Shell

I picked up a breath of something during the day. I've forgotten now, or rather, it's been taken by the cold. Its absence clings to my skin, ghost-kiss, hollowed-out shell space of some yearning, some nostalgia. What was it I tasted? No - nothing - surely there would be something left...  but no, it's gone.

I looked around the office at work. The knowledge of Christmas coming lending everything the feel of a time - or place - remembered. Here I was, the year 2048, 76 years old, remembering the place where I worked when I was 40. Old fashioned hairstyle, old fashioned present time. 

Think about a photograph I've never seen. Summer of love 1969, hippies and kaftans (I have no idea what kaftans are). Season of festivals fade, and they're all slightly out of focus, and this photograph is taken at the end of summer, and there is a dark smudge of woodland behind them, like some coming autumn.

I wonder what happened to them, these imagined people three years before I was born?

First Winter Days

The wind has taken the last of autumn, and the city feels plunged beneath a sea. The air feels serious - we don't take in the lighthearted breaths of summer now - and there is a sobriety to the air, a monochrome brooding that sharpens oxygen, makes knives of the walk to work.
Walking back home, and the night feels magnificent, a huge thing that has opened itself up; a myriad of previously locked rooms and wings unfolding themselves from previous narrow corridors. The stars are hidden behind clouds, but I imagine they taste of all the iced-over pools of January childhoods.
It felt like, this first evening of what feels like winter, coming home. There is a relief in the plunging temperature, the rumours of snow, the far-off streets as unreachable now as gods or last nights dreams.

A Shared Birthday 90 Years Apart

Tales from Bridge 39 is three years old today. I'm not sure whether that feels like a long time or a short time. I've been keeping it for longer than I lived at Worcester, longer than most houses I've lived in, most jobs. I thought at one time it was certain that I would only stop Bridge 39 when I died, or that I would consciously end it, write finish I'm done (or perhaps something more portentous in Latin) at the end of the last post but now I'm not too sure, It nearly finished last year, and for no other reason except that it just almost faded away...
My grandfather had a mug that was written on it Old teachers never die, they just fade away. Or something similar. Doesn't make much sense when I think about it. He was a latin teacher and a headmaster at some school somewhere in the Midlands. He was born on this day in 1919, according to Facebook. 93 years ago (he died 30 years ago when I was 10). I never realized till today that him and this blog shared a birthday, 90 years apart.
He would have known a good latin phrase if I ever decided to finish Tales from Bridge 39.

Next Time I'm Walking

My attempt at walking to work along the beach this morning was swiftly curtailed when it seemed the rain, far from lightening, was in fact getting heavier. Despite only living two minutes from the seafront, it took me fifteen minutes to get there and back to where I started to catch the bus.
Even under the most desperate of circumstances, the bus (Brighton and Hove buses are notoriously unpleasant) is never a pleasant experience. I managed to get a seat, and sat staring into space - and the woman who left her handbag in the walkway, causing people to trip over it.
A woman with a pushchair got on, causing everybody to inwardly sigh. I stood up, not quite knowing where to go. The bus was very crowded. The woman with the pushchair managed to slot her self in at a kind of angle. The woman with the handbag glared at me with an expression somewhere between utter hatred and disgust. 'C'mon....' she hissed at me, as if, somehow, it was all my fault (I think something to do with the woman and the pushchair.
I couldn't see where to go. There seemed to be nowhere to stand. That same sense of panicky out-of-place claustrophobia that necessitated my swift exit from the Prince Albert on Saturday night came down. I pushed past everyone, and got off the bus... five minutes from where the journey had begun.
At least it had stopped raining.

Curtains

No, I don' t think their language was ever mine. I think i wanted it to be mine, and once, I may have even hoped to have learnt their language. Those words are dead to my tongue now or my tongue is dead to their words. Either way, it is only silence that remains.
Slept for over thirteen hours last night. No dreams that I recall. This amount of sleep, combined perhaps with those panicky two pints in the Albert, drunk too quickly, have caused me to wake with a nauseous headache. The flat is silent. I heard Andy come in in the small hours. Won't be seeing him till after nightfall now.
The curtains are still drawn in my room, and the darkness is here is heavy as quilts and blanket on a winter morning. The laptop screen glares, and is brighter than the daylight seeping from underneath mt curtains.

