Something in the River

Hallowe'en, thirty years ago.
We had spent the day ghost hunting (as usual) around the woods of Kinloss. It was a Sunday. This I remember because the usual trick or treating ritual was done on the Friday, so as not to offend those with Christian principles on the Sunday.
I remember the sun over the tops of the trees to the north of Burnside, that late October light, all serious and mysterious and full with the thoughts of those deep, cold nights to come. I remember the light on the grass, all pale and drawn, and as the afternoon progressed to nightfall, the sun became full and reddened. Leaves on the ground that crackled underfoot, the colour of long nights and dark mornings.
I was halfway down the path to Burnside from the woods. My two friends were still up near the woods themselves. I'm not sure what they were doing, but as it got nearer to evening, the woods began to adopt an unsettling aura, and so I had begun to retreat to the safety of Burnside where I lived. Then my friends were running, and in that moment of pure terror, a kind of euphoria; I knew I had to run too, even though I didn;t know (yet) what they -and I- were running from.
Back at Burnside, one of my friends said that he had seen 'something in the river'. He never described it fully,  (because he was making it up obviously). I wasn't there, and never saw that there was nothing in the river, so I have spent the last three decades wondering what might have been glimpsed in shallow river  north of Burnside.

Whispers Follow Shantell

I've got Shantell by And Also The Trees playing as I write this.
Fifteen years ago - to the minute (it's just midnight) I was playing this song. October 1997. I had gone up into my room, and was about to write a ghost story for a competition. I was playing this song because I was going to use it as some kind of inspiration, about a the spirit of a girl possessing someone in the present (it wasn't a very original story). The spirit of the girl I was going to name Shantell, after the song. Then something struck me. I remembered reading an interview with the singer abot the song, where he said that what gave him the inspiration for the song was an odd experience he had had in a churchyard with a child's grave. He further went onto say that when they were recording the song they had all manner of problems; odd noises appearing on the tape, a whole verse or chorus disappearing... It occurred to me that the song itself might be haunted. Might I be asking for trouble calling the name of my ghost story after a possibly haunted song? As I thought this, and with the song playing in the background, all the books on the mantelpiece all fell off onto the floor.
I decided to call the story something else.

A Year like a Sunday Afternoon

A grey year this one, like someone has mixed all the colours wrongly and been left with is a mess the colour of drizzly skies. \Just one of those times, not one where anything particularly bad had happened, (mostly) but one where everything seems uninspired and not free and stuck.
Feeling sorry for myself without having anything to feel sorry for.
I knew this period of melancholy was deepening when I realized that I wasn't actually looking forward to a week off work next week. I wasn't dreading it either, but it all just seemed so predictable. As soon as I start the week off I'll just keep counting down the hours till I'm back at work again... like a Sunday afternoon stretched over a week.
I'm sure this will pass.
In the meantime I'll take solace in cups of tea and the novelty of the new cold.

Nearly Midnight

A pile of comics I've yet to read. An addiction to buying old comics, but somehow I never get round to reading them. I don't even remember buying some of them. Watched the old Star Trek episode Mirror Mirror tonight, which I've not seen since I had it on VHS tape. I started a painting. The face of a man, muddy and yellow, a troubled expression. I don't understand how to paint, and the painting troubles me. Perhaps I should stick to drawings. A dream last night. The central line tube leaving West Ruislip. A hidden landscape of flooded back gardens. In one such garden, a man in a dressing gown stares sadly at the grass. I have not bought a ticket. i have to go back and explain. I am with someone from work. I try to explain to the woman behind the counter I need to buy a ticket. She says that she 'does not want tio hear any excuses'.

Busy Work

Nine hour shift. Over that nine hours, breaktimes added up to an hour and twenty minutes, the rest of that time was call after call after call. Absurdly busy. Service l;evels dropping 23 calls waiting, then end one call, that beeeeeeeep and another one begins Hello, you're through to Stuart, how can I help you this morning / afternoon / evening? Made the day so long, so very long, that when I left tonight, at 6:00pm, the morning seemed weeks ago.
At twilight James motioned me to look out of the window. A lone surfer on a grey and choppy sea, foamy danger, churning deeps. He didn't fall, just kind of balanced, though didn't manage to surf any waves. He looked set for that darkening horizon, shades of blue, I turned to take a call, and when I looked back he had gone, drowned or vanished, or reaching for that horizon in these suddenly winter-seeming nights.
Caught the bus.
My head was too jagged with calls to walk.

Serpents

Surprised to reach the end of the field, and even more surprised to discover there is no fence, just a steep, long-grassed drop to what I presume to be a trench of water. The sky is white and wet, and the dew on the grass is old and clinging. Cold wind. Sometime in the afternoon in a landscape that is familiar and alien.
Shall I leap across the ditch? Perhaps. I was expecting a fence. Water may provide a greater barrier, like those fairy tales of witches who can't cross water, but this water is still and narrow and deep, and full of miniature sea monsters,
I am suddenly afraid I might sing, and the song would be in the tones of a dream that is about to turn into a nightmare. I recognize the warning in the clouds, they darken, turn the crooked pylons into skeletons. Shall I walk back, or leap the trench, or maybe sink into the water and dream with whatever serpents may already be dreaming there?

Early Night Coming

Even with the television and washing machine going, there is a Sunday silence to the flat. I imagine this is due to the cold - an air-crippling, sharp and brittle pleasure - that has pushed itself into all the nooks and crannies of these gloomy afternoon rooms. I look out through the window, and you can almost see the cold, like watching something that isn't there. The sky is dizzying and grey-white, an ocean void, and across the roofs and gardens a single trees, fading-light leaves all feverish and disordered. the leave look wet, like rain on skin.
Sound of footsteps from next door, the sound of something - a cup perhaps - being put down on a table. The washing machine starts to finish its cycle, begins again. High pitched wheeze. Nothing else, just the demands of the quiet that the new cold has bought.
Even my typing sounds too loud here.
I might go outside, see what I can find in the light teh day after British summer time has ended.
Bring on the early nights.

