Friday 31 August 2012

First Hour of the Last Day of Summer

45 minutes into the last day of summer.
Autumn is here, creeping about these days. I feel it when I leave work at 7:00pm. Quickly leaving light, and something like a musical note in the air. A cold that is a pale blue colour, something old and serious and that feels like coming home.
A full moon tonight, and when I walk back from Em's house, the colour of the moonlight is the colour of that cold. There is silver in it to, stars crushed to fluid, an outer space effluvium. A by-product of an extra terrestrial third world industry.
A taste of water with ice cubes cold as absolute zero.
Summer falls away, and even if there is a heatwave now, it will be a swan song only.

Tuesday 28 August 2012

Not Autumn Yet

I know I'll open my curtains and it won't be autumn, but here in the 9:27am gloom, I imagine it is out there. One of those kind autumn days, warm and daydreamy, when the best thing to do would be to catch the train to London, find a quiet stretch of park, and pretend to read a book all day, while watching the sunlight fall with the leaves through that consolatory light that is peculiar to autumn.
It's not autumn though, and I have to go to work to take phone calls about financial products all day.
I went for a walk last night, after a luxurious day spent drawing and writing and reading, and drifting into slightly melancholic daydreams. It was a hot twilight, and began to rain as I left the house. The rain and the temperature made me feel unwell and uncomfortable, and the walk lasted only a little over an hour.
I watched that most autumnal of films Metroland again, and drew a place from childhood, a parking lot between the houses of Southside in Kinloss.
It still feels like all those old autumns are gathered at the door (and the window, at the still drawn curtains). I'll leave the house in half an hour, break the illusion and walk out into a summers day instead, albeit one of the last of summer days.
It's not autumn yet.

Monday 27 August 2012

An Exact Kind of Sixth Sense

I have drawn all my life. Since before I can remember. One of my earliest ever memories - I was a toddler at the time - involves trying to draw (for some reason) a huge rock falling off a cliff. My first attempt pleased me I recall. My second attempt was less successful. I remember being confounded at how I could do it one time and not another. And then I probably watched Play School.
Drawing is something I have little control over. What happens happens. The drawing is in control. It's a bit like being possessed - when it's going well that is. When it goes badly, it feels like that second attempt at drawing the rock falling off a cliff. I put a lot of details into my drawings - and have used a magnifying glass before to put things in that no-one will ever see.
I began the above drawing on July 6th this year, and is probably the largest figurative drawing I've done. I'm about halfway through now, which means I should be finished sometime in October. I did want it finished by the end of summer, but as I said - the drawing is in control. The above photograph is me a couple of hours ago, early Bank Holiday afternoon in my room. A warm grey day outside. The last days of summer.
The drawing has gone through a number of titles, though the only one I like is the first, as is often the way The Coppice Miners. 
I don't know what the title means, but it makes for a certain and exact kind of sixth sense.

Saturday 25 August 2012

Remaining (A Postcard from a Made-up Place)

A wind through empty places. I hear the sounds of dry leaves scuttling on concrete. Lobster claws. Ghost-rat shuffle.
Out beyond these concrete planes and once bright shiny pipes, the wood settles, and there is a night-time in the woods, and, oh yes, that old phrase I love to use too much the trees are troubled.
The sound of a wood pigeon attains some occult significance. The summer twilight of the sky has been there forever.
This moment is pensive. There is the expectation of someone arriving, walking the paths of that unmapped wood below me.
Am I meant to be here? Am I meant to be met.
I breathe the air like cigarette smoke, like the most perfect of tobacco, but I gave up smoking years ago, but some things, it seems, must remain.

Wednesday 22 August 2012

A Lesson about Egg Noodles

I wanted egg noodles for dinner, but could not find them in Tesco Express, Sainsburys or the big Tesco. I had vegetarian sausages instead. They were quite tasty but I did not enjoy them because I kept thiinking about the egg noodles, and how much tastier they would have been.
I'm sure there's a lesson here somewhere.

Tuesday 21 August 2012

9:11pm

There's a plastic bag in the 40 watt bulb gloom of my room.
It looks like a small white dog sleeping,
and makes me feel pleasingly wistful..