Bad Night

Two pints drunk too quickly in a pub built on too many people and too many angles.
Walk back, half an hour after I arrived.
Looking at everybody, thinking your language is not mine
then correcting yourself; your language was once mine.
I remember this, back at Southampton, listening to drunk people on the street laughing.
Northumberland Road, St Mary's myth, Southampton gothic.
Back home now, can't find my phone and the letter box rattles.
Night outside is so unsettled. A stranger in the mirror.
This night for the bird flu god, laid out on this seven week old altar.

Cold Mechanics

5:47pm. Saturday afternoon, though this late in the year, anything after 4:00pm feels like night. Raining too - been raining all day. Only left the house to go to the Co-op down Portland Road for some gas and electric. Some food too, breaded plaice or haddock. Can't remember now, but they've left me sleepy and exhausted and the last thing I want to do is to go out tonight.

Sleep comes with guilt and fear these days. I remember the ecstasy of the petrol station days, those afternoons after an early shift when I would get home about 3:30pm. After a cup of tea, I would fall into bed, sleep for as long as I wanted, get up at evening time, a gradual awakening. More cups of tea, dinner, television.

The world always wants me these days - even at the weekend the world wants me - and the world is an alien and impersonal place, a mechanism really, particularly when all I want to do is day dream sleepily in the sublime quiet and dark of a late November night.

In a few hours I'll be in a noisy pub in the middle of town, unable to hear anyone, shouting conversations, the air thick and clogged with drunk people and alcohol and the smell of wet coats. I have a headache already.

Words cut in Three by Alleys

There is in the light, a knowledge. No, not a knowledge, but a language. I do not know the words, but know the tone. Recognize in the vowels of dry leaves inst brick, a tattoo of time. Scarred stones, trace words with the ghosts of fingertips. Braille for those who can't read underwater any more.

Alleyways. Chimney smoke is invisible against skies. Far up from here, high above wooden fences. Brick walls and tiny windows. I cannot imagine the bathrooms behind winter-frosted glass. Pipes blow out steam, a gothic myth for these backwaters, scent of baths and laundry days, washing line air, captain nightshirt days.

Crooked streetlamp leans in the arms of a stunted trees. Alleyway trees are always stunted, twisted dirty things. Branches regard me with knotted eyes. I can't undo their gaze. A language I do not speak but am possessed by. Unholy tongues for a universe full of words that we are all afraid mean nothing.

Bird Flu God

Wind's up tonight, and here in the kitchen, I can hear it, heavy with tides (like the way on windy days you can always hear the sounds of playgrounds in certain cities) and it vies with the water on the cooker, boiling carrots and brocolli and noodles.

Walking this landscape, and nothing shifts much. A change perhaps in the tenure of the earth, a moistening or drying of the skies. Imagination or sign? I start to hope the landscape might begin to end, that there is a star burning beyond the grey, that there is a dawn, a nightfall.

On a fence post, or on the horizon, or on the branches of a stunted tree, wind tortured and cracked, I see it again. Ragged bird, more bone than feather, and in watchful eyes, a malevolence born of this country I am still deep in. The bird, this avian symptom, a bird-flu god, is too large, magnified by eyes dulled by fever and eyestrain perhaps. Maybe it's size is due to certainty, because its being here tells me that this country exists, and I am nowherr it's borders yet, neither the bird or the country.

Sigh, walk on, and try not to think of grey-cold water, and the grasses of this region that move in the breeze, and I have not spoke for weeks, or sung, and I am afraid of my own voice.

Terry Dowling's An Intimate Knowledge of the Night arrived today. The ghost story as ritual. I am unutterably excited as I have been after a copy of it for years. On nights like this, dreamy and unsettled, it will be the perfect accompaniment.

I think I hear the door go, but no-one comes in.

Just wind, just air, and the thousand voices on the wind.

I am the Teleporting Man

Speaking to J. at work. She says that she saw me walking to work this morning, along Western Road. She was in front of me, crossed over at just past the floral clock flower display on that odd rectangle of green by Tescos. She said she turned around I had disappeared. Thinking no more of it she walked on, only to find that, toward the end of Western Road, I was in front of her. She did not see me pass her, and I did not see her. This is nothing unusual on my part as I am mostly in a world of my own and don't see anyone (apart from a lady walking her dog, who is a kind of clock herself. Depending where I pass her on Western Road, I know whether I am late or early) but J. is quite certain that she would have seen had I passed her. I no doubt slipped by in some odd moment where her attention was elsewhere, but I much prefer to think that I have developed a hitherto unknown power of teleportation.

