2013 is a Lost Year

The last morning of 2013. A grey year this one. I won't miss it. The kind of year that just wasn't fun, where I just felt lost and uninterested, where time didn't seem to be mine. Even when I had those two months between jobs, my time didn't seem to be mine - even if that was down to me worrying about the future. No real progression this year. Savings nearly gone thanks to those two months off, and the job I'm in now - though less stressful than my last one - is not ideal. I go back to work on January 2nd, and I've been dreading it for days. The gallows. I don't think I'll pass probation (comes to an end at the end of January, a months time). I didn't have this work dread when I worked at the petrol station or Telegen. I didn't have any money either, and I didn't like working all over the weekend when I was at the petrol station. I did get to go to America though, for my cousin James' wedding - and met my cousins for the first time - and other relatives I'd not seen for years. I've done a lot of artwork this year - more so than any other year I think. I set up my facebook art-page Witch Factory, which has been one of the best things I've done for a while - and I've met some interesting people through that (well, online).
Anyhow, goodbye 2013... I feel ambiguous about you. Even at this late stage.

Nine Lines for a Grey Year

Hot sun, cold breeze. Not a cloud in the sky.

I'm down at the beach with Em, a cup of tea from

the seafront stalls. A week or two till she leaves for

Greece. This grey year stumbles to its end. I start

to lose the old call centre as a recent place. Old

work colleagues slip into memory. Nevermore

the cool sigh of those stairs. The future is certain,

but some things seem immutable. Some things

stay the same for too long.

The Avoided Room

Bridge 39 is getting to be like a room in a large house you don't go to very often. Not avoid exactly, but when you do go there, you realise the room is cold and bare and almost haunted. I cannot imagine sleeping here now.

The Distance Sounds like Pylons

Sat alone in my parents living room at Cleobury Mortimer. Windy out there. I watch an odd leaf blown about - the last of autumn - look at the grey dreamy skies (dull sun dazed and electric behind clouds). Branches. A child's slide (for when my niece comes to visit). Then there is the sound of the distance. A sound you don't get in Brighton. It sounds like silence.
This isn't Worcestershire, but Staffordshire - though really we're just over the border. I can still feel the ghost of my twenties coming back though, the dark resonance of all that countryside. University days. Visiting my parents when they lived in Bretforton. I remember driving through the landscape in Ruth's car, a passenger watching the dusky pink lanes, a lost landscape even then. Poplars and copses and dark shadowy trees. Semi-industrial Midlands towns. Petrol stations with unfamiliar names. Picturesque villages and damp churches open to the public for a few hours on a Sunday.
I left Brighton early yesterday afternoon. Train to Victoria, tube to Paddington. Too-strong coffees from station stalls. The train to Worcester was busy and I was lucky to get a seat. I spent most of the few hours drawing. By the time I got to Worcester Shrub Hill, it was night.
Stepping out of the station to my parents waiting car. That old refrain; only Worcester is real. I can't believe I lived here, that this city was once home. Three years. Seemed so long when I was here.
The car clips the outskirts of Worcester, and before we know it, we're in the lampless countryside, passing by a sign that points to Whitley Court (a dilapidated manor house that was the basis for the And Also The Trees song 'House of the Heart'. The road takes us through deep woods (but really, what wood doesn't look deep at night?). Then here. Cleobury Mortimer. Where my parents have lived since leaving Perranporth last year.
I stay up after my parents have gone to bed, find myself reading about the Canadian Royal Cross Memorial Hospital in Taplow. I had been thinking about that place on the train ride up. I never got to go there back when I was at Langley College. I can't remember why. Everyone else went. It was like a rite of passage for everybody on that course. They came back with x-rays and bottles of dried plasma. I had some of those x-rays for years. Creepy things that made me a bit superstitious. The site was set up by a group of 'urban explorers' who had had a number of odd experiences there. The oddest of all being the way that the hospital has haunted them ever since. Melancholy and nostalgia. I am slightly perturbed to find that one of the people who set up the website was one of the people I went to college with back then. I was thinking about him the other day, wondered what had happened to him.
The website's about 10 years old, so I can still continue wondering really. I peer at his photograph, but don't recognise his features.
2:51pm.
The distance.
It sounds like pylons and lost lanes, grey afternoons in childhood falling to sleep in cool and comforting rooms, walking the dog in tangled fields. The sound of a small stream in a wood when you are the only one there.
The sound of being up late at night in a room surrounded by dark countryside.
You don't get it down in Brighton.