Monday 20 August 2012

Alarm Clock

I could not sleep in that twilight,
waiting for that alarm.
The roofs of the houses outside will outlast us all.

Sunday 19 August 2012

Deep Summer Day

A day shifting through various airless phases. The bright sun of the morning quickly glooming with a heavy haze. Fat rain drops that only lasted seconds.
By the time we reached Stanmer Park, there was nothing to breathe, and that star in that dead-blue sky was carnivorous again.
Sun-dappled afternoon. Time-dappled sky.
Walking through the woods. No breath of movement, and that wolf up there fading in and out, in and out. Someone kept turning the brightness down, then up. There is central heating in the day, inside this four decade old body.
We fell asleep on the edge of the wood, on the edge of a field.
I remember dreaming. I don't know what about, and when I woke, the day had cooled, and the afternoon was darker, a shadow slipped over those paths we took through the woods.

Friday 17 August 2012

A Moon as Silver as Aluminium or Mercury

The air tastes of silver. There is dew on that last image; a blurry figure walking through a raggedy field on a gloomy day, looking behind her - or him. The face is blurred. Who is watching whom? This is what the air in here tastes of tonight.
Silver. Or something from the aluminium factories. They hide in the marshy woods by canals. Long shifts through the winter days. Look up through those tiny windows, stained glass and smoke and steam. I see the moon there, and the moon, oh yes, is silver too - or aluminium.
Or mercury.
Slippery as milk, she is a poplar tree. Something about their sway reminds me of her, the pensive minutes this side of midnight. Down the hallway, the mundane stairs to the front door might be made of bone. I imagine a forest of poplar trees.
On my skin lies their chorea.
I might be silver in their dusk.

Wednesday 15 August 2012

Too much Sky, even at Twilight

A hot unlikely twilight.
The white lamps down Portland Road call an old August down from the sky.
Someone reminds me of autumn, though I have never seen her in autumn. Stairs in a tower, leaves on the steps. I walk slow round the shelves of Sainsburys, Diet Coke and milk, and the aisles are crammed full of people who look lost somewhere between Portslade and Brighton.
We're in the halfway state here.
Keep looking at that space where the church used to be. Great old Mediterranean looking thing, abandoned factory vibe, and a cool dust settling on all those dark rooms inside. Pigeons and pews and old prayers. They tore it down when I wasn't looking, and now there's too much sky, even at twilight.

Tuesday 14 August 2012

Old Rooms

I could almost pretend this is other rooms I have known. Half drawn curtains and the night outside gives nothing away. Black night and the lamp on the table obscures everything that might be seen out there. Woodstock Drive? Belmont Road? Clovelly Road? Northumberland Road? Bransford Road? London Road? I'm tempted to ask questions to the night air that tastes of summer and wine, even though I can't stand wine because it gives me the worst hangovers. Ask what old room this air belongs to, but even if the night could answer, I wouldn't really want or need an answer.

Monday 13 August 2012

Three Lines Only

Grey mornings, sunny interludes, evening rain.
I caught the bus home and still got soaked.
Sat on my bed and watched it get dark.

Sunday 12 August 2012

Nearing the Horizon

5:00pm. Sat on mattress with my back to the window listening to noisy hardcore influenced thrash in the form of Ringworm's The Venomous Grand Design album. The sun is still shining. It is a hot summery day.
I an looking forward to autumn now.
August disquiets me. It is not so much the heat I think, but the light. Even if the nights are no drawing in, by this time of year I find the too-long days as claustrophobic as the too-long nights of grim February. Everything seems too exposed and not safe.
At least with August seeming like summer means that, hopefully anyway, shift into September will be more pronounced, that almost click in the air that turns the skies deeper, the air more refreshing, and the stretched out evenings long paeans to more mysterious and beguiling times.

