rather than a decade of his life).
His skin creased into early middle age, and the resonances of these old autumns became stronger, -and not only in autumn either.

There might be, for instance, in the bright wet optimism of a spring day (perhaps after a light and sunny rain) a sudden breath of something that tasted of a shadow. A very particular kind of shadow, one cast by a childhood street lamp in late November- just come on in a pink dusk - that stood at a corner of the playground he knew intimately well as a child.

Perhaps on a rainy, not so optimistic day, toward the end of January, the play of kitchen lights in the dark and forever puddles of a walk back from work, might call to him, involuntarily, the London suburbs-

(There is a blank in the text here)

Even in the heights of summer, there might be a certain twist of sky that would bring to him those deep and magnificent skies of early September. A cooling blue that might taste of gold and a certain dreamy hope of something that rumoured it might last forever.

These old autumns, or rather, fragments of these old autumns

(The fragment ends)

Summer like Typhoid

Two dimensional skies; an inpossible plural, a flat enigma, existential paradox. The sky is there but it seems composed of elements of anti-being. An off-white nowhere without depth or dimension, where all the angles stretch on into forever.

There is no sun, but the summer generates a damp heat inside me, slinky fever falling from kidneys to liver, from lungs to heart. My internal organs mummified in clingfilm. Fever wraps itself around my spine. I told Emily yesterday that this close stuffy weather feels like the air had typhoid. She laughed and said typhoid was a lot worse, which she should know, as she has had it before. Suspected anyway. Most exotic thing I've had, fortunately is the flu.

The air feels heavy. I can't type properly. Sentences keep tripping over my fingers. The blinds are down and I can't see the sea. I can't imagine it moving. Waves like honey, crystalling in a white-out amber, cobweb tides, Iindustrial grey currents.

No-one else seems to notice. Someone remarks its cold and turns the air conditioning up.

Anatomy of a Ghost Story

It's like searching the days, the nights, looking for something -someone perhaps who has disappeared, except that someone has disappeared to such an extent, vanished so totally, that you no longer have any memories of them as existing at all. All that is left is just that absence, just that space, that sense of something that has been that is no longer. In that space, in that searching for a remnant of the forgotten, a ghost-story begins to form, and that absence you watch begins itself to look back. The absence - the missing - begins to follow you.
And this is the deepest haunting of them all.

A Minute into Sunday Afternoon

The washing machine on in the kicthen, barely heard above a Sonic Youth album on the stereo (bought yesterday for £1:00 from Replay). Shiny sun outside. Crooked look-up through the Mews light. Church spire against blue sky and white cloud.
Incredible rain last night, like an imagined Typhoon, some tropical storm lost in Hove. Trying to watch the zombie film 'The Dead' on DVD with Em, but the noise of the rain kept interrupting, and I kept falling asleep.
Threads of cold water in the sea, like another tide from outside, an elsewhere-current with its rumours and echoes and change, and the waves speak a new language whose words I no longer know.

Artwork February 2012 - June 2012

London Road Dream (ad infinitum...)

My aunt was driving me to where I lived on London Road in Worcester. I asked if she wanted a cup of tea but declined. The interior of my house was all windowless brickwork , and had the feel of cellars - even the rooms on the first or second floor. Em was waiting for me here in one of the rooms. Another house - a larger building. Lingering in the hallway, being aware of all those dark other rooms and hallways and stairways. This house was rumoured to be dangerously haunted. It was even inadvisable even to linger in the hallway (which resembled mostly the reception area of a hotel). There was a piano in this reception area. Was I allowed to play it? - I think I might have been - I might even have come to end up owning this house - or renting it - at least for a while. I looked again. It was not a piano but some kind of monstrous chaise-longue. There was some kind of problem opening or locking the main doors. I was in a hurry to get out. I had spent too long in the haunted areas of the building.

All Those 3am Possibilities

Sleeping alone in a house always concerns me. As I lie there in bed I am too aware of all those rooms I can't see, all that silence, all those angles, all those 3am possibilities.
My dreams last night did not ease my uneasiness. Fitful things. Fragments. Our old childhood dog Bruno curled up on the sofa. Realising he had been dead for nearly quarter of a century. Waking in my bed. Thinking feverishly - the haunting has begun- then waking again, because I was still dreaming the first time I awoke. Another dream, standing at the top of the stairs looking down. Knocks on the door. A figure materialising through the frosted glass. Some kind of intruder.
Wake from this dream too. Truly wake and too aware of all those rooms around me I can't see.

Midnight, Obviously

Midnight.
Calling back for those suburbs, raggedy places full of white-out early mornings. Dream-like traffic jams past hidden tube stations; Ickenham, Hillingdon, Uxbridge, Ruislip...
A calm and kindness under unnoticed trees and the tangled back gardens of houses never seen.
Nights were infinite.
There were always alleyways here.

Woodstock Drive Dream

I was back in my old house where I lived as a teenager, on Woodstock Drive in Ickenham. Emily was with me. The house had been turned into a kind of bed and breakfast / self catering sort of place. We were in my old room. Twilight gathering outside. I couldn't believe I was back in my old house. The bed was made of wire, spiral coils, an institution bed. Going for a walk with Emily around the streets I used to know. Sunset darkening sky. A new alleyway had sprung up, lined by mute violet flowers, between Warren Road and Woodstock Drive. I was unsure if we were allowed to walk this path.

9 + 1

The street lamp bars against the pale blue.
Shallow streets.
I notice the paving stones of the ground.
My tea tastes old,
The laptop breathes.
Sleep. As always. Thoughts of sleep.
'The shopping centre of the damned'.
I used to pass it every night,
in darkness, always locked.

Never saw it open during the day.

