2012

Another year done, another twelve months to be filed away for future reference.
Raining outside.
Sat in the living room with Em who is reading the paper. The lamps are on, a cup of tea is on the table, and I am tired from a long day at work, the constant rain, the wet blue-grey of this winter light and from 2012. Only a few hours left now. I can't help but view 2013 with a degree of suspicion that borders on alarm.
Put this year away anyway, and if we don't exactly start again tomorrow (who wants to always start again anyway?) then there will be the oddly comforting environs of January, a month without masks or romance, but that does have a new Voivod album...
The overtly sensitive fire alarm has gone off (dinner is cooking). I have flicked a towel up at it and the alarm has come crashing down to the floor.
Ah well - Goodbye 2012!

Reflections of Lamps

2012 begins to fold in on itself, close down, file things away from 'this year' into 'the past', gets ready for tomorrow night, not for death though - years don't die. They fade and flicker and haunt, they inhabit some distant country of nostalgia and yearning we always try to get back to (even though we've never been there, not really), but they don't die.
Time is conterminous. Lasts forever, even if we don't. 2012 will outlast us all.
It will slip away from us though, and that sad melancholic year 2012 will not belong to us any more.
Em came round earlier. There had been plans for a walk, but this is her first day off since we got back from Worcestershire, and she is now asleep on my bed, dreams in the grey shadows of my sunless room. Andy has gone back out to Tescos to get something for dinner. he went to the Homebase on the Old Shoreham Road earlier on, bought a tropical looking plant, with a braided stem. It looks like a palm tree. I can see it out of the corner of my eye, hidden behind the human size gollywog, and next to the other plant on the dark table that no-one uses except to dump stuff on.
Watch the lamps across the mews swing in the breeze. Haven't come on yet, though there is about the light a certain twilight air. The sky is grey, light faltering to nightfall. There redlections in the glass of the window of the living room lamps. In one of the windows opposite, I see a reflection of a lamp in an adjoining house. Reflection of reflections. An infinity of lamps.
The air outside is looks heavy with a cold refreshing greyness.
Welcome to January, just around the corner. Just coming home.
2013 beginning to unfold itself, and each present moment beginning to slip further away.

Three and a Half Pints Later (23 Minutes past Midnight)

They tore down the hospital, put up some new buildings. I remember this walk past St Annes Well park at night, long line of street lights... Tescos closed (why I'm waiting for some breaded fish to cook now) and I've got nowhere else to buy anything... Portland road, Clarendon Villas.... Saw Doctor Occult in the pub who looked remarkably like my nearly finished painting of him. Talking about Blood on Satans Claw with Claire's friends. Talking with Seamus about tortuously long bus journeys. Outside leaving the pub. Up past my old street. Long walk home. Night should be colder. Sleep. Sleep. And wake at 7:00am for a Saturday morning at work. Oh let it be quiet. Let my fish be cooked.

Australian Dream

In Australia. I have been lying on a patch of sloped grass somewhere in a park. I have lefy and now want to go back. Where was I? I walk across a field. At the edge of the field there is a bench that is used by street drinkers. They are all alike and dressed identically. Physically they appear to resemble human versions of humpty dumpty, and wear baseball caps. Some are on the bench, others are sprawled on the ground. They are motionless, frozen in a variety of unlikely drunk-addled positions. 

I find the patch of grassed slope and attempt to ascend. I want ti get to the exact spot I was lying before. This is ridiculous - the slope is near vertical! I see other people lying about on the slope though. I move further slong the slope and try to find a less vertiginous ascent. The shallower section of the slopes are full of too many people, all sunbathing. I eventually find a shallower way, but the way is barred by thorny bushes. I move further along, find a gap in the hedge, but then realise that, because of the intricacies of a shallow drop, I would still have to negotiate this barrier. There is no way back-

...and the alarm goes off and I wake up.

Back to Work

8:35am.

25 minutes, and I return to work. Christmas is over and we're well into those dead days between Christmas Day and New Year. I think it rained last night, though I haven't yet looked out of the window. I can't remember dreaming last night either, which is surprising. I seem to have remembered lots of dreams recent;ly.

Silent flat.