Saltwater Streets

Wild night out there.
Walked em back home, a mild wind, but there was something darker in it. Old hills and black fields, stars behind clouds, cold as pinpricks. Icy redemption.
Think it was something to do with the sea. That mild wind kept picking up the sound of it, flung it down streets. Felt like I was being followed by tides. Foamy haunting, a saltwater ghost.
Down on New Church Raod there's a man walking just in front of me. He looks a little unsteady, sways slightly. Can't tell how old he is, or anything about him. A silhouette really. Wears some kind of hat and carries a briefcase, twirls an umbrella in his right hand,. Looks like he stepped out of some old decade, bought back by the same wind that picked up the sea. Flings the past down streets too. Night full of footsteps, and when I got back to the Mews, the lamps creaked like all the ghost stories I ever wanted.
In my room now, last cup of tea, and Radio 4 playing a jolly old tune, flamenco style, and I can only imagine the wild night still going on outside.

Attic Peace

When I first woke, about an hour ago at 7:00am, it was all but dark. I crept about the house preparing myself for work (it is not possible in a late November dawn to do anything but creep, as if the very fact of being awake is a secret thing that needs to be hidden). The cat-flap rattled in the door, and aside from this, there was no other sound. I sat on the sofa in my room, drinking a cup of tea, the nocturnal ambience only increased because my curtains were still drawn shut. There is a peace about this time, the serenity of an attic where nothing has been disturbed for decades. I could imagine my lamp, set on the floor, lighting the same things since childhood; my sketchbook, a cluster of wires, a computer mouse, a crumpled pair of jeans. Five minutes till I leave for work, walk out into the cold light of an alien day.

I hear someone move outside, possibly readying the coffee shop next door for opening. Sound of some shutter, or a large barrel. Rumours of movement, and silence already beginning to be forgotten.

Songs for Lost Days

Lost something. Been lost for months, and I knew, but hadn't felt it till now. There had been a ghost with me, and now that ghost is gone, and in lieu of a haunting there is an absence, a landscape of nothing, an untilled field under a leaden sky.
Slept well. Vague dreams I can't remember. Ten minutes before the alarm went off, a series of images that threatened to turn into a dream. I was with Em at Drumduan park in Scotland. I said I would like to see the lights turn on in the lane below the Black Woods. She said she would prefer to stay where we were.
A few minutes before I leave for work.
Watch the light slip beneath the curtains, the hushed movement of people next door (a door closing, a drawer opening) and there is the occasional sound of seagulls. A cold and lonely sound in which there is some kind of strange undefined solace, a song for these lost days.

Sunday Night - 10:02pm

What to do with the last two hours of Sunday night?
I can already feel the alarm, the heaviness of my own body, of 7:00am and that physical drag of getting out of bed.

A bright, sunny day. Took a walk to the pylon country out beyond Benfield Valley park. Came back and slept, read for while (a story in an old book of horror stories called Under the Pylon) did washing, had dinner, drew for a while (the second page of my ridiculous Metroland adaptation).

Eyes are feeling a bit fucked now. Addicted to eye drops, which does improve the eye-strain, at least a little. My body feels cramped though, as if the air it inhabits is too small and closing in on it.
I try not to think about the future, those inevitable grey lands after Christmas.

Six Weeks

A gloomy weekend, full of a strange sense of desolation I can't seem to shake. It's been about six weeks now since this melancholy shift began (six weeks exactly actually - it 'began' on the Saturday after Em and myself had returned from Scotland). There's no particular reason for it... it's all rather annoying actually. Life seems rather bleak at the moment , even though there is no reason for feeling this.
Had another Southside dream last night. Usually in these dreams I am trying to get to the heart of Southside, where I lived between 1978 and 1981. In last night's dream, I was actually back in my old house. I am unsure if I was living there, visiting parents, or on holiday. I needed to leave Southside, and I took a path that ran past the edges of the houses by the railway line. I remember looking at the different shaped houses (some no bigger than sheds) and looking back at some point I realized that some of the street lamps had switched on as it was getting dark, (in previous dreams of Southside there is always a feeling of triumph when this happens). I thought that perhaps I should make the most of this opportunity and walk through the streets of Southside as the lamps were glowing red, just warming up.. In fact, I decided, I needed to take photographs of this. I had left my camera behind though, and needed to go back.
A sunny day out there, and am meeting Em in 45 minutes for a trip into Pylon country, just past Portslade. A quick afternoon of crispy air and fading light, then that drop into night and the gallows-quick crawl of Sunday evening.
Oh well, another week starts tomorrow. Shame they don't pass by as quick as weekends do.