Maudlinmorn

Stumbling towards the end of the year.
I walked to Portslade this morning, doubled back past the cemetery on the Old Shoreham Road. Used to sit in here over the unemployment summer of 2010, thinking about Em who I had just started seeing. I can't believe that was nearly four years ago now (well, three and a half as we speak). Life was different - better - then, though I have nothing to complain about now. Things just seemed full of more possibility. I didn't feel as old then (38) as I do now at 41.
42 next year!
Life passes us by in a blink. That old cliche. Never thought I'd be (still) struggling to work in a call centre at this age, with very little to show for my life apart from a lot of drawings. As I said - nothing to complain about, plenty to be happy about, but... I suppose there's some kind of perceptual shift that happens what happens now happens forever. Not true of course, but I have the fear that this is it. Working in low paid, unfulfilling jobs for the next 25 years, afraid to break out and do something for no good reason, then a state pension and a cold and lonely old age. Bedsit death, a sacrifice to the four bar gods of wall heater and electricity meter...
Oh lets forget this maudlin-ness, I'm not feeling very melancholy at all actually, I'm quite cheery this morning. Time to head out to meet a friend for coffee.
Bedsit deaths can wait for at least another 40 years.
Touch wood of course.

Wintry Nostalgia, Cold Hangover

Three nights of drinking, excellent nights each, and here I am, Monday evening, my week about to begin tomorrow, lost in a cold wintry nostalgia, and the feeling of someone having just left a metaphorical room. Oh, I'm missing something, but I don't know what - some gap, some absence, some lost thing or lost time...
At The Geekest Link pub quiz last night, out of eight teams, my team came seventh... oh, the shame.

Late Middle Aged Men Only

Had a few pints with Andy at the Neptune last night. There was some kind of folk musician playing some kind of blues influenced thing. Not my cup of tea but he was quite good, in an almost completely bland way. There is something grim and desperate about the Neptune. I'm never quite sure what it is. All the clientèle are men of a certain age (late middle age) and there is the air of resignation about them... what they are resigned to is beyond me. There is a desperate air of something... There are also always at least a couple of these late middle aged men who have had too much to drink and 'play up' in the kind of ways that toddlers do. Getting attention. There was one such character there last night who was clattering up and down 'in time' to the music and shouting out inane remarks to the performer. Another of these characters asked the jumper if 'he liked Stevie Wonder'. This puzzled the jumper who replied that he didn't. 'I thought you would' the other, equally drunk late middle aged man replied 'he was exuberant too'. As midnight passed by, the middle-aged barmaid began doing some kind of tango or waltz with some late middle aged men to a tune from the stereo - some kind of rock'n'roll number. My table kept being knocked. It was all rather claustrophobic.
I don't think I'll be drinking there again.

Advent Calendar Days

Time flips, folds in on itself, slips sideways.
Starts to feel like December, those advent calendar days, old, old Decembers... being 13, just moved to , London from Scotland. Addicted to computer games for my Spectrum, loving Crash! magazine, poring over 'A Pictorial History of Horror Movies', probably by Dennis Gifford, and starting to wonder if the house we had just moved into was haunted. Above my head the advent calendar hangs...
...and new Decembers too... being 40, and having finished work until after Christmas, and I'm wondering into town, and I've just got paid my bonus, and I go into Trafalgar Street Records, and I find 'Mystery Animals of the British Isles', and I've just got back from seeing my parents at Perranporth, and I didn't know it then, but that would be the last time I would see Perranporth (my parents were to move to the Midlands next year)...
We're lost here, on this infinitely looping mobius strip that never seems to quite loop back to itself again.
Only the past is real.

Face

It wears mask after mask after mask, and you remove mask after mask after mask, and beneath all the masks, finally, is the one face that you never want to see again.