Condensation Season

Condensation on the window panes, and on the Saturday morning walk to work there is an icy tightness in the air. Oh, this is winter, this is the coming season, and I do not do up my jacket because there is something about the novelty of the cold that is appealing. It feels like coming home.
After an absurdly busy shift at work which resembled more four hours in a hellhole factory (call after call after call after call... ad nauseum) I had a pint with James outside the Mash Tun. Ghosts of Telegen, I remember those old faces I used to drink here with here; Jen, Katie, Pam, Motley, Arran, Tom...
There is a clear lucidity about the air, a January light, and the sunlight falls sober and crystalline on the buildings, the temple-like church opposite the pub, the cycl;ists, the passers by, those whose Saturday night drinking has just begun.
Sat in my room with the curtains drawn and the windows open, and that cold is here again, and even the sounds of the outside - the cars, something rumbling in the breese - are lit through with the cold. A sound to hurt, a song to sleep by. It sounds like the distance.
I fell asleep watching the television, and only woke when it had gotten dark.

Return to the Aluminium Factories

Still dark when the shift begin - not really, but the air had that feel of too-early night-time. Fire up the machines, load the devices, oil, petrol, rust, and breathe in the chemistry under it all. Check the gauges, the needles, in the red, escaping steam. There are cracks in this factory, ruptures in the wall, and the underneath is swelling through.
Breaktimes are curtailed, and during the half hour lunch, the rain outside is cold and still tastes of night.
Melancholy roads, nostalgic Sainsburys shelves.
I'm not sure what we're making here, not sure what we are even, as we tend this moebius strip of abstract process and watch the sea between backwater industries. I can't see any reflections on the factory floor, all I hear are the echoes caught in the pipes, asking for so many things, and I can't be bothered to understand then any more.
The coffee machine kept breaking down during the day, and this was the worst thing of all.

Autumnal, Obviously

Obviously really, considering the nature of the preceding two posts, but...

Walking home.

Not the sky this time, though that remained the same shade of featureless grey as the last two nights, but the light. It wasn't quite twilight, but more that even rare time that precedes twilight. Walking through Churchill Square shopping centre, the North Laine, down Western road, there was something about it all that was unmistakably autumnal. As I said, it was the light itself that seemed to be suffused with autumn, and there was a whiteness to the light, despite the fact that it had begun to get dark.

Southside again. I remember this white light from Southside, the pale air that rushed with browning leaves as we waited for the streetlights to come on, something occult about it all, that time that precedes twilight, the tension of waiting for the street lights to come on, breathing in the air of Abbey Crescent and Easter Road, and all those playgrounds and alleyways, and childhood spaces hanging heavy over it all.

I might be expecting spring time tomorrow night, but when a pattern is recognized, it stops becoming so, and usually becomes something else instead.

We'll see I suppose, but I'll probably forget to notice.

Summery Sky

Walking home again.
Exactly the same shade of sky as yesterday, except with a tint of twilight-red in the white / grey cloud. Yesterday felt like a winter light, but this felt like a summer light, or rather, a very early summer night, perhaps no later than the first half of May. It put me in mind of the way that when the days start to lengthen, places seem to somehow deepen. An average street seems somehow longer, the local park seems full with extra nooks and crannies that weren't there before, and on the outskirts of town you swear that there will be a new suburb that you could not reach in winter. There was a time when I was as fascinated by the mysteries of summer as I am now (and have always been) of winter or autumn. Tonight put me in mind of that fascination that I haven't felt for a long time now.

Wintry Light

Walking home, after 5:00pm.

Something in the sky, that white shade of nothing slowly fading into the grey of twilight. The sky looked like it was foggy or misty, rather than merely cloudy, though ground level was mostly unnaffected by whatever meteorological description I have failed to correctly supply. Something there like I said, in the muted light of the first street lamps, the black boughs of damp trees by the roadside, and the yellow leaves on the ground... breathe in and taste that foreshadowing, that premonition... Winter. Not the temperature (it was mild), but the light. The light was that kind of light that seems to precede snow, all sober and mysterious, a white light but heavy with nightfall and Christmas and ghost stories. 

A light like silence.

Pavilion Gardens at Lunchtime

Sat outside the cafe at lunchtime. Green chairs and a cup of tea, the usual mix of old couples and people on the verge of middle age. A man plays pipes in the distance, and there is something jarring about the sound. Forests and pan pipes and panic, and people vanishing. Echoes of this even here, on a mild grey day, murky and heavy with mid-autumn.
Watch the grass - signs to stay off it - there actually is no grass any more - they've torn it up. Muddy earth, wet and sticky looking. The few trees on the grassed area look marooned and remote. It seems impossible to think that people spend days here over summer drinking tea and pretending that autumn and winter never existed.

Lovers Lie

An early twilight, thanks to the obscured skies that crept up some time past Reading. This woke me a little - the first train from Worcester down to Reading had kept pushing me to a dangerous sleep. Lull of the wheels, and that abyss of dreamy deeps below me... I'm not sure where this exhaustion came from - I slept well last night - and anyway, I had the same issue on the journey up on Saturday. As the train trundled through the bright sun and the lucid afternoon landscape, I was afraid that if I gave up to sleep, I might not awake until Slough, or Paddington, and for the latter, there were no circle or district line tubes to catch...
I managed to get a coffee at Reading station from a stall on the platform. I wasn't sure, but the girl who served me looked like the girl who served me coffee when I was here in May 2010, then travelling up to Worcester. This unnerved me slightly, though there is nothing unusual in the same person working in the same place over a number of years.
These days seem full of superstitions I can't quite place.
It was a busy train from Reading to Gatwick, but I was quite happy, serene in the early stretched out twilight, watching all the obscure and secret places no-one ever thinks about pass by, all those shadowy estates with their hidden gardens, spines of trees across the ridge of a slight hill, parks abandoned in the rain. I felt content, settled in this twilight phase, this transition. The man opposite me commented to his wife how 'murky' the day was out there.