No Ghost, No Haunting - Just a Thread of Panic

This might be a ghost story, but there is no haunting, and certainly no ghost.
I didn't realise I was unnerved until today.

The weekend had been a melancholy affair; Saturday's light sadness had, by Sunday afternoon, turned into something heavier - a rain shower rather than drizzle. The weather outside did not reflect my internal mood so I went for a walk at about a quarter to nine.
It was still light, still slightly sunny - there may have been something dusky about the sky - there was certainly something autumnal about it. OctobralI would have said, which is of course, not a word, but describes that sky more than words that do exist. White clouds, breeze-pulled into faces against a pale blue sky. Silent air - no sound of anyone as I left the Mews and headed up toward Portland Road.
I had gone for a similar walk last Sunday - at about exactly the same time - and I listened to the same album as I had then too, Storm Corrosion's debut.
On the walk last week I had ended up walking past the cemetery on the Old Shoreham Road just before sunset. I remembered a pleasing dream-like serenity, an unreal kind of peace.
I was eager to see if the place had that same effect on me again, so I walked down Portland Road, nearly to Portslade, then took that odd curve of a road up (passing by the building that looks like some old radio transmitter station) onto the Old Shoreham Road. I then doubled back on myself so I was heading toward Hove Station again.
There is something about walking past a churchyard at twilight - nothing sinister - or even ghostly, but something dream-like. Particularly in late midsummer days such as this. It was still light - though beginning, a little, to fade, and I slowed my walk, watching the tombs, the bushes, the spires, the quiet line of trees against the far edge of the graveyard.
Like I said, I didn't realise I was unnerved until today, but the quietness of the Old Shoreham Road began to bother me, and I started to feel strangely exposed. Not exactly watched, but vulnerable and aware. The road didn't feel safe.
As I left the cemetery behind me, I quickened my pace. Houses and the edges of industrial estates. Sudden laughter - no - or was it seagull cries? The laughter increased. It was an unpleasant laughter, mob-laughter. No. It was the sound of seagulls squalling. I couldn't tell. Movement ahead unnerved me. Were those figures in the kind-of-distance laughing? I felt in some kind of unspecified danger, began to look at other roads I could take. There were none except those which would lead into the Sunday quiet of the industrial estates.
I turned off my music.
The laughter was a sound effect on the Storm Corrosion album I hadn't noticed before.
Instead of setting my mind at rest, this set me even more on edge. There was something suddenly awful about the brightness, the unrealness, of the light. It was the kind of light you get in dreams that are about to turn nightmarish. A light heavy with an unwanted meaning, about to reveal something that should remain unwitnessed.
I was relieved when I got to the Shell Petrol Station, began to relax a little. I saw the long haired man who works there come out, look up and down the forecourt - checking for something. Probably to see if he could shut the garage down while he went for a piss. It seemed a long time since I worked there.
I turned right, took the bridge and walked past the bus garage. I was going to walk under the distant archway ahead of me down into Blatchington Road. A sudden flurry of movement. Teenage angles, gangly spider jab-moves. People walking past. I didn't like the way they were moving, something aggressive in the few seconds I saw them.
I began to feel oddly vulnerable and exposed again. Everything was normal; bus-men stood outside the garages, luminous vests and eyes hidden behind glasses, pot belly comfort, cups of tea and easy Sunday evening stances.
Prickling panic. Turn right and walk quick.
This proved to be an error if I thought that this route would ease my for-no-reason uneasiness. We had got to those last few seconds before the street lamps come on, those liminal minutes when the day-shadows deepen enough to drown in. A narrow pavement between some bus-garage building (do not smoke in front of these open windows) and a line of double decker buses. All the buses seemed dead. Blank windows watching dark interiors. Claustrophobic between diesel-metal and harsh brick wall. Walking quickly through cold shadow. Hurry, hurry, hurry.
Another man in front of me. Crosses the road, and stops on the pavement before me, ostensibly to talk on the phone, but I hear no voice, and we're in the middle of nowhere here. Sudden thoughts of murderers in this suddenly lonely industrial estate bus garage nowhere.
I turn left quickly, cross the road, come finally to Sackville Road, cross Portland Road and then into those streets that lead here. I am relieved to be home, but I do not quite realise how unnerved I am until today.

I'm not sure when I realised how spooked out I had been on my walk last night - I think it may have been lunchtime, as I bought old comics to try to shift this melancholy that has settled over me. I felt suddenly followed, and I thought of the churchyard in that light just before dusk, that watchful serenity, and all those ghosts of midsummer; sirens rising from lakes, distant songs beautiful and sinister, full of verses leading to people vanishing. Pan-flutes in woods, the hushed hiss of night-breeze through full trees.
Despite all this, the sense of threat I felt last night, wasn't paranormal. I felt in stead as if I had wondered into some region where crime might happen. A sudden flare-up of street violence, a mugging, an assault.
Name calling. Nasty stares.
That feeling hasn't entirely gone. Maybe just beginning to fade into Monday's twilight. I can't help it, but I think of next Sunday, of going back to the Old Shoreham Road again, just before sunset.
See what waits for me this time.
Summer is haunted. I don't care what anyone says. Summer is so haunted.

The Anonymous Critic, not Julia Holter

I play the new Julia Holter 'Extasis' to someone. She is a bit Kate Bush-esque. The person I am playing it too is a little disparaging; 'it's a bit new-age... sounds quite twee-Japanese'.
I decide to put on Fields of the Nephilim's last album instead.
I tell this person that I am writing what she said about Julia Holter. She looks concerned. 'What if she reads it though? It makes me sound really critical.'
She (the anonymous critic, not Julia Holter) gives me a look that makes me think I had better take out all references to her name (the anonymous critic, not Julia Holter).
So I do.
I quite like the Julia Holter album, but she is right though, it is a bit twee-Japanese and new-agey...