Under the Trees

Walking back home from work last night, and the air is clear and I can see stars. It feels like snow - already! - though surely this must be a mistake, as it still feels like it should be late summer. But no - late summer is long gone - even autumn is passing away and despite the rapidly depleting leaves on the trees, this is the beginning of winter.
There's a full moon high up in the sky, far, far back, though it's light is lost amidst the street lights. I watch it through the branches of the trees as I walk down Temple Gardens. The trees are part of the grounds of some large house - or series of houses. This house - or series of houses - is not residential, though I am unsure as to their function. I imagine it to be some educational facility, some obscure private college. The trees tower over the path. A stone wall, the height of a man, stops access to this miniature wood, and the trees actually grow from head height - the top of the wall is actually the ground the trees grow from. It looks quite suspicious, these huge trees, growing from this - I'm not sure what you call it - kind of hillock in the middle of the city. Last night it struck me how alluring this wooded area was - all the more alluring as it is on private ground and cannot gain access to it (though I suppose it would not really be that hard).
I watched the moon through the branches. Wondered what was buried beneath the trees.
It really has begun to feel Christmassy now - adverts on the television, Christmas lights in town, and this blog approaching it's fourth anniversary, which means its outlasted any relationship I've had.
Well, Saturday morning, and it's cold and wintry but sunny again. Cup of tea to drink, then off to Hove sorting office to pick up a parcel that didn't get delivered yesterday.

Sunday

10:30am, Sunday morning. Costa Coffee in the North Laine.
I watch Sarah come in, stand by the table I am at and then leave. I see her walk into the studio. Has she really not seen me? I phone her, she comes back  in. She actually hadn't seen me. She suggests that she was looking out for my usual black and I was wearing a red shirt. I think some kind of dimensional irregularity is more likely.
After a lovely coffee with Sarah, I discover it is a lovely day. I wander down to the beach, and in the time-lapsed November heat, I sit on the pebbles for a few hours, working on a drawing. I try not to think of the rubbish A3 sketch book I have bought (paper too thin, the ink bleeds).
I meet up with Al, Claire and Graham at the Meeting Place cafe. Graham is down for the weekend for the Colour Out of Space festival. We walk up the Lewes Road - some exhibition in Phoenix Place, but it is closed. We look through the windows. Skeletal animals melded together - hands coming out of ribcages holding eggs, long alligators with wrong heads dressed rags. 'Looks like Dr Mengele has been at work' says Graham.
We go to the Basketmakers and talk about ghosts and serial killers, plane crash sites and childrens television shows.
After they head off to the festival, I head home. It seems to take me an age to get home. I have dinner and am exhausted, and fall asleep on my bed at about 10:30am, listening to a 53 minute drone track called 'Himmelhvaelv' by a musician (or perhaps group of musicians though I think this is unlikely) called Rumforskning.
That was such a quick weekend.

Remember only Fragments

My first full week at work, well 30 hours, done.
Fragments:
Waking up at 9:30am, lying about reading Donna Tartt's 'The Goldfinch'. Leaving for work at about midday. Coffee in town somewhere - usually the Bystander cafe - and working on a drawing of a woman whose dress may be made of branches. Slipping out of known Brighton into unknown Brighton - that semi-industrial era to the left of Trafalgar Street.
New England House, brooding and dreamy, a hospital-factory of a place. Creaky old lifts. Wide corridors, paint flaking in a kind ways. Call scripts, mini-briefs, charity chats, fundraiser stats. Standing with the smokers at breaktimes, still unused to early nightfalls. Mint Aeros, and waiting for 9:00pm. Saw goodbye to my fellow trainees. Head along the darkness by St Annes Well park. (Last night, a man tying up his shoelaces on the wall. Pass by, and over my music, hear him shouting at someone in the Friday night park 'watch your fucking language, bruv'. Walk on under spectral or lurid white lamps.
Baked potatoes and cheese. Repeats of Peep Show. Fall asleep by 1:00am.
Deep dreams.
Remember only fragments come 9:30am.

Condensation Time

This is the first morning there is significant condensation on the windowpanes of my room. Clear blue sky, bright sunlight. There is a chill, icy and pure, now in the air that belongs more to winter than hazy autumn. I noticed it yesterday when I went for a walk with Em round Three Cornered Copse.
It starts to feel like this time last year. I had a week off from work I remember. Sunny and pleasantly cold then too. I remember waiting for a book to arrive from Amazon. I remember even later in that year - toward the end of the month, when the cold turned darker, more sober, and summer began to seem a long time away.
My first full day on the phones today - well, six hours - I do not finish until 9:00pm. This will be, at least for the present, the immediate future, walking home in a darkness only a few hours from midnight. As I do not have to be up early (I start at 2:00pm) I imagine that I will not go to bed till deep in the small hours.