Andy stayed around Al and Claire's last night. I joined them at the Neptune for a few pints as we did on Boxing Day last year. A pub full of old men who looked slightly out of place in Brighton, slightly out of place in the 21st century. I'm sure they would have all seemed more at ease in the gloomy uneasiness of the 1970s.... though it is hard to say why. When I left the pub to come home I got soaked in a heavy driving rain. 

I ate too much fried beef, mushrooms and smoked cheese for dinner last night, and feel like I have put on two stone overnight.

Oh well.

Aftermath

I go to bed at 3:00am after staying up and drinking (various ales, cherry ciders). Or rather not bed, as I decide to sleep on the two seat sofa in my room for some reason which escapes me now, but seemed to make sense in the middle of the night. I wake while it is still dark, and decide I would much rather sleep in my own bed. I stumble over something in my room (my bed is less than two meters from my sofa) and collapse under the covers. 

I dream of Burnside, back in Kinloss. I rarely dream of Burnside now. In this dream Burnside (the square of houses reserved for the officers and their families of RAF Kinloss) was connected to something called the 'night-suburbs'. I was there with two or three other people. Burnside was completely abandoned. Empty houses shadowing in a day whose horizon was marked with a reddened sunset. In one of the houses, a number of doors - these doors were the houses themselves (I'm not sure how this worked out). The houses - all of Burnside - was, of course, haunted by some never explained force.

I wake with my alarm at 11:00am - one thing, no matter how drunk, I can be certain of, is that I will always set my alarm. I go into the living room, look at the collection of empty ale bottles on the table, Andy's half glass of port, still undrunk. I look at the top of the stereo that I had to remove because a Sonne Hagal CD got stuck, and I was unable to remove. On the table, there is the mirror from Andy's bathroom cabinet. I have no idea how that got there.

I had a cup of tea and heated myself up a vegetarian farmhouse pie. I watched a bit of The Railway Children and continued reading The Corner by David Simon, about drug takers ('fiends') in inner-city Baltimore in the 1990s. 

Christmas Evening

5:30pm Christmas Day.
Em and Andy both at work, and I am alone in the flat. Doctor Who is on the television and is making me vaguely annoyed already.
Beyond the sound of the television, and over the vague noise of voices outside, the flat has a silence. A silence that all buildings have at certain times of year - or of days. Not so much ghosts of the past (metaphoric or literal - your choice) but more like the present moment itself is feeling old. This is 2012 remembered (or imagined) a hundred years from now.
Through the gaps in the curtains, a fragment of the Mews, and I can see a window of one of the flats opposite. I can't tell whether those dark shapes are sofas or heads. The north side of the house (my room, the toilet, Andy's room) is in its always-shadow, comforting and dream-like and eerie in a redemptive way. No sun ever falls there, even in the night.
Footsteps next door, or some piece of furniture being moved perhaps. Quiet now. Something moves again, skittering over the walls of the house next door.

Truncated Snapshot

A snapshot of my weekend away, a fragment from the last day - those last few minutes really. With Dad in Worcester. We'd arrived early, and went for a coffee. Parked in that shallow basin in the centre of toen, nothing here but bits of car park and ring road, a dual carriageway landscape. Wet blue twilight, and the buildings all jagged and silhouettes against the perfectly hues sky. You don't get twilights like this in the South. Walking across there, trying to remember this was once the town where I lived and not being able to, impossible to think I lived here... Felt more like I was walking through one of my dreams of Worcester.

Anyhow, Em's just came around. Time for a Christmas Eve drink.

Inconsequential Woodstock Drive Dream

Dream - passing by the top of Woodstock Drive with Em. A bright summery day, one of those days associated with the first warm days of spring. Leaves on the trees. I remember their pale green under the blue, slightly cloudy sky. Em asks if I want to go and see my old house, further down Woodstock Drive. I say I do not, though am not sure why. We walk on toward Uxbridge.