Friday 10 August 2012

9:32 - 9:38

9:32pm.
I've just finished watching The Inbetweeners movie on DVD. It made me feel strangely melancholy.
The spell check on blogger doesn't recognise the word 'movie'.
It feels like summer out there. The lantern hangs in the Mews and looks oddly Mediterranean.
There is an unfunny comedy on the television (2 Broke Girls). It doesn't even make me feel melancholy.
The curtain is half drawn and seems to have been for weeks.
It's hot. At least for this summer.
I've turned the television over and am watching Outtake TV instead.
I really want to do something else but need to vacuum my room.
9:38pm

Thursday 9 August 2012

Changing Rooms

Spent the evening changing my room round, and now lie on the sofa exhausted from the sudden physical effort. Books removed from bookcase, put back, removed again, put back, bookcase dragged across room, bed dragged across room, boxes moved, piled up, put down.
There are certain inevitabilities to changing your room about. The first is that it will take longer than you think. Because of this, you will end up going to bed in a room that looks at least slightly disordered. There will also be something that is damaged. In this case it is the bookcase itself. Nails torn out, the backing coming off. It starts to lean alarmingly. I observe this with concern.
When I was a kid changing my room about was a cause of great excitement. This usually caused me not to be able to sleep that night as my room would feel all strange and new and Christmassy. This last despite the fact that all great room moves seemed to be done in summer.
I don't think there'll be insomnia tonight though. I feel I could sleep for days.

Wednesday 8 August 2012

Notes from a Semi-Autumnal Morning

A calmness. Something, slow and deep and daydreamy. A feeling of waking up into something else that has been awake forever - but still dreaming. A haziness to the light - breathe in the light and taste all your old too-early semi-autumnal mornings - getting ready for the school in the hushed-dark house - last minute packing before a long train journey. The first day in a new job perhaps. You always need to get up ridiculously early for the first day of a new job. I don't know why.
I glimpsed a shot of the Mews whilst waiting for the kettle. One van outside of one of the workshops that had been there all night. The fresh-glisten of recent rain on the ground. That almost-smell - if only I had od opened the window...
The morning is muted, and even the sounds of odd birds and lone cars seem distant. The silence round everything is powerful, and has pushed everything to some horizon. A horizon I must move toward in quarter of an hour when I leave for work and leave all this slow and daydreamy morning behind.

Tuesday 7 August 2012

Memories like Someone gone Missing

(autumn 1996)
There was an air like a fairground wheel, a silent carousel past the fences and the allotments and the brdge over the railway tracks. I remember leaving the house in the full dark of late November. Cold breaths like sucking in ice. Why is the first winter in a place always the coldest?

(early summer 1995)
I never knew the city over summer, and only spent the infant days of that season here. Lying in that long room that looked out over a weedy concreted yard that no-one ever used. Breathing in the late May, and threaded through with each breath, already a sense of someone gone missing.

(early winter 2011)
I must have listened to this song on that night, but I don't remember it. Long looping November roads (and some Novembers are more winter than autumn). I walked to the edge of the city, and across the empty road, the blackness of unlit hills. Thinking; I could vanish here. 

Monday 6 August 2012

Strange Coffee


At first, the train ride isn't too bad. It's not a train ride that you want to get - oh no, not at all - but it is a train ride which is somehow necessary. Think of it this way; you have lived in a certain place for a certain amount of time, long enough for it to be thought of as being 'home'. You have been there for a reason. The reason is not that important - a job, university, perhaps some other more obscure reason. The important thing is that that reason has now come to an end - the job has finished, a period of study is over. There is no reason to remain in that town any more. More importantly, there is no new reason to remain in that town. You must leave. It is necessary.
You make the most of it, and at first the train ride isn't too bad. You look at the oh-so-familiar streets (achingly familiar streets perhaps) from the comfort of the train seat. This is a novel view. You see the streets of home differently; the parks you walked through on the way to work or that university course, the shops yiou bought milk at every day. You notice, perhaps, the way that light falls on a certain street corner. You never noticed these things before.
The train stops at half familiar stations. You recognise their names. Recognise them as being part of your home town... but a part you never visited. You begin to feel uneasy. Home town? Is it a home town any more? You're leaving after all. The trains skirts through the edges of town. These are the regions that do not seem even vaguely familiar. The train speeds up and everything starts to blur.
The last station is passed and your home town is now a town, and all that is behind you.
The landscape outside the speeding train window is startling in its unfamiliarity. There is nothing of home you recognise there. The train speeds up and you regret leaving, even though staying would be worse (that rut that might drag on for years - until the end of your life - maybe) or would it? You reluctantly mounted the train with a wary optimism, but now all you feel is panic. The oddly emptied carriages are angled and jagged with strange dialects and references to places you have not known. You want to go back. No-one knows where the next station is, but they don't seem bothered. They've been here before. You find a train guard and he looks at you with an expression that is anything but comforting. How would he know the destination. He'll get off long, long before you do anyway.
With that sense of disquiet firmly nestled in your stomach, you buy another coffee that tastes like it was made in a country that is not your own - not the one you have known. You sit back down, sip the coffee that you know will do anything but calm your nerves, and watch the new and frightening landscape speed past you because there's nothing else you can do, and despite the terror its still somehow better than the alternative of staying behind.
Welcome to the future, you think, and with another mouthful of strange coffee, you sit back and wait for the first night in this new country to fall. 