(there is always that fear of life passing you by, when I was younger it was there, this fear of getting old before I had fully finished with being young, even when I was fifteen, the approaching end of childhood unnerved me, and I remember the autumn of when I was twenty one - 1993 - the dread of the passing autumn days that I wanted to last for far, far longer, and in this all, there is that fear also of staying still, of watching other people - other places - move on, and being left behind - Mark and myself, during the days of Actors Orphanage, even wrote a song about it, 'Lovers Lie'. It was called 'Train Song' for a while because we had used a train sound effect during the song, and the lyrics were full of references to trains and journeys, and watching the trains pass by but never being on the train... I don't have the song any longer - I only had a cassette copy and we recorded the song over the balmy Easter of 1996 - sixteen years ago - but the fear of being left behind still remains even if the song is long gone)

They are secret landscapes you see by train, as unreal and unreachable as the cloud kingdoms seen by plane.
Windows of houses promising rooms dulled by dim afternoon light, a slight valley, scattered houses hidden by suburban trees and the street lamps having just come on, and, there - for a time - I thought the train might creep through the ground of the mansion I have seen only once before, February of 1997, and can't remember where - Reigate? Redhill, the place anyway where I saw what I came to call the King of Stations. The train stations of these places are secret things - empty platforms lit by white lamps, and no-one gets off the train, and I think what would it be like to fall in love here, to sleep here, to dream and wake and get lost here? Oh, but we're all lost here already though, as we pass by in these trains, through these unknown places at twilight, and we don't stop and we don't stay, and we're still all scared of being left behind.

Postcard from Cleobury Mortimer

First post on my new lap top. No humming of ancient hard-drives, and  I have an 'i' key I can actually type with. White keyboard, all new and under the keys, the turquoise blue of the background panel, all sci-fi blue and gleaming, a summer pool made of metal and alien sky...
Got soaked walking to Brighton Station this morning. A deceptively fine rain in the mild air. I wished I had caught the bus.
The train ride up here went immensely quick (still what wouldn't be quick after the epic fourteen hour coach journey from Inverness to Brighton three weeks ago today?) No hitches, no delays, even the tube ride was smooth... The most annoying thing was a French man who sat next to me on the train from London to Worcester (he kept shifting and squirming in his seat like some recalcitrant child) and the man who sat behind me on the train from Brighton to London, whose voice resonated at a particular timbre that seemed uncannily precise in its ability to irritate...
Always nice watching the landscape shift, from the sparse dullness of the Sussex Downs to the tangled luxuriance of Worcestershire, the latter a landscape of poplar trees and chimneys, crumbling red brick walls and tangled clusters of trees scattered about the yellowing October fields. Autumn had cast all this with a light from a dream, full of something pensive, as if the train were passing through a landscape where something had just happened. The journey was also marked by an incredible tiredness, an inexplicable exhaustion pushing me into the tempations of sleep, of train-sleep, lulled into dreams by the rhythm of the carriages, the wheels on the tracks, the passing of station names Moreton-in-Marsh, Kingham, Evesham, Honeybourne, Pershore...
I had ten minutes to spare at Worcester, waiting outside Foregate Street station for my parents to pick me up. Leant against the time table sign, watching all the teenagers passing by (why is Worcester full of so many teenagers? - I never noticed it when I lived here). Here I was, yet another Worcester - not the Worcester I travel to with Em, nor the one I went to college at, nor the one even before that, day-trips from my parents then bungalow in Bretforton, winter days, and long summer sighs, car and train-rides through that endless midlands landscape... and yet it was the same Worcester. If I turned right, then cut behind the station I would find Em's parents house, if I turned left, I would find the upward slope to London Road, where the ghosts of old summers and older autumns might wait... There was something strangely melancholy about waiting there, and I was glad when my parents arrived to pick me up.
A twenty minute car journey, and we were in Cleobury Mortimer, a name from an And Also The Trees song surely. A new house, a new town, a new landscape that seems familiar at the same time.
Ten past midnight, an Armstrong and Miller repeat on the television, and now I can sleep, that incredible exhaustion of the train journey has gone, and it feels I might stay awake forever...

Open Window

(before the pub)
Agree to meet, Aldrington Station at 7pm. Breezy night. Not even completely sure where the station is. Though I've used the station before, passed by it dozens of times more, I've never gone specifically to the station.
New autumn streets, and the layout looks altered, a new geography ordered by a dark day full of troubling horizons and premonitions that were not explicit in their warnings.
Dark tunnel under the tracks. Where were we meant to meet? In front of the station? On the platform itself? In the ticket office? Under the tunnel first of all. A sudden bustle of rugby players disturbs me, just returned from some nearby rec. One of them says something, and I am unsure if I am being threatened. They pass by. Under the tunnel, and I am led out onto a dark suburban street, and there is no-one here. Where is the station? Spy a narrow path, half-hidden. Narrow thing, lit by tall white lamps. Tangled gardens of raggedy buildings on one side, and a hight fence on the other. Reach out and touch both. Narrow paths like I said. Only 7:00pm and it feels deep in the night. Wind picks up, and the path-lamps and the breeze of branches cast wet shadows on the ground. Oh, this is good, a ghost story station, something that might be dreamt of. Path leads me to the platform. Will Mark be catching the train to here? Walk down the platform, look for a ticket office, but there is none... just the two platforms. Impossible station. I retrace my steps to that dark tunnel, find another path sloping upwards, walk up and find myself of the other platform. This is a place that has no outside, just an interior. Retrace my steps, pass by a woman who regards me with a kind of vulpine suspicion. Swear the shadows cast by lights get more fluid, flickery, flickery, flickery. A ticker-tape river, an autumn place. Ah. In the spill of light to this station that doesn't exist, I see Jo, all shadow and orange street light folds. Dark roads stretch back to New Church Road. Mark arrives - he had trouble finding a place to park. No-one came by train.