Saturday Night / Sunday Morning

'Industrial Romance, Doomed Lovers'
pen and ink on 7.5" x 10" paper
October - November 2013
There's more art to be found at my facebook page which is here.
A quiet Saturday night in did mean that I finished the picture I've been working on over the past week. I watched the Space 1999 episode 'War Games' whilst doing so, but ended up paying no attention to it; lots of explosions and vaguely cerebral, heavily psycho-drama atmosphere. It's surprisingly dark... but as I can't seem to watch any DVDs these days, after the episode had finished I turned it off and worked in silence instead. This unsettled my flatmate who popped his head around the door 'you're working in silence, not any music?'. We discussed downloading music from Amazon... which got me to downloaded a long 53 minute drone / ambient piece by an artist whose name sounds either Finnish or Russian. I put it on as I went to sleep; lots of dark, bubbling waters, like something lost in winter, deep underground. Woke up at about 1:00am, fully clothed on my mattress. Eventually sliding under the covers was heaven.
Awful dreams last night. I can't remember any of them, but all I know is that in the dreams I was deeply depressed, full of an unassailable despair and crisis. The emotion of these dreams followed me into waking. Lying there in the bright light of a November morning, sick with desolation. The feeling soon faded however, and by 9:30am (only an hour ago now) I got up, had a cup of tea and came on here, whilst listening to the album 'The Actual' by atmospheric prog-metal band Reading Zero.
Time for another cup of tea, and perhaps a few more chapters of Donna Tartt's excellent third novel 'The Goldfinch'.

Gloomy Saturday

Another Saturday night in. This is getting to be a regular thing.

Secret Industrial Country

I work now at New England House on the 7th floor. 

Sarah once had a studio in the building, and I remember buying a massive drawing board / easel that took four of us to carry back from here. January 2007. Snowy air. After-pints in the Evening Star. I never really used the board, sat cross-legged on the floor to draw instead.

The building is massive, and has the feel of a gently decaying factory; hospital-wide corridors and paint-flaking walls, creaky industrial lifts and a cafe on the 3rd floor. I peer from the windows into the centre of New England House; a courtyard surrounded by windows, looking back from rooms that seem to be used as store-rooms.

It is situated in an odd industrial part of Brighton town centre; down from the station, turn left into this shop-less slip of new buildings and Sainsburys, deserted and dreamy. This is a million miles from Brighton, a secret country, even if from the windows of the seventh floor I can see for miles back to all those places I've known for years.

Lost Things

Even as it becomes more real, it moves further away.
I have never seen
the distance looking so sharp.

A narrow season of narrow rooms,
condensation panes
strange hallways.

Pauses walking home.
These streets know absence.
To choose is to move

through cement
through concrete
through too many lost things.

Last day of the Unemployment Period

The last day of the unemployment period, no matter what happens in the new job, is here.
Last night's storm was ultimately disappointing, and this morning it seems to be a beautiful sunny, but slightly damp and breezy autumn day. I slept well, though had many dreams that I can't now remember.
The sky really is quite blue out there.
It seems both like yesterday and a lifetime ago that I left the old call centre. I remember that day - it was grey and breezy, and after I had left I bought some fish'n'chips and ate them at the beach whilst listening to one of the two 'Deaf Centre' albums I had recently downloaded. The next day I caught the train to Worcester, had a walk round old haunting grounds, then got picked up by my parents. The next day I was flying to Portland, Oregon for my cousin James' wedding.
The first couple of weeks after I came back were doused deep in summer - I would still get up early in the morning - go for a long walk and end up having a coffee at the beach. I didn't know what was going to happen in the future but it was too early to worry about it.
This state of affairs lasted until the middle of September until a Saturday where I helped Sarah set up some of her stuff for a Japanese exhibition in the morning, and in the evening went round to Genevieve and Kate's house for dinner. Between the two events I set up the Witch Factory facebook page for my artwork and began a long period of savage depression which I have not fully emerged from yet.
(fragments) - up all night reading threads on urban exploration websites / drawing in coffee shops both elated and uncomfortable / afternoon teas and crosswords with Em, meeting her at Sainsburys on Portland Road / Uxbridge town centre, even in the sun draped in wintry mystery / waking with anxiety in my gut that wouldn't leave the whole day
I wonder how I shall think of the past two months in years to come?