Kidderminster at Twilight

Went with Dad to Kidderminster yesterday to pick up the last of their Christmas shopping (not my Christmas shopping - I shall be returning to Brighton, flooded tracks permitting tomorrow night).
The last time I was at Kidderminster was with Em in May of last year, before them would have been over the winter of 1993 / 1994. After a very busy Morrisons we headed to the high street, which was bustling too. Dad went to pick up Mum's prescription. I went to WHSmith's to buy a prog rock magazine then waited for Dad on the steps of some building, slightly unnerved by teenage shenanigans about me. When I met Dad we went for a coffee and watched the late afternoon pass by outside - an odd place Kidderminster - well, not odd, just not Brighton. The place was thronged with teenagers and families, and it didn't look like there was a graphic designer (thankfully) amongst them.
The town is littered with old carpet factories - now mostly turned into retail outlets - and roundabouts. I was surprised at how busy it all was; people moving quick through the growing twilight, walking with ease the labyrinth of subways and footbridge, side passage and back street. This is a place where people live out their lives, born, grow old, have families and die. Depressing in one way but oddly comforting in another. I imagine any teenager here would yearn to escape their red brick incarceration - move to somewhere exciting -like Brighton perhaps. Kidderminster has an old and broken soul, on the edges of disintegration, but Brighton sometimes seems so plastic - trendy without depth, without a soul - at least any of note. A place for holidaymakers and that short period in every lifetime when anything you dream of might still be possible. After the holidays are over though or you hit your thirties, Brighton might seem less appealing... I wouldn't want to live anywhere else though... or maybe I would, but I have no reason to...
Leaving Kidderminster in the full throes of twilight. Something vast about the skies up here, great grey things flung from horizon to horizon, the land and buildings all flat, supplicants before unknowable, impeachable gods. The wet dusk, impressive in its sobriety, bought resonances of old Christmases spent here in the Midlands, when my parents lived at Bretforton (the Christmases of 1993, 1994, 1995) and of course my own three Christmases in Worcester (1996, 1997, 1998).
Particularly the Christmas of 1997.
A dark December that one - a 'relationship' gone bad, and the early gloom of that December darkening into crisis as Christmas approached. Nothing serious of course (nothing and everything is serious though when you're 25) - just that back - forth - push - pull of university-era relationships. I remember the shared house I lived in on 136 London Road slowly shedding its occupants for trips to familial homes till there was only Al, Ruth and myself left. Ruth didn't live there, but she spent enough time there to qualify as some phantasmal resident. I remember the preparations for Ruth's birthday party at the beginning of December - feeling later in the month that it was - trips into town with Sal to buy flowers and presents (I bought her Portishead's second album) - I don't remember anything about the party itself though.
We drove out of town as night fell - though this night seemed to rise from the ground, from the parks I remembered (maybe) from childhood visits, from under red brick viaduct bridges and from the shadows cast by street lamps.
By the time we got back to Cleobury Mortimer, it was night.
Midwinter days, a few sickly hours of pale washed out daylight and then darkness again, - a phrase I used in something years ago.
Ah well.
Days start getting longer from now on, even though it seems that these nights will last forever.

A Dream of Snakes and Tarantulas

A cluster of tarantulas in my room. They were all bunched up together, hanging from the whiteness of the wall like a bunch of grapes. I had to get someone to sort them out. A meeting with some kind of pest controller. We view the tarantulas through a kind of video link. To my horror I see that the tarantulas have been joined by a number of brightly coloured, toxic looking snakes. I see them twisting away across the objects in my room. \I am afraid that these snakes will vanish and not be found. How will I ever be able to relax again when there may be hidden snakes?

