Back

This time tomorrow I'll be in Scotland, back amongst the landscape of those first autumns. There were autumns before of course, but I don't remember them - I was five when we moved to Scotland and anyway, one of them was spent in Malta, a distinctly un-autumnal country.
I wonder what this return will be like? My only other return to Scotland - over the summer of 2005 - marked a profound shift in the intensity of my predilection toward hyperthymesic obsession. Or in other words, my ability to 'move' into the past, in an 'imaginative' or 'mental' sense, was heightened considerably after my previous trip. It is quite hard to explain. I thought everybody did this until recently... What it boils down to is a constant awareness of a personal - or autobiographical history. There is the present day - where I am now - and usually two or three threads of my own history, almost overlaid onto the present day. This usually centres on a place in a specific time - my room in Woodstock Drive on a rainy Sunday during adolescence, the alleyway leading up from Drumduan Park to the Black Woods on Christmas 1984, London Road hill in Worcester, curving up at the base of twilight. These 'pasts', these other histories (or rather geographies of those histories - memories of other people rarely feature) are a constant and sometimes overwhelming presence, and have always been - though  they grow stronger as I grow older oddly enough. All time seems to happen at once somehow. These remembered places seem sideways from here - landscapes attached to the present landscape, but that cannot be reached physically, except through the act of remembering. This is why these returns (Ickenham, Worcester, Stone, - and Scotland tomorrow) are so fascinating. They feel like visiting a mythical place where all the myths are hiding but leave their shadows behind.
It's getting late, It feels like autumn, and tomorrow night I won't be in England any more.

Rainy Sunday Afternoon

Rain. Ministry's Psalm 69 playing. Gray light of my room, seeping in like sleep I see the green of the trees in the gardens, in the fragment of gardens in the gap in the curtains. My floor is a mess of old comics and clothes. The curtains move. There is autumn out there, The first traces. Watching the coming of autumn is like watching the coming of Christmas when you're a kid.
I shall be revisiting childhood landscapes this week, heading up to by train to Scotland tomorrow, to Inverness and from there a short train ride to Kinloss and Forres, all those places whose power to fascinate has only grown over the years.
I wishes I had written more about the trip before, but it all seemed too much to write about, and anyway, the 'i' on my keyboard isn't working properly and makes writing anything incredibly irritating, hence the paucity of entries here of late.

Midnight

Midnight. Paul Roland's Sarabande / Roaring Boys album reissue. Miniature beers. Old photos. A cup of tea. A lamp on the floor. An old horror comic from the 1970s. Cream curtains with the texture of rubber. Deodorant. A hair brush. A bottle of black ink. A bottle of white ink. A book called Dancing in the Dark I bought in Worcester in either 1998 or 1999. Snake-horse the draught excluder. A sock. A broken wine glass. And if I opened the windows and lean out, would there be the passage between this house and the coffee shop, or dark and endless fields lined by hedges and dead trees under impossibly starred skies? Time for sleep. Work tomorrow.

Cryptogram

Sleep dampened the autumn, culled the cutting mists, the calling days. No body of a season, but it fled, and I am left with these streets that no-one can be bothered to map. afternoons whose sunlight ultimately has no meaning and nightfall that sadly only resembles what they should be.
Even going back into the heart of the first autumns unsettles me. This unworkable timetable spreads across the country, across the years, hiding waiting rooms and what I thought might slowly be following me. There's a ghost of a lost summer here too, something sad and quiet and doesn't belong to me.
Twilight gathers and I take a sip of tea, think about that last true investigation thirty years ago, listen to an album (What Starts Ends by Rubicon) I first heard twenty years ago, and think about a word I first said ten years ago whose resonance is infinite, but the meaning I've never been able to divine.
I could say I would walk these streets forever, but these streets are not here, and I am not walking them, and begin to suspect their curves and shifts and paths lie beyond the point of any cartographer of cryptographers pen.

Sea in the Distance

There is little more peaceful than being up early on a Sunday morning, particularly when that morning feels cold and breezy, and the half-light that falls through a gap in the curtain is muted and day dreamy. I can hear the sound of the sea from where I sit on my bed, a vast low end rumble, barely there, the sound of the distance. I hear cars pass by, doors open in the coffee shop across the passageway, but all seems kind and far away, as if these are sound from decades gone.
I peek through the curtains at the grey sky, that still light, and I am glad the sun has gone and it might begin to feel just a little bit like autumn.

The Grey Door Remains

All the flats in the Mews have newly painted bright green doors. The only door that has not been painted is ours, still a shade of borstal afternoon grey. Are we marked out for some mysterious fate? Andy says that it is because the painters haven't been able to keep the door open as we have been at work all day, but I suspect something more sinister and interesting.

Summoning Autumn in Wrongly Remembered Houses

I attempt to win myself autumnal feelings by playing Omni Trio's 'Haunted Science' album. Closed curtains and a Sunday night resonance over everything, and I'm trying not to think of the alarm going off at 7:00am. 'Haunted Science' half works, a beautifully melancholic and mysterious album, first bought in Worcester in the late summer of 1998. You would think that any resonances the album holds might then remind me of the portentous and graceful days that herald the end of summer... but I am reminded instead of our old house on Woodstock Drive in Ickenham. If I don't look too closely, I could be sat on the floor of my room, suburban night out of the window, sloping up to Swakeleys Road, squint and hear the endless cars on Western  Avenue, and I would be, what, eighteen, nineteen, twenty?
At least it feels more like autumn now. I spoke to Em on the phone, and she said it had been raining. I missed this. I was drawing pictures of melancholy factories instead.