Thinking of Leaving Here

The factory still operates, though its production system is now in its afterlife. Machinery still operates - though there are fewer and fewer workers - and no-one is interested in tending to these machines that make nothing. Air and wind and grime, and lost corners, petrol smell and oily skin, and no skin.
Outside the factory, the air is empty, and I think of leaving here forever.

Inky Gaze

Alone in the house last night, I busy myself with a drawing.
The drawing is of a purposefully fictional face. This is a drawing of a woman who has never existed. It is a windy night. Sudden squalls of rain add to the air of foreboding as we all wait for the big storm to come - due today apparently.
The drawing begins to unnerve me. I can feel her large eyes looking up at me. I'm not sure whether her inky gaze is malevolent or imploring.  I began to imagine she possessed the baleful qualities of some kind evil fairy tale witch. The flat began to imperceptibly alter itself, becoming haunted. Banging doors, rattling cat-flap, wind like voices overheard at 3:00am.

Lonely Saturday Morning

With Em away for the weekend, and everyone else busy today, the prospect of a lonely Saturday rises up. A slight panic pops its head up somewhere; how did my regular social group get whittled down to so few people? Like most people, I have more acquaintances than friends. It seems that as I get older I have more and more acquaintances and fewer friends. What happens if Em moves away? People move on and get on with their lives. Life eats them up, leaves others oddly stranded. I wonder if this is how a lonely old age starts?
Growing older - even into middle age - is sometimes frightening.
Sat in my room, waiting for the storm that's said to come. I can hear some distant rumbling like the sea. The air feels damp and dark yellow. There is something subterranean about this day.
My last weekend before I start a new job on Wednesday; on the phones as a charity fundraiser, so it's goodbye to this unemployment period - for a bit anyway. I don't know how successful I'm going to be.
What shall I do now? Sleep for a bit? Watch television? Go for a walk into town? I've never really fancied town on a Saturday, and I'm not even in the middle of a drawing I can take to a coffee shop... I'll probably flick restlessly through the internet, flick through old comics and new books, flick these minutes away... wait for the melancholy to come, as it inevitably will.
It's only 11:18am as well.

The Sun will Set at 4:43pm

Morning - Bright October sun - clear and laced through with something fluid. Slightly hungover I wandered into town listening to Death In June's last two albums.
When the sun goes in, a chill comes down. Later, on the beach, I think of sleeping on the stones, but that that wind - that wind is a premonition of January. Those long stretched out weeks preceding when I will have my 42nd birthday.
I read online (once I would have read this in a newspaper) that the clocks go back this weekend.
The sun will set at 4:43pm.

Sea Predictions

Lets divine something from the sea.
Earlier, I linger over a coffee in the cafe on the edge of George Street. I continue working on the drawing of a stag standing in an impossible tangle of undergrowth. The cafe is noisy with Sunday afternoon people, the overspill of late shoppers from the supermarket, the charity shops, the newsagents.
The coffee does not help my hangover, and a sudden storm of rain puts me in mind of floods and launderettes and petrol stations submerged in a dream-undertow, the Old Shoreham Road, only accessible now by submarines and sea monsters.
The rain clears, and the sun comes out, and I leave the cafe to it's last hour before closing.
As I intimated, I wander down to the sea.
The seafront is less busy that it would be normally, though is by no means deserted. I stand on the edges of the waves, on the stones, the pebbles, watch the spindrift horses, the choppy un-rhythms of foam and pulsing tide. The sun - low in the sky - makes the waves cast autumnal shadows. Strange clairvoyance, unreadable predictions. A presentience of times that twist away from us. Somewhere impossible.
I would have waited till it had got dark, till the city lights behind me had flickered on, but the wind is up, and drowns out the silence I wish to dwell in.
I walk home, and already it is twilight.

This Room feels like Footsteps

2:00am, and there are miles and miles of dark roads between here and London; silent fields and locked meadow, the pylon-song in some rain I cannot hear here.
From old windows I used to watch lights flicker in the trees, a window of a house I never remembered to look for in day. Winding branches, blue sky of early mornings, and getting ready to travel home.
My voice in the night, a name tumbling out of the open window, rolling like dice in the slope of the streets for some river-deep season. I think of all those places I know in day, but would not dream of knowing at night. Not this late. Three Cornered Copse, Freezewood Covert, Perry Hill Woods.
Messages and signals.
This room feels like footsteps.