Landscapes

Sat in my parents' living room in Cleobury Mortimer just inside the county of Shropshire. A cat called Thomas, a grey and white thing, curled up at my side. Sound of the radio in the kitchen, turned down low. Songbirds out in the garden, and the sky above a leaden shade - though it was bright blue when I first got up. Temporarily alone in this new house (Dad has taken Mum to the doctors) and feeling oddly displaced because I am not in Perranporth on the North Cornish coast, where my parents lived from 1999 until earlier this year.
Train ride up yesterday, cutting through England's dismal, strangely hypnotic December landscape. Miles of flooded fields and ragged farmland, provincial towns and dull lamps not yet lighting paths by the side of new housing estates. It took an age for us to get out of London - an hour to reach Slough from Paddington - something to do with bad signals. We were stuck for what seemed an eternity in some industrial railway landscape (an infinity of train tracks and overhanging wires). Under the constant rain, the colours seemed to drain away and everything outside the carriage looked like all the photographs of wartime Europe you've ever seen.
By the time we reached Worcester (where my parents were meeting me) it was dark. Said goodbye to Em - whose parents only live five minutes away from the station - then to the car, parked in the car park underneath the Crowngate Shopping Centre, and then to Cleobury Mortimer.
Funny catching fragments of Worcester like this. Seemed impossible I once lived here. Driving over the black bridge over the Severn, the car swinging by the Bush pub at the base of St Johns where I first went out for a drink with Al and Joe (January 1997). Watching from the car window that path that ran up to the base of Sabrina footbridge, remember walking here, thinking about Ruth, autumn of that year, with an alarm clock in my pocket because I had lost my watch, and these were the days before mobile phones... In all these investigations into my past, I never find any trace of Ruth, no nostalgic rush associated with her, no resonance of past times. I occasionally catch fragments of her house in Whitbourne, somewhere near the border with Herefordshire- the smell of some kind of air conditioning air freshener scent is the same as the smell of her - her parents - house, but that is strangely all.
Now that Em and myself have ended our relationship, Worcester is full of warnings, of things gone, things regretted, things lost. A place not so much for the nostalgic, but for the troubled. Reminders of a worrying emptiness, a hollowness at the heart of these days, the inevitable fear of growing older too, I don't know why... As much as I have mythologized the time I have spent living in Worcester, I remember grey days back then too, the light all washed out and white, drained of romance and possibility, and the colourless skies uncomfortable in its cloudy cold delerium.
Sometimes Worcester seems a city built on drizzle.
The car drive here took us through the black lamp-less countryside, flooded roads and fields I couldn't see, barely a village passed through. Deep in England, deep in the lost heart of England, here we go... and looking up at the sky, I couldn't see clouds, and I couldn't see stars, and we might as well be travelling through Limbo...
It didn't stop raining once.
Slept well last night - even though I did keep waking up, and dreamed of illustrating a comic strip about patients in a mental asylum being confronted with the arrival of a new object - some kind of device - on the wards.
I never found out what that device was.

The Evening Star

Doesn't really matter what other pubs we experiment with - the one in Seven Dials we liked for a bit - currently the Brewery Tap - we always return to the Evening Star. Was there last night for the first time in don't know how long. It never changes, the same rotund middle age men (of which I am one I suppose), the same hard uncomfortable benches, the same slightly wet toilets (well, the floor of anyway)... but there is something comforting about the place. The first pub I drank in in Brighton when I moved down on December 30th 1999 (as opposed to other pubs when visiting). I remember we met Paul A's brother here when he came to visit... though I don't remember much about him, or when this was... Poor Paul, lost to schizophrenia in some home up on Cromwell Road. This used to be the pub of Brighton's best years (though not necessarily the happiest) when everything was still achievable, and we were still aglow with the (admittedly by then fading) rays of youth. We could have been anything we wanted but we chose to drink real ale instead.

In the Company of all our Old Dogs

The dream is fading now. This is what I remember.

In a house with my sister - I think that she was living there. Something to do with the upper floors. I open a trapdoor in the ceiling with a long chain. The trapdoor opens showing a whole series of other rooms. I am momentarily afraid. These are haunted rooms. I am afraid I may have released something. We discover that these rooms can be accessed by the stairs - and we have always been able to do this. We explore the dark rooms. Despite the fact these rooms are haunted, there does not seem to be much that is malevolent or truly unsettling here. I go down the stairs in the comapany of all our old dogs Bracken, Bess, Bruno, Bruno II and Misty. It does not bother me that I know all these dogs to have died.

Crows in the Morning

A familiar country, albeit one I have never seen. Crows cry in early morning, and the air is wet with mist, woods full of too many trees. Churches are harsh and documentary-real. A school room I could almost be nostalgic for and the imagined darkness of the trees.
I'm not sure why the landscape in the old (1970) British horror film  Blood on Satan's Claw (which I've just finished watching)  is so familiar. There has always been something so familiar about the sounds of crows in the early morning, and the film soundtrack is littered with them. I remember once, back in Forres, my sister and myself frightened by the sound of them in the Black Woods on top of Cluny Hill, and again, my room in Drumduan Park, and through those dark-less midsummer nights, my sleep disturbed by crows in the garden... there is another memory of something earlier, living at my grandparents house in Stone in 1977. Arriving at school early in the morning, and was there this one morning, misty and wet, riven by the sound of crows - I vaguely remember a fascination, but this memory might well be a dream as anything real.