(after the pub)
Wake up in the night, a four pint sheen of discomfort. A glass of water, and too hot, I open my window, open the curtains to the 4am darkness, and lie back down on my bed. Open window air, and the rain starts, and both seep into my dreams. I am stood in my own room with my sister, and we are at the window, and I say to her at certain times in the afternoon, you can hear the ghost of a baby crying below, and we listen and there is the sound of a baby crying. I know it is not a ghost, but I do not tell my sister this, because I do not know what it is that is crying. Another dream. Opening the door of my room, and I see the open window, and there is a hand sneaking through the window - my room is on the first floor. There is a figure out there, seeming to float, a skinhead thug, leaning against a stack of cars or pallets, some passage-detritus between the dream-room, and the dream-coffee shop next door. You'd better let me in the figure might have said because I'm new to this town and I'll fuck you up so badly. Then another dream. In Andy's old flat down Cromwell Road, and a gang of teenagers pass by, raucous, vaguely threatening, and the rain starts, heavy, heavy, heavy, and the rain becomes a storm, and this becomes a flood, and Cromwell Street is buried under metres of fast flowing water. Sweeps those teenagers away. Somehow we watch this, and Ben is there too, and he moves to the front door, and he goes to open the door, and we wonder if this is a good idea, because surely the water might come in and take us all away too? Wake throughout these dreams, these fragments of dreams, hear the rain out there, the open window just by my head - Should I shut the window? Were these dreams a warning?
Morning comes quickly, with a gray 7:30am light that somehow manages to last all day.

(after the night)
I look up Aldrington Station on the internet, and discover it is not really a station but something called a halt. The word has that dead end night-time ring of something lost and serious, a dark remote lot. Oh I love that phrase - saw it only once on the back of a taxi in Los Angeles nine years ago. Jet lagged and strange in that first American night; why leave your car in these dark, remote lots when we can look after it for you? Something like that. Those three words remain, and Aldrington Station, this halt is also a dark, remote lot.
I've been searching for you for years, and here you are.
A lost landscape I could feel through the too near air of an open window.

Current

Boat drifts on.
Sargasso sea, becalmed or caught, no tides here anyway, no current.
Oh, something dark under the surface, something cold.
Draws this boat on.

Warning

Turn away from the station, you've been waiting too long. There used to be tonnes of trains here, leaving all through the day and night, then they got less and less, a few a day, one every now and again. You thought there would always be trains. The ticket office is closed, the waiting room is boarded up. The whole town is now a waiting room. No way to leave. After all, no trains any more. The town has become a place of no departures, only exits. Walk away, leave the station behind. Bright sun, but the air tastes of empty rooms, and the sound of wings flapping is the like the sound of flipping through old photo albums. Other people wait too, missed their trains, and now they wait for their exit - no departures left now. Breathe in the stillness - could you settle here - fade away into the stone and the days and the afternoons and night full of repeats on the television? I suppose you could. Your fault you missed the train, messed up all the time tables. It's not a bad place. Sun is out after all, and at least its peaceful here. Think about walking though. Walking through that unmapped geography that never needed to be mapped before. Darkness outside the edges of town. Dusty desert lands. Towns without name. Unsafe sleep under the winding wind, the chimney skies. October moon, made of bone and dream. Set off. Keep walking. In every footstep on the road out of town, an echo follows, a song reminding you that this a warning. Up to you what it warns you back from.

Pass

Days pass. 

Always seems to be the morning walk to work, the fall into twilight down those stretched out afternoons to the early nights that come in quick now like sudden tides. Drifting in the waters, so imagine; that blue sky above, and no earth, we are adrift here. Lets hope we can breathe underwater.

Sleep at night is deep., and drenched full of dreams unremembered when that unwelcome alarm goes off at 7:30am. Drag myself out of bed, and into the murk that accompanies dawn; someone hasn't tidied up the day, lets shovel all that darkness into the corners, under the carpets, out the window.
Walk through the mess night has left on the way to work, roadside puddles full of 3:00am.

A sudden yearning; a London suburban skyline, reddened horizon, - sunset over a country of tube lines and houses. All those secret places of suburbia spread out, and behind me - because we're on the edge of London here, the darkness of unexplored country. The unrequited night, heavy without street light and the meanderng territories of silent rivers and unmapped fox-holes, long since abandoned.

Found

Bright day, but not like summer. The edges of the clouds are too shop, and the sky that shade of blue most commonly seen in dreams. I walk down London Road, and can't remember what I'm listening to, and everywhere is busy. People sitting on the pavements outside of cafes, on benches outside of pubs, but in the shadows, that chill that feels like home. Through the gaps between the buildings, the startling nearness of the Sussex ountryside. Flat sloping fields, shadowy clusters of trees, a coppice country under that unreal blue sky. Unconscionably I look for the moon, expect to see it, waxing and pregnant, floating over October fields. The lost landscapes are close today, just a few street corners away, a few room from this one I am in now... no, not now. Night has fallen, and the city has resumed the mundane gloom that only Sunday night can bring.

1:33am

1:33am.
The night-deeps.
I imagine the city in silence, for I can hear nothing. This is an illusion for this is Saturday night and Brighton and Hove are never quiet for long. It feels it has been 1:35am for hours, It feels I have not spoken to anyone in days.
The night-deeps elongate, stretch out. Languid time.
Lazy as a summers day dragged under the sea.

Parallelogram

The shock of the alarm this morning - 7:30am. The curse of a week of late shifts, you get so used to waking up at 9:30am to start work at 11:00am that when that alarm goes off for the first time at 7:30am, it comes as a nasty shock. It doesn't help that this is my Saturday morning shift at work. It means I got home last night at about 8:00pm, so a few hours awake, then to sleep, and up in the still-gloom of the morning.

I was surprised by quite how dark it was this morning. Out of the toilet window I could see a glimpse - fractured angles - of the house across the passage. Their bathroom light was on, but the yellow glow had that curious air of emptiness that lights left on in empty rooms tend to have. No sign of movement behind frosted glass, and this parellologram of muted 1970s wallpaper yellow was the colour of childhood headaches and drizzly Saturday afternoons, of November evenings and things hanging over you that you keep putting off. Around this geometry of gloomy nostalgia, there was the murkiness of the morning, a wet grey light, heavy and sludgy. Light the gas fire, put the pot on for coffee, another day down the mines, we're far from dawn here...