Calmed in Ickenham, Spooked in Uxbridge (Adventures into Nostalgic Twilight)

The tube pulled into Uxbridge Station at about 4:00pm - a little earlier than I had hoped, but better than getting there too late. I hoped to be able to time everything so that I would hit Woodstock Drive - where I lived from 1985 - 1993 - at twilight.
I had an hour or two in Uxbridge first - a nowhere town at the very end of the Metropolitan line. Places don't change that much I've discovered - a building may get knocked down here maybe, another one gets put up there perhaps.
Places from the past are a lot more consistent than people.
Well, nearly.
I went into W.H.Smiths where I used to work from 1990 - 1993, but because it has been refurbished, it felt completely different. I stood in the newspaper section, pretended I was still putting out the magazines from 23 years ago. I went back into the Pavilions shopping centre. Now this place never changes. The book stall in the middle is still here. I worked a couple of shifts here, but wasn't offered the job because I was ' having problems with the till'. That must have been back in 1989... I remember when Louise and Helen both worked here. Helen was going out with Edward, and with Craig and Simon, we would congregate here in Saturdays. I used to fancy Louise, but  never told her. The closest we would get to anything would be holding hands.
I rifled through rows of old 1980s paperbacks.
Slight echoes here.
I wandered into the new shopping centre, along the street to the Civic Centre then circled back again, via Uxbridge College, where I failed my art A-level over 1990 / 1991.
Back in the town centre I went for a coffee as Costa, sat looking out toward the tube station entrance.
I was thoroughly spooked.
I'm not sure why I was spooked, but there was something edgy and wrong about Uxbridge. I can't put my finger on what it was - it wasn't just being back in my own past (though that might have been part of it) it was an air... of something untrustworthy about the place, as if something bad was going to happen. I wanted to be out of there. I could feel an inexplicable panic building up.
Luckily my coffee was decaffeinated.
When that was finished I strolled slowly up to the big Sainsburys, got a sandwich and some apples. I munched on my sandwich at the entrance, looking out over the car park, thinking I used to live here and felt twilight begin to gather.
I walked up Belmont Road, passing by no 83 where I lived when I left home, from 1993 - 1994. A rented room that never saw sunlight on the ground floor. Saw the outside wall of that room. Just got back from Langley College, 21 years old, popped into Sainsburys for dinner, time for a joint and some artwork...
But I couldn't.
20 years ago is too long.

Uxbridge Common was just around the corner.
It was twilight proper when I got there.
And something began to happen.

Twilight out here in suburbia has something compelling about it - an out-of-place serenity, a deep incongruous mystery. Here we are in the suburbs of London, Metroland, a place famed for boredom and nothing, an interzone place as the writer Will Self called it, and I found there was something ancient and almost mystical about it.
I don't remember this feeling from when I lived in the area - eight and a half years is too long for a single emotion to cover everything - there were happy and sad times here, all lain over with a sense, at times, of isolation - my friends tended to live miles away from where I did. I had noticed this sense of serene mystery before, when I came back here two years ago, and also the first return I did, way back in the January of 2006.
Another interesting thing is that when I came here in November last year, that sense of serenity was missing. Perhaps this was because it had been daylight. All I found was a sense of unpleasant melancholy and loss, a geography of regret, a suburb of a city built on depression and sadness. It seems that the mystery and peace, the recompense of this place, is entwined only in the evenings and nights out here. When I walked up Woodstock Road, back over 2011, I thought that it seemed a very kind place. There was an implacable air of benevolence about this road where I lived when I was a teenager.

The above two photographs were taken at the top of Woodstock Drive.
I felt too self-conscious to take any photographs of my old house, so I passed by slowly instead, searching the blank windows for something, noting the willow tree in the garden was still living and voluminous (I could have sworn that it had died). I noticed that the back door light was on. Do I remember a back door light or has that been a recent addition? Oh what I would do to knock on the door, say to whoever's living there now that the house has haunted me for twenty years and more, and that I have frequent dreams of being back in the house at twilight or sunset, that the empty rooms are haunted by something that knows me...
Walking by the house, in the surreal twilight, felt like I was actually in one of those dreams. A nostalgia for a place that doesn't exist, but is somehow real. I couldn't ever imagine living here.
I walked up Swakeleys Road, passed by the Swakeleys Park, Swakeleys Manor, a trinity of Swakeleys. I glance down the overgrown path that led to the rope-swing that was there over the summer of 1986. I brush fingers over all those still familiar landmarks from walks back home from school. That tree, that crooked street lamp, that front garden. A sense of euphoria crept into the darkness, a sense of rightness. There is something beautiful about a suburban night; houses lost and comfortable in their front gardens, the rumours of vast back gardens hidden behind trees, a lane leading to a tennis club (floodlights above the chimneys), avenues curving off into safe darkness. Suburbia - or this suburbia at least - has so much more potential for mystery and secrecy than Brighton does.
I got to Hillingdon tube station, waited for the tube back to London and to home and the present day. Behind me was an unlit footpath, muddy and lost, and I couldn't work out where it came from or where it was going to.