Secret Rooms

Walked back along the seafront road after a works dinner at a Chinese restaurant in the centre of town. Town was surprisingly quiet for a Friday night (aside from the traffic) - mild too for the time of year. Close your eyes and it's hard to believe it's mid-November, look around though and everything seems again like late autumn heading to winter.

Something pleasing about the seafront road when you get over to the other side of the King Alfred leisure centre. Great old buildings, most of them cheap hotels, slightly faded and with a grandeur that seems more influenced by the industrial docks of Aldrington Basin than the Brighton Pier. Get glimpses of windows, and the possibilities of secret rooms... secret not because they are hidden, but because they are forgotten. There are the windows at the front of buildings, there are attic windows, maybe a corner pane or too, we all know these... but on obscure walls, lost under overhangs or behind ventilation shafts, there are smaller windows, whose glass gives no indication of what room they may look upon. The buildings down the seafront road are full of the possibilities of such rooms.

We all pass by hundreds of them each day, mostly don't even think about them, but a lot of them have been there before we were born, and will remain there, spaces between stone, till long after we're gone. Something strangely comforting about that thought. Don't know what though.

Spilt Cup of Tea

I was about to write this post, and reached forward for my cup of tea on the other table. I wasn't paying attention and knocked it over. Tea over comics and books, and I am forced to get up from my seat in search of a tea towel to clear up the mess. I carefully take my two issues of Dell's Ghost Stories comic from their protective sleeves over which the tea spilt, and place them on the pile of comics under the TV I never switch on. I mop the front and back covers of Haunted Horror issue one carefully, glad the covers are made of card. I remove a reprint collection of 2000ad's Finn, as well as two recent copies of 2000ad from under the table that is now dripping with tea and sponge these too. I look sadly at my latest copy of Comic Heroes. This seems very wet indeed. On the other table - not the one my laptop is on (both tables are very small and of a 'bedside' variety) there is a pot of indian ink, some eye drops, a now empty mug and a hairbrush. On the shelf beneath is a digital camera, and on the lowest shelf there is an unopened tube of white acrylic paint and a pair of pliers. When I reached for my cup of tea originally, just as I was start this post, I was going to write about a fragment of a dream last night involving the ghost of a Chinese girl (and in the dream I knew she was Chinese as opposed to generically oriental) with completely black eyes, trying to get in through the open window behind my bed, but now I won't, except mention it in passing.

Lost in Pylons and Poplar Trees

For some reason I'm thinking of those strange days between winter and spring. A lost season, shoved sideways in time. Leaks through sometimes; days of white sky (looking through branches at leaden clouds), Sunday afternoons sinking to evening, thinking of fields lined by pylons and poplar trees, a certain kind of English cold, both savage and dreamy.
I don't know who lost this season, some absent minded god who let it fall through divine fingers. Perhaps it was lost purposefully for this season means most when found, either accidentally or consciously, or maybe the season means most when it is not found, and its absence leaves a shadow, vulpine and drowsy, that watches you as you start to dream of it.
If, in springtime, in the days when this lost season should be, you lie on a bed by an open window at the ends of the afternoon, you can taste it on the air. Tastes like shadowy valleys and tilted alleys, and all those childhood myths you thought you'd never believe in again.

Nightmares of the Sea

The submarine lies just below the surface. Drift and dream, cramped oil-smelling chamber, a mattress and blanket, and no controls, we drift. Through the glass of portholes, the water is heavy, the tides are deep and threaten to drag this submersible lower. The air in here is old enough already. Don't move, don't breathe, just sleep and dream. There are kraken here, and serpents, and obscene ghost ships that float just below the surface. There is a light I do not wish to see, casts a cold shadow. Dead sailors knock on the metal, sound like a bell, their songs to get in, to get me out. The surface of this sea is Himalayas-deep, and pitted with submarines, whose pilots woke, and lost their dreams, and faced the nightmares of the sea.

