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.