Summer is Winning this War of Attrition

Sunday morning and the sun is shining, the sky is blue and there is no sign of autumn anywhere. Am meeting Em for a picnic in an hour, so hope to find some pockets of fall resistance in the backwaters of Hove Park, some alleyway that tastes more of October, a street corner where the light falls like it should on troubled September afternoons...
Was down the beach yesterday briefly. Half a pint with Em and her parents at The View. The place swathed in summeriness. Felt more like June or July, except June or July this year felt like rainy spring days. I have enough trouble with keeping myself up to date with linear time as it is. I should like the seasons to at least make an attempt at behaving themselves.
Exhausted last night. Em was working and Andy joined Al and Claire et al at the Prince Albert. I elected to stay in but after three very small beers was incapable of doing anything but lying on my bed and snoozing through albums (I listened to all of Reigns' back catalogue We Lowered a Microphone into the Ground, The House on the Causeway. I fell asleep properly during The Widow Blades).
A night of vaguely disturbing (none of which I recall now) and one mildly coincidental, utterly inconsequential dreams. I dreamt I was talking to Em, and she said that she had missed a call on her phone. I woke up and called her (about half an hour ago now) and she didn't answer. She rang back and said she had missed my call.

Missing

I miss the petrol station days sometimes.
It's all an illusion of course. I wouldn't go back to working in the petrol station again. Days of no money and bad customers, and a horrible flat I hated. Well, for most of it anyway. No, I wouldn't go back there, but I miss some parts of it.
I miss finishing the evening shift at 10:30pm, then that half an hour walk back along the Old Shoreham Road to my flat on Buckingham Street, often with a DVD I had bought before that shift had begun. Getting back was one of the few times when that flat was bearable, cosy after dark, and I could stay up late into the small hours because you never had to be up early after an evening shift.
I miss those Sunday afternoons there when it was dark and quiet and raining. Autumn days slipping into an oddly smoky darkness, and slipping round the back for cigarettes. Just over the fence there was a wasteground (there's a furniture store there now) that used to fascinate me. Lambert and Butler and me staring at the tips of trees like weeds that grew there.
I miss those cold morning walks crossing that bridge up near where I would end up living on Wilbury Crescent. Never any trains that time of the morning. Oh, those days when hungover and still half-drunk I would make my way in to serve the white van drivers their cigarettes and diesel and Daily Stars...
Bright humming fridges.
The blue light that illumed the cigarette racks.
Happily flicking through that days papers.
No, I wouldn't go back those times again. Wouldn't even consider it for a second, but there was something there that isn't here now that I miss.

Grey Door for a New King

They've painted the front door grey.

When I left for work this morning there was a certain coolness to the air. By the time I had reached town, it had gone, replaced by the heat of this sudden wave. I took my jacket off, tied it into my bag and kept walking.

I am exile here, or the country has a new king.
I cannot find the old kings.
I'm sure they sleep somewhere.

Sudden waves from the window. Watching the summer glitter under too too blue skies.

'They've painted the walls white' said Em.
'They did that days ago' but I don't think she believed me,

I brush my fingers against the dusty grey of the new door.
I miss the blue.
Gone forever like the autumn.

Docklands Nostalgia

You know these dead spaces between the tower blocks. Shallow, grey skies. The train moves like a dream of a rollercoaster. No driver. There are homelands here. The sky seems to close to us all. Rocking of the train. Like a boat. The ghosts of factories - but I don't remember any. Wasteground-gothic. A tangled path leading to a dead end.
Something that looks like a reservoir. Dead stillness of the water reflects the 2D skies. Shadow of some metal, stretched out arms like a heron. A heroine. Heroin. Obvious leaps from one to another. Housing association projects. Windows lain with towels and flags. Cul-de-sac warnings. Overheard conversations; 'there's nothiing here at all'. I think of you in all of this, this someone coming home, to this place full of meanings and signs and nostalgia amongst my imagined knife crimes and gang-ghosts. You sleep here in these grey rooms. The corner of houses always watched by lost eyes from the passing trains.

Small Hours

1:30am.
The night is deepening, a sudden swell of cold water up from the wall. Slips into the shadows, and the darkness is changed, seeps into the day, and the afternoon is different. Time speaks with a different accent. We're in autumn country now. Approaching the border anyway.
We're in the small hours too. There is that silence of the small hours. That deep, deep humming of silence, or what passes for silence in this semi-suburbia. There should be a bird cry, out there in the night. It would be the perfect accompaniment, but the windows closed, and I can hear nothing.
1:34am.

Overheard Telephone Conversation

After work this morning I came home and fell asleep. Afternoon dreams, deep-coma drift. A sudden jarring awake. A woman's voice in the passageway just below my window. An older woman. I assume she works in the coffee shop (the passageway is a dead end and runs between this building and the coffee shop). She is talking to someone on  the phone, and sounds disappointed and angry. I only hear one side of the conversation of course. She is trying to convince someone to go to their job. I assume it is her child I cannot help but think is a son. She refuses to phone them - he must do it, not her. She listens to him 'and where would I get the phone number from anyway?'. She tries to convince him to go to work, but with little success. She says something about him regretting it, then says that if he turned up now he would be 'fired on the spot'. She says that he sounds 'off his face'. I start to drift back to sleep again. Her voice jars me awake once more. 'Don't take any of those legal highs. They can kill people'. I feel terribly sorry for her, whoever she is. There is a deep sadness in her voice.
I go to the kitchen and make a cup of tea, so I don't have to hear it any more.