Night Sighs

Because I didn't get up until midday yesterday, I find it difficult to get to sleep last night. I eventually do fall asleep, or at least fall into a light doze. At some point I realize I am awake. There is a sudden sound in the darkness of the flat, making the silence around it even more profound. I ignore it, but then it comes again. It is like a very quick sigh - the sound, perhaps, of a chimney expelling short puffs of steam. The sound comes regularly. I cannot quite work out what it is. I settle on the theory that it must be Andy in his room. Some kind of snoring noise. There are two closed doors between us though, and the sound seems closer than that, too regular for a human sleep-sigh, but there is undeniably something very unnerving about the sound. I think of turning on the light to dispel my nerves, but fall asleep instead, to the piston-like sigh of that undetermined night-noise.

Coffee Shop

Slightly hungover, I don't leave the house till 3:00pm. It is raining, a dreamy autumnal gloom, though not heavy enough to be irritating. There is something almost protective and comforting about the light drizzle.
I go to George Street first to pick up Fortean Times annual 'mag-book' (as they call it) of real-life paranormal tales called 'It Happened To Me'. On volume 6 now. Another autumnal ritual - I've been getting them since they first came out, back in the autumn of 2008 when I was still living in the hallowed walls of 35 Wilbury Crescent. Afterwards I went to Tescos. As I stepped in, a voice came over the tannoy, warning us that we all had ten minutes to spare before the store closed. A great intensity over the shoppers, and I rushed around; tins of peas, baked potatoes, slices of Leerdammer light cheese...
I considered going home when I got out but instead walked nearly into town and went into the Starbucks down Western Road. It was crowded with foreign students; Polish women talking quickly, the halting tones of an Italian woman out on a first date. A woman with short hair, looking Eastern European in a pleasing Soviet-Block era way, sat opposite me and played with her phone. She looked nostalgic for snow and ice and monochrome days.
After flicking through 'It Happened To Me volume 6' I took out my sketchbook and spent a relatively productive hour continuing the present drawing, called 'Under Surveillance') of a man in the pose of Gaughin's female figure in 'Nevermore', while  behind him, a dark woodland broods (based on Cluny Woods in Forres).
The last of my coffee was drunk cold.
I walked home slowly through the rainy early twilight. If it hadn't been raining I might have walked for longer.

Lonely Autumnal Day

After Em had popped over for a cup of tea, I took a walk to Tescos. I had hoped to go for a longer walk but it was unpleasant weather. Aside from Em I saw no-one else all day.
It rained all day too, so I elected to stay in, drawing, drifting from room to room. An afternoon nap. Rewatching 'My Tattoo Addiction' for the third time. Andy slept all day, then went out in the evening. The day crept on till midnight, and it still rained, and the wind started rattling all the doors, and I had to stuff CD cases under the frames which only kind of worked.

Upstairs in the Comic Shop

Dave's Comics is one of my favourite shops. I rarely go into the new comics section (a room upstairs) as I like old comics. Sometimes a new release comes out, or a reprint of old comics, or just out of interest, and I descend into this tiny room of superheroes and that glossy smell of modern comics...
Much as I love Dave;s Comics, the upstairs room is a nightmare of too many comics in a too small space. Things seem to be fine-tuned regularly, and comics seem to move about every now and again. I know where the DC and Marvel comics are, but the indie comics seem to shift their positioning in the indie comics section... This has meant that I missed out on the last issue of Haunted Horror and couldn't find yesterday's issue of Afterlife with Archie. Of course, I could just ask someone who works there, who are always unfailingly helpful, but that would just be too easy wouldn't it?