Grey, Still Day (Thinking about Sleep)

Took ages to fall asleep last night, for no apparent reason, aside from the fact that I probably (definitely) ha cold too much coffee at work. I was unpleasantly neither cold or warm. Every time I came close to falling asleep, a strange palpitation would cover me and I would 'wake' with a start, heart beating and somehow feeling too uncomfortable in my own skin.

When I'm working, I find my dreams to be more jagged and disquieting. Stood at the top of the stairs in the flat looking at the front door, and seeing the figure of a man through the frosted glass. I was afraid that he was the landlord's son (in waking life our landlord is a landlady) and he would want access to the house. In another dream, I could not find something I needed to give to someone at work. My desk was a mess, covered in papers.

It is growing increasingly cold at night now, as we slip toward yet another winter. It looks a grey, still day outside - at least the glimpse I get from between the curtains. I was fortunate in my week off last week. ah well, ten minutes and I've got to go out into that grey, still day, and another absurdly busy day at work.

Nine Lines after Midnight

Two minutes past midnight.
Bedside lamplight.
A half drunken cup of tea, growing cool, almost too cool to drink.
Tired eyes.
I hear Andy leave his room, move to the bathroom.
A gap between the curtains of my room.
The inverted dagger of night is held back by a slash of white window frame.
I will sleep for eight hours.
Wake in the melancholy of a November morning numerous times.

Monday Morning - 8:28am

Ah well, this is it, that moment of a holiday that haunts the rest of all those days off preceding, Mionday morning. Just finished a bowl of porridge (Quakers Oats) and have a cup of tea to drink. My right hand is slightly sticky from the honey I put into the porridge (I somehow managed to get on my hands). All that I have left to do is brush my teeth, hunt for the things I will inevitably not be able to find (keys, i-pod, headphones, wallet) and then head out for that walk to work. Seems to be quite a cold and wintry day out there, which is good. I'm quite looking forward to the walk to work... if not work itself. Have just been on Facebook and one of my colleagues has already said that he is not looking forward to today as it is going to be so busy... Hmm.
I hear the cries of children net door - them or their mother (I cannot tell. She is always shouting).. Aside from that it is silent, and my holiday is officially over.

Sunday Night - 11:08pm

Last hour now. Andy is in the kitchen making a cup of tea or dinner or something. I've spent the last hour or so working on the Metroland graphic novel adaptation exercise, drawing the actress Emily Watson looking tired and annoyed at that unexpected phone call that starts off the film... Ah well, might watch another Space 1999 episode and go to bed, drag out the holiday another excruciating hour, then turn the light off and know the next event will be that damned and cursed alarm...

Sunday Evening - 8:35pm

Resisted sleep, went for a walk instead, through the early twilight of 4:30pm, along Portland road, then up onto the Old Shoreham Road where it passes through the graveyard, then to Sackville Road and back home again, where I grilled four chops for tea. A beautiful night, the sky a clear and intense blue, the air sharp and cold and wintry. After dinner I drowsed in front of the television, episodes of Big Bang Theory I've seen before. Waiting for the water to heat up for a shower. Thought about having a bath, but was afraid that kif I had a bath it would be impossible to get out into the cold air. Twelve hours time, I'll be getting up for work...

Sunday Afternoon - 4:04pm

Written my first story for years - probably over a decade. About 1500 words or so (so it is quite short) called Summer Days of Permanent Autumn. Not edited it yet, but this means that (apart from Bridge 39 of course) I have actually done some writing on my week off from work. I was listening to a selection of Paul Roland albums as I was writing; Sarabande, Roaring Boys, Danse Macabre... Sunset outside, light fading now.Might go for a walk. Sunday evening is here - or just starting. Paul Roland is still playing.

Sunday Afternoon - 1:24pm

Have indeed watched a DVD. The Space 1999 episode A Matter of Life and Death. Now I am somewhat tired, and may go for a snooze, and my last day of the holiday continues as prophesied above... Oh dear. it will be getting dark in three hours time.