Except we weren't. It was just that dawn felt like 4:00am would just before Christmas in a particularly nocturnal winter.

It rained all the way to work - a walk of about three miles. I considered catching the bus as I passed by the bus stop - a bus had just pulled up - but even though it was only about 8:00am, the bus looked crowded and claustrophobic. I decided to walk, and it continued raining, and I got soaked and soggy, and it continued to feel like night in some northern town. After the first hour had passed at work, it had in fact got even darker. Looking down onto West Street, the buildings seemed to be actually generating darkness. Cars had their headlights on, and beyond it all, the sea, a grey and untrustworthy shift of water. I could almost taste the pebbles and the seafront cafes which surely must have been closed.

Afternoon now, and it's sunny, and we seem far further south than 7:30am.

post script - about five minutes after I got home this afternoon, there was a hailstorm. After the hailstorm I went to sleep - about 4:00pm - and woke up about an hour ago, disoriented in darkness. For little reason, I began to think what there was before the big bang. I got up, made a cup of tea, and, coincidentally, am now watching a documentary on BBC4 about what was before the big bang.

It doesn't make the subject any clearer though.

Soundtrack

(morning)
No news, just the morning joggers, and I don't remember passing the closed down cafes on the seafront.
Listened to the Mental Funeral album by Autopsy.
(lunchtime)
I puzzle over sandwiches in Sainsburys. Settle on Eggs Benedict. An unlikely sandwich choice. I don't even know what eggs benedict is. Or are.
Listened to The Beginnings of Times by Amorphis.
(evening)
Western Road lit by street lamps. I run into someone I worked with five years ago. I puzzled over whether or not I sure get a pork pie.
Listened to Echoes by Ellysgarden.

1:00am

This is a new country, and I can't see how it will end.

Beach

I walked along the beach in the sun.
Summer is gone. This was an autumn warmth. Passed the camper vans by the swimming pools, watched the glittering sea. Regarded the sun with suspicion, but it was shifted in the sky and doesn't blind me like it did back even in September.
The Meeting Place cafe was open. I wished I could stop for a coffee, but I had work and hurried on, up the slopes away from the beach and onto West Street. If I still smoked I would have stopped for a cigarette but I gave up smoking two years ago.
I walked back through town tonight.
It would have been too dark on the beach.

Equation

The lamp on the floor, turned away from me. Curvy spine of the neck. Head looks sad, elegant as a preoccupied cat. Lights a space, the semi-ciicle edge touches a CD (Cranes last album from 2008) and the first page - first panel - of a comic strip I didn't continue with. When was that from, 2006? 2007?
12:30am. Night-stillness. Laptop hums like my fridge in the bedsit. Gloomy deep darkness outside of the lamp light. Feels like nothing has moved in here for years. There is an attic somewhere where nothing has moved for decades, since before I was born. Dust mixing with silence. An old pile of paperbacks.
Sudden sadness. Here we are. The streets are tired when I walk to work. Sleep itself seems tired. Finish ripping one CD (Constantinople by Ides of Gemini) and start another one (Styne Vallis by Reigns).
When I see myself in the mirror, I think that gaze is 40 years old. This, for some reason, unsettles me.

Autumn 2008

Four years ago.
That great Wilbury Crescent sky, a back garden jangle of trees and railway lines.
Grey days and sinking to sleep in the chairs by the window.
Strange angle of a corner room, a balcony looking out onto suburbia.
Games of Cluedo at work with Katie and Vicky.
Fish and vegetables for dinner.
A thunderstorm.
Waiting outside the Victory smoking cigarettes, waiting for Ann.

Evocation

And stepping out of work to come home at 7:00pm, and it's dark. Oh, take a breath in, and we're back there, and Joe might still be living in Brighton; 'pier coffee and then House of the Dead?' or Andy might text from the Battle of Trafalgar, and I might not have to be at work until the afternoon shift at the petrol station the next day, Guinness and then cheap Vodka bought from some late off-license, 2008 or 2004, or it might be 2009, and Tales from Bridge 39 already started. Searching not for memory but for resonance, and that month, that first month in the bedsit is rich with it. The dark cosiness of the long room evenings, buying comics from Dave's Comics, trying to read them in bad light, roll-ups with Pam outside of Telegen, singing Lovecraftian hymns with Tom, and that nonsensical rhyme we used to chant, originally from Andy's dream mate your onions are hanging out, hung for a sheep as well as a lamb. Then I walk up by Churchill Square and I taste woodsmoke, and this is old... my grandfather's house in Stone. Christmas cold, and someone in those sloping gardens of Stanklyn Lane, there's a fire, and the fire tastes of ice and fields and a house that had an open fire and no central heating, and those nights in that haunted house (the first haunted house) were deep and forever, and the attic-air of the landing seemed heavy with trapped stars...  

Submarine

After a gloomy weekend, here's Monday morning and a week of lates... 10 - 7 today, then 11 - 7 for the rest of the week and 9 - 1 on Saturday morning.
I feel like I'm in a submarine that has slowed down, inching over barely there terrain, picked out in flickering searchlights... if submarines have searchlights of course.
No sign of shore or sky.
Fifteen minutes till I leave for work, a cup of tea to drink, and then a walk to town in a hopefully autumnal morning.
The weekend was far too sunny.

Crack

You catch glimpses of years like this, sometimes. A crack in the glass, and through smoke (petrol, cigarettes, candle, factory) you catch a glimpse of yourself in some mirror. God, I look old you think, and you look older because the year has been awful through dreadful tragedies, but just disheartening because it has been full of mundane and everyday sorrows. Nothing to write home about, sometimes nothing to even tell anyone, sometimes just nothing. They tire you though, age you out, these banal commas that punctuate our sentences of seventy, eighty, ninety years. Skip you forward a few stations - oh! the terminus station is nearer than I thought! Nothing much to do, years like this, when cups of tea aren't as nice as you remember and everything seems that little bit less interesting than it had when the year had just began.