Dark Roads in the Small Hours

2:04am

A silence so quiet it is almost a noise. Everything that has a noise seems loud; my fingers typing, the laptop humming. I listen for the sounds of cars outside, but hear the dark roads instead. I am nostalgic and pensive, waiting for something to happen. Something is waiting for me.

Dark roads, as I said.

Never meant to stay awake this late. Meant to go to sleep at midnight but the hours slip away. Everything seems very still in this room. I imagine if I tried that I could imagine voices. A radio-murmur of voices from the locked up workshops below.

Downed tools in a stillness of oil and wood and metal.

It feels like Christmas now, and thinking that, I think further, of the cliff top path at Perranporth I would usually walk this time of year. That path is closed to my footsteps now, and I know, except perhaps as an old man, I shall never see Perranporth again.

I was young when I first walked there - the last years of being young anyway - and now I am not young - but not old either. A liminal age, a borderline phase.

I should go to sleep, let myself slip onto those dark roads and dream, and go and meet whatever might be waiting for me out there. 

2:11am

Forgotten Rooms

Dreamt I was living in some small but cosy ground floor flat. dark and shadowy, the walls seemed to be made of a black wood, which gave everything the appeal of old panelling. In an alcove sat my chair and a computer. Much to my surprise, I saw that there was further space to the left of the computer and chair. I had already put somethings in this new space when I had moved in, but had promptly forgotten about it. Perhaps I should move the chair and computer to allow for greater access to this new / old space? I investigated this space further, there was two or three smaller rooms, all connected to each other. The last room contained a bed (I had thought I could use this as a spare room if people stayed over) and there was a small bathroom. The tiny window looked out onto the sea. This room also contained a door that opened onto Hove Boulevard. I was pleased and excited that I had remembered these rooms - the possibilities were endless, but I was slightly perturbed that the door opened onto the seafront - there would be drunk people passing by at night. Because of this, the whole flat came to seem slightly unsafe, but I was still pleased that I had discovered / remembered these other spaces.

Hangover Day

40-watt bulb light dimmed even more behind the lampshade. Dull overhead light. Listening to The Perc meets The Hidden Gentleman album 'Postcards from the Meantime'. Last echoes of a melancholy hangover hollowing out my body. My rooms feels haunted and old tonight. Alone in the flat, I feel lost in time, like I have been in this room for decades. Hangovers do that to you.
Fag-end of the year, last few drags of these smoked out days.
Works party last night, Christmas dinner for the call centre. Some restaurant I can't remember; cold sprouts, dry turkey. Pretty foul but I ate it all. Lager, red wine, white wine, champagne, cider, rain. Went to karaoke afterwards. Stuffed in a room while everyone shouted to songs I can't remember. A strange pleasure. Then to the casino afterwards where I gambled nothing, but stared at the cruise-ship like interior, and all those set faces at the roulette table, the fruit machine, and all the other devices installed designed to lose your money.
I gambled nothing.
Afterwards, walking up New Church road, I pull out my phone to look at the time, and am surprised to discover that it is nearing 4:00am.
Long sleep, disquieting dreams I couldn't recall on waking.
Time for a cup of tea, some cheese on toast, and to leave this room I've been in for decades.

Thursdays were Bad Days in 2012

Last day at work tomorrow, then a week off, back in on Christmas Eve, then Christmas Day and Boxing Day off, then work again during those dead days between Boxing Day and New Years. Working New Years Eve, then New Years Day off, and then 2013...

2012 has exhausted me. 

I don't think I've enjoyed it that much.

Unbelievably I turn 41 in three months time. I still have very little idea as to what to do with my life. Given my past history, this will just involve drifting on from day to day, with no real plans, just vague ideas that never come to fruition.

Ho-hum.