Last Day of a Week off from Work

Here it is the last day of a week off from work. 10:24am, slightly hungover, and a whole day to do nothing but try and forget that I will have to be up at 8:00am tomorrow for a nine hour day. Like the last day of summer holidays when you were a kid, and you can't believe the holidays are over, and that Sunday comes, and that day goes by so quickly, and then it gets dark, and you're doing all those things that you have to do before school that you haven't done for six weeks and and and...
But it's still only 10:24am.
10:26am now.
I've got to do washing for tomorrow, and tidy my room, and maybe a bit of artwork - I've done hardly any this week and even less writing (oh the guilt that hangs over us of holidays not used well...) but first I think I'll go to the shop, get the Sunday papers, might watch a DVD, maybe an afternoon snooze...

Gloomy Routine

What is more gloomy than the Saturday of the last weekend of a holiday? Normal service has been resumed. This could be a run of the mill Saturday, a couple of days to yourself to catch up on things, before the carnivorous routine of work eats up all your time. I can already hear that alarm on Monday morning, that desperate rush home when I finish work in darkness (it is my week of 10:00am - 7:00pm shifts next week), then that struggle to try and get some energy to do something other than stare numbly at the television, and succeeding in this only at 11:00pm or so, when you have to go to bed, and fall asleep with that dread of the alarm already there.
You wait for the weekend, for some time (if I'm not working Saturdays that is) and it gets to Saturday afternoon - about now say - and you get so scared of wasting the precious time you have left that you end up doing nothing because you can't decide what to do, and if you do decide to do something enjoyable, then that makes the time - and the weekend - go even quicker.
I'm sure there must be a better way of living than this.

Another Return to Woodstock Drive

London trip yesterday.
Em was visiting friends in Cambridge, so we parted ways at London Victoria. Went to Notting Hill Gate, where in the second hand shops there I bought an Of the Wand and the Moon album, and two compilations of old EC crime comics. I sat in Starbucks and wrote my Nan a birthday card, drinking coffee and watching the passers by on the cool, dry autumn day outside.
Headed back to Ickenham of course. Another entry in these odd rituals of mine, where I revisit places I once lived in, hoping to charge their near-mythic presence in my memory, or to somehow gain some sense of closure on them. My relationship with the past is an odd one - no point in my history seems any further back than a year or two back, and usually the present day is often overlaid with the resonances (the feel or identity) of other times - specific years, or periods in my own history. Sometimes, two or more time periods will be experienced on top of the present moment. I can be walking down Western Road back from work, and I will suddenly, without any doubt, experience, for instance, February of 1987 (white days fading out, cool and empty) as well as the autumn of 1995 (dark rooms full of angles and rain, shallow streets, wine cold as drizzly days).
The past is a constant presence for me, which goes someway to explaining my need for these journeys into the physical locations of the past.
Since leaving Ickenham / Uxbridge in Septenber 1994, when I was 22, I have returned once in the summer of 1996, then in the January of 2006, last year at the end of November and yesterday.
I caught the tube to West Ruislip, and walked down to Ickenham from there. From Swakeleys Road, I slipped into Swakeleys Park, the sign on the gate warning that this was a 'controlled drinking area'.

The path through the park was more tangled than I remember, the trees more ancient and primal looking. There was an odd serenity here, a consolatory kindness in the air that reminded me of sleep and old age.
I used to walk through here on Sunday mornings with Edward when I was 18 / 19, heading into Ickenham (I can't remember what for). As I walked I became aware of another time overlaying itself. This time from autumn 1986, and being here with my then best friend Leighton, my sister, and her friend Nicola, who lived opposite us. In this memory, one of us was wearing red. I do not remember anything else about this memory - which is probably more a collection of memories rather than a single event - nor where the colour red came from, if anywhere.

There was an odd melancholy about the trees, a kind of emptiness, as if the air around the branches was mourning something they couldn't really remember.

The River Pinn runs through the park, a secretive thing that flows through all the hidden places of Ickenham (and beyond). Lost corners where rope swings would be built, a bridge where we were once trapped by older kids, the false bank that turned out to be nothing but a shallow layer of leaves (I plunged in up to my waist). I dream of the river sometimes, and in my dreams it is a huge and primal force, vast and deadly, but somehow still as dark and secret.