Desert

And when I woke, I felt the desert here.
I remember the desert from old days, I would drift into it from that flat on Buckingham Street, walking home through cold January nights when I was 35, lost Saturdays evenings after too-long days over the summer of 1995.
I knew the desert would be waiting for me, could feel it in the pale afternoon sleep of yesterday, the listless viewing of a documentary on a Beatles film (Magical Mystery Tour - I dislike the Beatles anyway). I didn't make it to the end of the Beatles film and went to my room instead, wished I had gone down the pub. Lay on my bed, drowsed and listened to music Tactile Gemma and Paul Roland, and between drowsing drank nonsensical cups of tea and read bits of The Mercy Boys by John Burnside.
Fell asleep at some point.
Didn't hear Andy come back from the pub.
Or did I? (some vague recollection of hearing the sound of the front door opening, late Saturday night tread of boots on stairs, the sound of the stairgate).
When I wake this morning, I am in the desert.
I feel it straight away; the sand dunes, undulating into the distance, but leaving me on a flat plane under panic attack-blue skies, and too hot sun. The sun seeps into everything I am, washes out all those nooks and crannies with too bright light, washes away the books and the albums and the DVDs and the daydreams and the drawings. Leaves me witnessing the process of observation, the exhausting mechanics of an absolute vigil. I am not being watched, but I do not know who is being watched, nor who is the watcher. The machinery exhausts me, exhausts me even out of tiredness.
12:15pm. A quarter of an hour into the afternoon.
Through the gaps in the curtain, a shift of blue sky, the sunny tiles of a roof.
There was the sound of a plane passing by.
Now there is nothing, just the desert, and this too is deserted.

Broken Shipwreck

Open windows, cold air, dead night.
The floor of my room is messy as a haunting. The lamp on my bedside table is damp, a dull sun, it's light swallowed by the flat light of the... of the what? What do you call the light that hangs from ceilings? Anyway, that light is even dimmer, and makes the mess of my floor - (typed pages, a friend's story,a camera, an envelope, discarded clothing, a ripped towel) a pensive constellation, stars waiting for some drab alignment. It feels like the 1970s in here.
Voices from outside. They were letting off fireworks earlier. Yelps of joy. That air cuts like a knife. I should close my windows, but that black air is pleasing.
Voices or a dogs bark.
Earlier at the sea, an October heatwave - like last year - and I could no longer find any meaning in the cup of tea that was bought from the seafront cafe. Left it tilted on the pebbles, but like a failure of a shipwreck, the tea stayed in the polystyrene cup (or whatever they make those take out cups from these days). I felt duty bound to drink it but tasted nothing.
I came home and tried to sleep, and I suppose I did for I remember waking at 6:15pm. I burnt rice. I left a tea bag in a cup of tea too long.
Those old fantasies  recur, of slipping through the window, and following empty roads into night-hills full of woods and autumn leaves, and a dry hut with a mattress and a blanket, and a place to sleep for as long as I would want to because thee is no time in those hills.
Sometimes those hills are houses or lakes, or fevers, or memories, or woods, or certain alleyways in certain afternoons... but whatever form those hills take, I shall never reach them.
The year continues, like this evening.
Open windows, cold air, dead night.

Unfinished Picture

The picture is still unfinished (the photograph above showing it when it was about a week old).
I started it way back in early July, a Friday night if I recall right, sat in front of the television watching the film Metroland. As the picture is so large, I knew it would take me some to finish it. I had some wild hope it would be finished by the end of summer, then by the time I went to Scotland. Now we're in the first week of October and there is still some work to do on it. I had hoped the picture would pick up all the unconscious traces of my 41st summer... but it may well be picking up traces of my 41st autumn as well. I am waiting for dinner to cook, and after dinner I must do at least an hour on it, I will finish it... at some point.
It's just that, tonight anyway, I would much rather daydream at the television.

Delay

Squally weather.
Walking home in the suddenly early twilight of 6'0'clock, and the headlights of cars are suddenly autumnal. Thought of the lights of kitchens spilling out onto pavements. No kitchens down Western Road. I hurry home but get distracted in Sainsburys by a self service till that doesn't work.
The comfort of cold evenings. Rushing to get home, oh, the warmth and cosiness of being indoors, television, a DVD, a book, a bath.
The possibilities are endless.
I get home and make that cup of tea, and wish I was still out in that old night, under nostalgic rain, and racing to get to a destination that seemed hours away.

Ghosts of Kinloss

I have returned from Scotland now, four days where the weather shifted from a gloomy grey to a constant rain. There were a few interludes of sun, but nothing indicating warmth or an indian summer. Monday and Tuesday were the worst - constant soaking rain. Went for a walk along the River Ness on the Tuesday, and on the Wednesday, a bus ride to Loch Ness. No lake monster alas.
On Wednesday, we went back to Kinloss. Or rather, I went back to Kinloss, and Emily went for the first time.
I lived in Kinloss from the ages of 5 - 10, before moving to the nearby town of Forres, where we lived until I was 13 and we moved down to London. Everything anyone does is locked in their childhood, some writer said, and Kinloss, by dint of it being geographically remote (on the north east coast of Scotland), locked away even more for me. It wasn't able to become a normal place as I never saw it - couldn't see it - and it remained (and remains) a place of absolute mystery and fascination. I went on a return visit before - over the summer of 2005 - and since then, the places where I spent my childhood  have only increased their capacity to haunt. A salient word, haunt, as childhood was marked by ghost hunting expeditions and myth making on an oddly epic scale. We populated the area with a pantheon of ghosts and demons and legends, our own folklore, our own Lord of the Rings inspired by ghost hunting books, 1970s television shows like Doctor Who and Sapphire and Steel and the remote locale we found ourselves growing up in. I've written about it before, and I will again... but I'll cut to the chase (and what a sinister and seemingly nonsensical phrase that is) and write about my return there last week.
I don't think I'll be going back again. The place felt like it was fading, becoming not mine, as all places - particularly childhood places - should do, and there was... something else too.
Em and myself walked from Forres to Kinloss, along the new (well it wasn't there thirty years ago) cycle / pedestrian route - a walk of about three miles or so. There were moments of sun, then moments of rain. An unsure day, gloomy, bright, and the light feeling somehow cold, as if the rain had got into that as well.
I remember walking over a bridge, passing the Welcome to Kinloss sign, and there, across the fields, and through the trees, the white houses of Burnside (the married quarters for the officers who served on the air base, and we where we lived for that last happy year in Kinloss from 1981 - 1982).