3 x 3 x3

Night / ale / winter

Dream / desire / alliteration

Literate / roundabout / memory

1989 / Western Road / Swakeleys Road

Copse / Named / Lost

Petrol / cars / branch

Fall / autumn / yearn

Bus-stop / diary / grass

Our Price / Ruislip 98 / Uxbridge Common 

Morning Songs

After my shower I heard the sound of horses, clip-clopping on cobbled stone. It wasn't of course - just the sound of the coffee shop next door opening, the drawing back of the shutters sounding like horses hooves. I tried to make them the sound of ghosts (there used to be stables below us, where the workshops are now) but the resolutely refused to haunt me. I hear the sound of a car now, engine running, warming up. A cosy sound, a winter noise. I hear something being unloaded, some indistinct banging noise. Now the sudden sound of a babys cry, seemingly coming from the passage outside my window. I imagine its a cat or a seagull. Now there are voices.

Edge

Started last night when I tried to get to sleep. Can't really explain it... a nervous tic in my leg, barely there, such a soft and delicate thing, but it kept me awake all night, waiting for the nest breath of its crawling discomfort. At 4:00am, my only recourse to sleep was a bottle of Desperado left over from the abortive attempt on Saturday night to go to Sarah's party.
It continued all day, superseded, somehow, by the primary side effect of a crawling discomfort in my own body, a jittery restlessness that is somehow even worse than that awful toothache back in July. I'm dreading trying to get to sleep tonight.
A bad call check today at work - we get them every month - I scored 20% - my worst ever.
Not a good day.
No, not a good day at all.

2:23 - 2:34pm

Suddenly feeling it, where there should be two shadows, one falls, and in that sense of something wrong, that spiraling foreboding; this sense of the missing can only increase, at least for a while. Hard enough now, but when I think to February, when that isolated sense of midwinter hibernation wears off? Look around to those emptied out lands, like those other emptied out lands; spring of '97, summer of '94. summer of '87, late autumn of '05. I can play with these dates like I'm juggling tarot cards, and I'm still not sure whether they continued premonitions or only mirrors.
Sat on the sofa in my room, and I can taste two past periods, one I can't name, and the other a late autumn night in 1993. Smell of oranges (I also associate this smell with the spring of '93 - I think it was the scent of the house I was living in at the time) and air freshener. Cleaning my sunless room on a sunless day, listening to Type'o'Negative's Bloody Kisses album, vacuuming my room as that serious winter light fades to that brutal, consoling winter darkness. Loathe to turn on the lights in that empty house, to break that spell, and I can't remember whether I was smoking then on not. Cups of tea, and that welcome hush of silence, though in that silence, some sense of loss I couldn't quite place either (probably the passing of the autumn of that year, one of the more progressive times in my life). As it got dark, that gladness to leave that house, and that off loneliness. I had a late photography lecture. Yellow bus to Langley College, through those miles of now-bleak countryside, ruled by gods and December and spiky consoling twilights.
That's what I taste now anyway.
Just beginning to get dark.
Night falls so early in December.

Saturday Night Un-Haiku

Went to Sarah's party.

Had a panic attack.

Left.

Chimney Country

Head south to Christmas, to chimney-country, to lands under gray skies the shade of white and afternoon sleep, and I feel those nowhere days with their promises of ghost stories. Lying in bed at night and listening to the wind rattle over imagined moors, black lanes and dreaming hills.
Here in the just-before-twilight of December, a strange sense of something. Last night in the Metropole Hotel, at the Value Awards dinner, and in the bustle of the great hall, it feels like this has all happened decades before. Here we are in the 1930s, being remembered in the impossible year of 2012.
Took hours to walk back along the sea front. Red wine, white wine, water, lager. Wasn't sick on the beach like I was after the Awards dinner last year. Woke up this year with no hangover, just tired, and words I reach for but can't grasp fading now in the cool and comforting evening.

Intimate Apocalypse

Rain sharpened so fine it cut like needles. Roadside pools clogged with the last remnant of autumn. The brown paper bag holding the pizza disintegrated.

This morning it was quite nice.

Winter now, and it's in the sobriety of the air, that sense of apocalypse that always accompanies the end of a year, or rather, that sense of one's own mortality. I suppose that's a kind of intimate apocalypse. Some people get their sense of mortality when summer fades... but I shop for it slightly later in the year.