...and so after you cross the main space of the park, you turn right into Woodstock Drive. The last two times I have returned here have been at night. This is the first time I have seen Woodstock Drive in daylight since the summer of 1996. Woodstock Drive, when seen at night, is a dark road - something to do with the spacing of the street lamps perhaps. During the day it has a comforting ragged quality, something daydream-y about it, like a day off school when mildly ill as a child. Woodstock Drive always looks as if it is another time - never part of the present. There is an old fashioned taste to the air, as if something here is always slightly out-of-date.

. 
My old house on Woodstock Drive, lived here from when I was 13 to when I had just turned 21. I've written about this house and its alleged haunting before. My old bedroom is the one on the top left of the picture. There is a different window frame than the one I had, and the front of the house wasn't painted white.

Another shot (not a very good one - these were taken surreptitiously remember) of my bedroom window, and below it the dining room window, hidden behind the posts of a fence that wasn't there when I lived there.

I left Woodstock Drive behind, crossed over Western Avenue, and passed by the Middlesex Fields. I took a right and headed across Uxbridge Common, where the wide open sky, brooding and beautiful, was already edging toward an early twilight. This was the place where I saw that huge sun over the December of 1992.

I looked around Uxbridge for a while, then caught the tube back into London, headed to 30th Century Comics at Putney where I bought too many old horror comics before meeting Em again at London Victoria.

We walked around St James Park, and headed up to Oxford Street where we got a bite to eat, before finally heading back home about 10:00pm. 

A twelve hour journey all together, but one which spanned nearly 30 years.

The past is never far behind us.

Small Hours

Caught this thing back in the summer of 2010, where only the small hours feel safe. Rest of the time, it lies upon you, ticking clock, counting hours down till appointments you'd rather miss, places you'd rather not be, people you'd rather not meet. You can forget it out walking too, letting the pavements do their job, beat of footsteps on the concrete crossing roads, watching for new alleyways, for signs of twilight. I could walk forever at dusk, wish I could stop it right there, walk out to that red and beautiful horizon, falling down through violet and purples to night, star-shift skies, and always on the edge of fields, facing that darkness, and that imagined countryside sweeping out into forever... Here in the small hours, morning is a continent away, there is silence here and a peace, and even if it is full of ghosts, I don't mind feeling haunted.

Three Minutes Nine Lines

Playing Sonic Youth's Rather Ripped.
Cold, nostalgic, laced through with something disquieting, some warning or premonition.
A painting of a man whose photograph I surreptitiously took in The Evening Star a few months ago.
We call him Doctor Occult.
The sound of the workshops, low and hidden in the air.
Sunlight on the roofs of the houses.
Undercurrents.
An image of a man walking away down a path lined by lamps, not yet on.
In this image it is December.

Long Hair and Beards

At the Geekest Link pub quiz with Stuart, Nat and Mark from work, answering questions about Superman films, Doctor Who (nearly forgot it was Terrance Dicks who wrote The Five Doctors) and sc-fi literature of the last few years (not that we got anything right on that round aside from Mark who answered a question about Game of Thrones correctly).
We're in the Caroline of Brunswick pub, opposite central Brighton's notorious mugging ground the Level, and the pub is like a retirement home for people who sued to drink at the Hobgoblin when that was a rock / metal pub, way back in the mists (or is it midsts?) of time. Nowhere near as chaotic as the Hobgoblin could sometimes get, a right sleazy dive sometimes, but it is Sunday night. The lights in the gents toilets don't work, so the management have helpfully provided candles instead, so we all piss in a gloomy light the colour of Sundays in the Victorian era, and make jokes about black masses and old horror films.
As I look round the pub, I notice that I do not look out of place. There seems to be a surfeit of men with long hair, beards and (less frequently) glasses. It is like going to a convention where the majority of people are dressed like me.
One of these bearded men sits down at our table when Nat has gone to get a drink. Nobody knows him. We all look at him, waiting to see what will happen next. He looks at us with an expression of surprise.
"I'm on the wrong table" he says. My table's next door".
I look at the table next door.
It is full of men with long hair and beards.