It was an oddly familiar feeling, seeing those houses again, mixed through with a lacing of something else, a slight feeling of portentousness perhaps. We walked past the Abbey Inn and the Spar, looking all closed up and shut down (it wasn't though) and looked across those fields to the crumbling abbey (haunted by monks and vandalised by devil worshippers). We saw the bus stop where I realised I missed the last episode of Sapphire and Steel over the summer of 1982 because my watch had stopped.

At the end of that road, we took a right, headed toward Burnside, kept the woods where we played to our left (that used to be the entrance to the woods... those houses weren't there then). There was a door in the stone wall that bordered the trees that wasn't there when I was a kid, and neither was it there when I went back seven years ago. Then there had been a gap to slip into the wood itself, but now there was a door / gate blocking the gap. I didn't try the door / gate, but it looked locked. The first indication that something was wrong. A shiver of concern.
We paused at the small river, the burn, from where Burnside took it's name. The river seemed crowded and tangled, the embankments slippery and treacherous. We would be quite happy clambering amongst here when we were kids... until the day we found a stone with part of a name carved on it. We thought we had discovered a tombstone - one of the victims of the werewolf (King Hairy) that we said lived in the woods.

. Burnside itself was deserted. A dead square of white houses - though there was indication that the houses were still lived in, they didn't feel lived in. There was an odd air over the place, a feeling of abandonment (and that line from T.S.Eliot's Prufrock recurs, about those half deserted streets). The green at the centre of Burnside seemed smaller (that playground wasn't there either) and the gardens that backed onto the field now had higher wooden fences, keeping onlookers like myself away. I didn't take any photographs inside Burnside itself - I felt too self conscious to (though wished I had now - Burnside isn't up on Google Street View). I had some vague anxiety that if I took photographs I might find myself in some unspecified form of trouble. Were these houses still owned by the M.O.D? RAF Kinloss was no more, but the air base (to the North of Burnside and the woods) had been taken over by the army. Did soldiers now live here? Would they think I was a terrorist? .
We passed by our old house, number 47. I sneaked quick glances in the kitchen window, the pale angles of a kettle in a dark room.. There was a car parked outside. I saw a quick glimpse of the garden over the back gate. There seemed to be more trees now, almost a wood, I said to Em. 
I took a photograph of Em stood in the road. You can see the car outside our old house.

  These trees - lining the path out of Burnside - we called The Guardians of Burnside. In our myth making ghost hunts, these trees came to represent a benign force that sought to protect Burnside from the dark forces that would gather in the woods and surrounding fields. We imagined them to be an encouraging element - all except one tree (I can't remember which one) and this was a dark tree, one that would work with the malevolent forces we imagined were ranged against us. This dark tree would have debilitating discouraging effect on us to abandon our ghost hunts and investigations.

Going through a gap in the fence took you to the entrance to what was Abbeylands Primary School, which I attended from 1978 - 1983 when I then went to Forres Academy. Abbeylands was a school for the children of servicemen and women of the air base. It closed down and then was reopened as a private school, sometime since my last visit, the Abbey Rose school. Looking at it now though, it seemed abandoned and closed. A dead place. Maybe the summer holidays... No. It was the end of September. It didn't look open at all, and around the building there was an odd air of decay, of something fading...

If you took the path to the right, and round the school, it would take you to Southside, the married quarters estate for the sergeants and their families, where I lived from 1978 - 1981. Southside is now not owned by the MOD and the houses privately sold. I felt too self conscious to explore the labyrinthine alleyways and cul-de-sacs of Southside, almost repeating the recurring dreams I've had since that first return visit seven years ago, where I'm walking through Southside, trying to get to the heart of the estate and I'm not sure if I am allowed to be there or not. At least in the dreams I actually got inside Southside. In real life I just walked down the end of the ragged path, strewn with leaves and rainfall detritus that only increased the raggedy post-apocalyptic aura of the place.

I walked to where the path turned left, went to the fence (Kinloss was always a place of fences) and took a photograph across the fields, of the distant clump of trees we called a wood by the railway line. We used to stand at the edges of Southside, fingers curled around the fence wire and peer at the dark and fascinating undulating mass. We imagined the trees were haunted by an apparition we called The Black Phantom, a cowled monk-like figure. We convinced ourselves we could see it amongst the trees. The hysteria spread, whole playgrounds of children would come to that fence, and in an ecstasy of terror someone would shout that they had seen something move and we would all scream and run back to the Abbey Crescent playground where we would discuss what we had seen. One boy said that the Black Phantom had come right into Southside and had pointed a stick at him. Another boy said that, one night, he had climbed the fence surrounding Southside and had walked to the wood where he had found a wooden box covered with moving lights. I could not imagine anything more terrifying at the time. The hysteria was repeated with the incidents involving The Green Hand. This was a stone carving on one of the tombs in the abbey (The Old Abbey as we soberly called it). The teachers told us that if you touched the hand then you would have nightmares for a week. We imagined the hand had come alive and was haunting the school. One girl thought she had seen it on a lamp post, waiting for her as she walked home from school and had feinted, having to be carried back to the school by the slightly sinister caretaker Mr Wright. An assembly was called. We were promised very serious trouble if anyone mentioned the Green Hand again.