Sunday 5 August 2012

Nothing to Report

August kicks in. The weather changes every five minutes; humid, grey, sun, heat, and underneath it all an undercurrent of autumn. This is wrong. There should be no signs of autumn yet. August should be endless, impenetrable feverish heat, otherwise that shift into autumn is robbed of its power.
There is the sound of movement next door. Furniture being moved, large objects being dragged across the floor. Yesterday afternoon, while attempting to sleep after a long week at work, the sound of drills and hammering.
I caught the night bus home last night from the pub with Al, Claire and Sarah. The bus was busy and there was no seats. There was shouting from upstairs.
There was no-one interesting on the bus.

Thursday 2 August 2012

Perhaps an Unearthed Light Arcing

In the Pavilion Gardens at lunchtime with Em. Cups of tea under the trees. Something autumnal in the clarity of the distance. Sharp paths edging past the unseen arches up London Road, a quick shift over and knife sharp distances are lost to Lewes Road. Those places I have not walked for years.
Walking home and I don't remember something because it never happened, but; an imagined fareweel at a train station. Shallow platforms, and the railway tracks are Sunday-emptied like they could only be over the summer of 1994. Ice-cream heavy air and a return back to cool shadowed rooms I would soon be leaving.
Never happened but I remember it anyway.
So tired I could sleep for years.
Wake in autumns where the afternoons brood over their own memories of things that have never happened.

Wednesday 1 August 2012

Questionnaire

I was tagged in some complicated questionnaire type thing (well, compliicated to me anyway) by Feilong, whose online novel Circle Quartet is definitely worth reading. I like answering questionnaires and can't think of anything else to write tonight. So here are the questions... and my answers of course.
1. Do you get scared in the dark?
Depends on the situation. I quite like the darkness if I am outside, but if I am to awake in the middle of the night, alone in a house, then I find the dark quite unnerving. Everyone's haunted at 2:00am, and if I wake in those most haunted of hours (particularly if I have woken from some disquieting ghost story of a dream) then on goes the bedside light to help dispel the night fears...
2. Who is the last person make you cry?
I really have no idea. Probably some school bully or school teacher.
3.What's your worst fear?
(In no particular order)... Death, pain, illness, regret... and watching the first events in a series of apocalyptic prophecies come true. Blame Nostradamus and the summer of 1999 for that last one. Fortunately there was no apocalypse though...
4. What kind of hair / eyes colour do you like on the opposite sex?
Green hair, red eyes...
5. Where can you see yourself proposing / being proposed to at?
Five minutes before the apocalypse.
6. Do you prefer coffee or the energy drink?
Coffee is a necessity at work I drink constantly throughout my day at work. Energy drink is that guilty pleasure when I pass by certain newsagents in the morning that I know has 35p drinks of 'Euro Shopper Energy Drink' for sale.
7. What is your favourite pizza topping?
Ham and pineapple. The pineapple is oddly refreshing.
8. If you could eat anything right now what would it be?
Pineapple without the pizza.
9. What was the most meaningful gift you ever received?
I think all gifts are equally meaningful.
10. Do you have crush?
Velvet Crush Thai Sweet Chilli flavour crisps. Five for a pound at the pound shop...
11. Your favourite clothing brand.
Anything brandless.

Hmm. A few 'get out clause' answers there...