The Worst Taxi Driver in the World

We had ordered a six seater to take us back from the pub last night. Claire had called them by phone - Carcabs I think, and the six seater duly turned up. He dropped Al and Claire off first, and then Sarah. He then had to drop Em off on the street where she lives - and he didn't seem to know where her street was... We gave the taxi driver directions, but it's only a small street, and I thought oh well, maybe it's just slipped his mind... Then he had to take Andy and myself back home, and we gave him the name of our street. he didn't say anything but headed down Portland Road, almost to Portslade... I said to him that we had gone way too far, and then, again, had to give him directions back, right to the door. We then had to badger him to give us a discount for the trip - which ended up costing us £23:00, which seems incredibly expensive anyway. I saw the number on his cab as he drove off - 414141 - which Andy then duly called to complain about how utterly dreadful he had been.\The woman he spoke too sounded 'cagey' and said that there had been no cabs booked from the pub we had been at (The Brewery Tap in the North Laine) since the night before.
Something dodgy going on there...

Der Prison

Window open, sat on my sofa under the main lights of my room - can't be bothered to turn on the new lamp I bought last week. Death in June's Brown Book album playing, and through the open window, there is the sound of fireworks added. War-zone effects, a blitz ambiance. I imagine rebel strongholds and executions, bouncing bombs and sniper alleys. Sound of the war getting closer, Joe's fictitious book he came up with sat on the freezer in London Road Worcester, January 1999 - Der Prison, the tale of a man in a European city going slowly mad while in the background there is some kind of revolution or civil war... Waiting to go down the pub, that odd hour before having to leave, the bottle of port I drank last night lending the day a clear and icy haze,  everything sharp and softened and unreal...

1:08am

More port... oh, lets follow these visions down... I want to listen to Sol Incvictus's Against the Modern World re-recorded version from 2006 - twelve years ago! Been watching videos on youtube of neofolk's holy trinity, Douglas P, David Tibet, Tony Wakeford. They all had their own unique utterly personal vision. Shouldn't have been transmutable to others, and yet... each of them - their own personal mythology, is somehow communicable, able to be transfigured...
...and mine? Southside and hat lamps and twilight, dreams of flooded suburbia and impossibly steep alleyways in Januatys full of lakes and clear skies and purity...

Late November / January Last Year / Three Quarters of a Bottle of Port

Three quarters of a bottle of port.
Listening to Late November Sandy Denny.
Certain songs.
January 2011, only last year but it feels longer. Remember the cold, that circular walk around the outskirts of Brighton, a certain sense of premonition, sharp air, clear icy breath, and something beautiful and deadly, an undercurrent, and this song reminds me of a friend lost in the March of that year, certain songs like I said...
...i see only smoke from the chimneys arise...

(i am not free)

The day crawls by. Battered by endless calls at work, one after another after another, and it was like a thousand days rolled into one, an afternoon the length of a millenium, the morning like a rainy Sunday when you're twelve years old and your friends live in another town.
This is a dark autumn.
At lunchtime on a corner, a back alley, talking on the phone, backs of buildings, backs of shops, a car park, and the air is white and empty and not cold and not warm, and I see the geography of the present stretching on interminably.
Back home now.
My week off from work has started. I can't remember the last time I was least looking forward to time off work.
And work this week has been a nightmare.

Breakdown Country

Car's dead and we're left alone in this wilderness. Black undulating hills, no shelter, and I can't tell if this is dawn or dusk. We're on some strange compass point though, some fifth direction, and this could be both morning and night, and if I stay here, this twilight lasts forever.
Keep walking? Easy to say, but there are plenty of people who don't make it out. Bones littered in the grey air, lost in the obscure moors under those dreaming, troubled skies. Look at the engine, and can't make out a thing, but I've got to leave. It's started to emit poison.

Old Sun

I remember.
It's December 1992, and I'm walking across Uxbridge Common back from work. It's a Saturday afternoon, and already beginning to ease toward twilight. There is something snowy about the air - though no snow - it never snowed before Christmas when I lived in Ickenham. Frosty ground, brittle air. I'm listening on my walkman (chunky cassette tape) of Bathory's Twilight of the Gods album, or at least that's the album I associate with this memory. And there - hanging over the common is a huge and bloated sun, a sunset red globe both terrifying and beautiful. It was impossibly vast, a size caused by some atmospheric phenomena I don't understand, something perhaps to do with the light, or the horizon, or just a certain kind of winter day. The twenty years that has passed between then and now, a phenomena I understand all too well, has no doubt amplified the size, and that real sun I saw cannot compete with the sun that I remember, but it is the sun I remember that endures, hanging over the common like a portent or a god of some religion no-one could ever hopr to understand.