 So I didn't go into Southside but walked the opposite way up to the woods to the north of Burnside. Well, we called them woods, but they weren't really large enough to be called a wood, just a U-shaped curve of thickly clustered trees, where there was an old  manor-like building where my sister went to nursery and brownies, and a street of MOD houses called Northside that led off from the main road from Kinloss to Forres.
The path up to the woods was shorter than I remembered - though seemed longer when I was a kid because
I spent so much time running away from the woods, from King Hairy, from living skeletons we called the Urglie-Burglies, from Mutoids and The Strangling Tree, and it's darker cousin The Nightmare Tree, from a vanishing purple car (the ghost of another victim of King Hairy) and from one inexplicably scary story that a friend told me on a snowy January night in 1982.

      The woods were accessed by a bridge across the burn. The first photograph in this post shows me stood on the bridge. Once you crossed the bridge, you turned left and into the woods.

But there was something wrong. There had been something wrong right from when I first saw the woods from the other side. The woods were fenced off for one thing. Access denied. I couldn't actually get into the woods. Peering into the thinned woods themselves I saw other fences where there used to be no fences, and piles of trees cut down, waiting to be shifted out. A horrible possibility began to occur to me.

The woods were being destroyed. Some of the gardens of Northside were being elongated to take over patches of the wood, and an awful lot of trees were being chopped down. The place had a thinned out, dying quality to it. I remember the woods thick with trees and paths and possibilities.
It was around this time that a curious feeling began to creep up on me. The interesting thing was that I wasn't consciously aware of it at the time, but it took me over unaware,  like the coming of autumn or an afternoon sleep. A slipping by degrees into something else. There was a damp and haunted quality to the day as I took photographs of these childhood places, a feeling of... not exactly being watched, but more a feeling of not being welcome, a cold, unfriendly aura you get sometimes in certain streets in rough areas. A feeling of barely-there panic. I continued taking photographs, Tried to ignore that feeling of being followed that was starting to grow.
The feeling reminded me of something else. .
That story told to me on that night in January 30 years ago, up behind The Astra, a tiny one-screen cinema on the edge of the woods. From the outside it looked so small as to be impossible to even conceive of a cinema being inside. On the last day of school before the summer holidays, as a special treat, we watched Looney Tunes cartoons here. I remember watching Star Trek The Motion Picture here, nearly being thrown out because the two friends I was with were misbehaving - a fate that terrified me (would I be sent to prison?) We came here this night because of the path that ran behind the Astra, following the line of the woods.

Back when I was a kid, the path behind the Astra was considerably more sloped than in the photograph above, so sloped in fact, it was possible to sledge down.
Now, the winter of 1981 / 1982 was full of snow. We had spent the Christmas at my Nan's house in Wolverhampton, a stay that had increased by a number of days - maybe even a week - because the snow had closed down the railway lines. When we had returned to Kinloss, the snow was still as thick as ever - and winters that far north are bleak, remote things anyway. Serious winters full of ridiculously early nights where the day never gets fully light, and in the depths of December doesn't really get light until 10'o'clock in the morning..
This one night, we decided (myself and a friend from Burnside) to sledge on the slope behind the Astra. This was a serious proposition. This meant being by the woods after dark, all alone, something which was usually not even considered. There could be no talks of ghosts or ghost hunts or anything of that nature. I don't remember walking from Burnside to the woods, but I can imagine it, that growing tension in the air, that refusal to look into the dead space of the woods. I remember taking turns sledging down that slope, trying to get as near (and not near) the woods as possible - imagine falling into the woods this late at night. Our summer ghost hunts didn't then seem so funny then, not at all... There was a darkness to the woods that was very serious indeed. We ignored it and tried to continue sledging. Tried to have fun. That feeling crept up on us - crept up on me anyway - that feeling of not being welcome, not being wanted, and that we really shouldn't be there at all, that strange idea that we were being followed. Then the friend I was with stopped, and some kind of seriousness came down. He was going to tell me something I didn't want to hear (the cold, the wind through the woods, the black sky, the snow). He began by asking if we had returned at any point during the month or so we had been away at Wolverhampton - or at if my Dad had. I said we hadn't, then he said that at some point over Christmas he had seen out car - a green Mazda - parked in our driveway and thought we had come back. I said it definitely wasn't us.We had stayed in Wolverhampton the whole of Christmas. That was it really. Nothing scary at all. A car mistaken for my parents car. Someone using our drive when we weren't there. Nothing scary at all. Not even a ghost story.
It was the most terrifying thing I had heard in my life.
Then that silence. We looked at each other. That acknowledgement.
We didn't speak another word until we had made it back to Burnside. I remember the blue sledge bumping against my legs as we ran through the snow. As far as I can remember, we never spoke of that panic that had over taken us ever again.
There were werewolves to hunt after all.
And now here I was, thirty years later, and that same feeling was stealing over me.
You shouldn't be here at all...

We walked away from the woods, passed by Northside. There was only one last place to look before we headed away from the melancholy, haunted air of Kinloss, and that was Kinloss House, located on the other side of the woods.
Kinloss House always looked haunted - even more so now, all boarded up and amongst the felled trees. Em stayed near Northside as I walked to the front of the building. There was a workman about - possibly connected with the felling of the trees. Despite the fact that Kinloss House looked so stereotypically the haunted house, I don't remember having any ghost stories connected to the place.

Behind me, there was more evidence of the woods being destroyed.

That was it. My return to Kinloss.
As I said, I don't think I'll go back again. Maybe the woods won't be destroyed, (though they might be changed beyond recognition), but I don't think so - I think that if I went back again, the woods would be mostly gone, and there would just be a space, an absence where memories used to be. The whole of Kinloss had a strange air to it anyway, an oddly comforting feeling of decay, as if it was slipping back into the wilderness on which it was originally built.
Em and myself walked to Findhorn (a fishing village a few miles from Kinloss) and caught the bus back to Forres, and then the train back to Inverness where we were staying.
On the train back I thought about Kinloss, and how glad I was that I wasn't there now. I was glad to have gone, and not to have to breathe that melancholy ghostly air, full of a dreamy, not entirely unpleasant disquiet.
Memories are haunted places after all.