But I do tend to do everything late anyway.  

Distillations of Concentrated Time

I have long suspected there may be some neurological basis to my fascination and obsession with the past. Tempted as I am to self diagnose with hyperthymesia, this is probably not the case, as I lack the photographic memory (though my chronological memory is indeed very good). I do however spend an inordinately large amount of time thinking about my past (a side effect of the condition), but more importantly, are those constant rushes of the past itself. I don't mean memories - or not just memories - but something else more vital, as if time itself is rushing all over me, as some kind of almost physical sensation.
All day long I have been thinking about Hillingdon Circus (where Western Road crossed Long Lane in Hillingdon). I'm not sure why. To be more precise, Hillingdon Circus in January 1991. There are memories attached to this place and this time, but none important. Of more importance, or resonance are the feelings that this is generating. I can't describe them very well, but phrases like the consolation of January nights and sentient black skies over street lamps like gods and the eternal night-bridge are probably far more evocative of being doused in this curious and particular distillation of concentrated time. 

Night Rattles

Imagine a colour, the shade of a silvery - grey, a fish scale sheen. The colour tastes of being twenty years old, living in a town where friends have moved on. Streets haunted by rooms you once knew intimately. Old homes inhabited by strangers. It is a colour of a certain kind of winter, when you go to the train station in a town you've been meaning to leave for, well, years, and finding that there are no trains any more, and the station is being boarded. The colour of realising that a time that seemed only recent is now years ago.

Bottle the colour, label it with a clinical name. Line them up in hallway cupboards.. Dusty second floor cranny, third floor nook.  Stuffed in the space beneath the stairs with the hoover and other things suffused with this colour. Sleep and wake at 3:00am, and imagine those bottles in their lost and hollow places, rattling in the night.

Down Western Road

I passed twp kids messing about on skateboards. One was sitting down, leaning against a wall, the other on the board itself. I wasn't paying that much attention. The one on the skateboard fell, and his board - at a remarkable speed - sped into the road. It somehow got tangled in the wheels of a car. The car sped off, and I think I heard a crack - of the skateboard presumably. The car didn't stop - maybe didn't even  notice. The boy retrieved his skateboard, and his friend erupted into peals of uncontrollable laughter. Am unfiorgiving sound, harsh and unpleasant. The laughter rang on as I walked down Western Road.

Home again.

A midday heavy with nerves.
Houses of fear.
Home again.

Curled up inside me.
Dark dog.
Sleep is his wound.

Winding on,
Dual carriageway roads.
Home again.

Beginning of an Unwanted Country

An empty wasteground, just before midnight. The day has emptied itself out, and this air is cold, and, oh yes, full of premonitions I can't accurately divine by. A hollowness fills time, and my own silence seems in itself a divination. As an old man, lying cramped on a sofa, weeks and weeks of silence following weeks and weeks of silence. Hear a door open in the flat and it seems as improbable as nostalgia. The sound of water, footsteps, voices from even beyond that. The door closes. Walk these wastegrounds and hope to speak, because there are equations here who tip the balances with silence. Age and passing and withdrawal. Too many goodbyes you forgot to remember. Too many twists of unmapped roads and you're here, at the beginning of a land you've always tried to avoid.

Dream of a Dark Party on Woodstock Drive

For some reason, Mum, Dad - maybe my sister - and myself were to stay back in our old house on Woodstock Drive for three night. I was very excited, as I might be able to continuie my investigation into the haunting there. I was also slightly concerned that it may necessitate spending nights alone there -  aprospect that filled me with dread. The house was larger than waking life, and the rooms had a hollow washed out atmosphere, empty walls and floorboards.
Other people arrived and the house seemed to grow. Talking to a stranger there. He had conducted previous investigations into the house and discovered there were three additional rooms. I also noticed that there was an entrance to a 'cellar level' that I didn't remember being there when I lived there.
More guests. A party. From one of the now very large rooms, I could see a huge upper balcony section that was full of people. There was something monstrous about them - I think they were all holding snakes. There was some kind of accident with them - one of their number had been killed because of some ritual theyw ere holding. The ambulance was called, but I could only watch this from a distance as we were not allowed access to the mysterious balcony level.