October is the Sky

I left the house at about 5:00pm yesterday to meet Sarah and Ingrid for dinner at the Basketmakers. I had worked on a drawing all day so this was the first time I left the house.
The sky was October - it summed up everything about this month, It was a deep blue, and that blue ribbed with clouds. The sun was low in the sky, a sleepy gold that made shadows look like being eight years old and looking forward to Hallowe'en. It was still too warm (I had to take my jacket off within five minutes of leaving) but there was a coolness - somewhere - in the air.

The Lost Book

Sometime in the past - I think it was early 2007 - I bought a book I never got around to reading. I couldn't even tell you what it was about (I had read a little and the back cover blurb) but seemed to be some kind of dream-like narrative, something about steps and a secret street. In my mind, I associate the book with those first few warm days of spring, where things open up after long grey winters.
I'm not sure what happened to the book - lost in a move, or perhaps given to a charity shop. I barely remembered the book. Lately I begun thinking about the book again. Because I could remember so little of it, the book began to achieve a mythic resonance in my mind. Was this a lost classic? I began to suspect that - as I had so little information on the book - that I had dreamt it up, and was never real book at all. I didn't know the author, the title. All I remembered was it had a kind of grey cover.
I came across the book in Waterstones yesterday on there sales shelf - the book exists and is called 'Days Between Stations' and is by Steve Erickson, published in 1985 first.
I wonder whether I'll get around to reading it this time.

Back Spaces

The backs of places yield strange angles, occult spaces that may be conducive to childhood myths and daydreams; alleyways, footbridges, stairs, a courtyard that, when glimpsed, may seems somehow Mediterranean. Even Brighton and Hove (most of these shots were taken in Hove), that city of surfaces and angles and no-trees, have these portals to far more interesting countries. Countries within countries. Practical wasteground, people passing through and never stay... Places half-sinister and half-comforting...
It felt like Sunday yesterday, I'm not sure why. Was one of those days beautiful and melancholy, because it surely must be one of the last few hot days of the year (though it looks fairly sunny out there this morning).
I passed through a number of places I would pass by regularly - on my way to work or home - those liminal spaces we never really notice at the time.
There was something of sleep about them, some soporific air, heavy as narcotic or waking weighed down in the depths of winter and falling slowly down into sleep again.

Bad Latin and Winning the Pub Quiz

My team won the Geekest Link last night. I was actually helpful for once. These are the questions I helped with:
In what TV programme would you find the Cybernauts? (The Avengers)
How many K9s have there been? (4)
In the picture-round successfully identified David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth
Who carried Dr Theopolis? (I identified the programme as Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, which prompted Colin to give the answer 'Twiki).
My share of the winnings was £5:00. I was very pleased.

The toilet in the Caroline of Brunswick is full of goth / metal graffiti, of a rather adolescent flavour. Somebody had written in latin (they had provided a helpful translation underneath) 'let the banners of Hades ride forth'. This was written in felt pen in a 'scary' medieval font. Someone heard me complaining about the 'bad latin' and informed me that it wasn't bad Latin, but the writer had 'got the verbs the wrong way round'.
For some reason I didn't believe that he knew anything about Latin either.

House of Hooks and Nails

Yesterday was a day of sleep, or a state akin to sleep.
It wasn't that I was hungover, but I just felt incapable of doing anything. I did finish one drawing, and finally started another. Aside from that the day was spent in a twilight zone. I didn't even leave the house. Exhaustion-euphoria, a day-dream drift.
The house is full of nails. They were left there by the previous tenants. Stuck in every wall, used to hang pictures on. They must have had an awful lot of pictures. We've lived in this flat for over two years now, and I still discover new nails.
There is a hook on the hallway wall I have only recently noticed. I can't see what it could be used for - the gate at the top of the stairs swings open the other way. Andy said that he has only noticed the hook over the last couple of weeks as well.
It seems the house is spontaneously generating these things. I wonder if we'll find any more,

Another Bad Taxi Driver

I don't remember the taxi ride home from the pub. I vaguely remember Andy and me talking - trying to talk - to the taxi driver. Not getting anywhere. Down New Church Road. Hmm, Looks a bit unfamiliar. The meter read £10 which is usually how much it costs to get back. We said to drop us where we are... which was ten minutes away from where we lived. This is the second time a Brighton taxi driver was unable to take us home. At least this one didn't cost us £26 like the one before...

Damp Churchyard

I signed on at the job-centre this morning. The woman I saw looked both like a penguin and someone who has worked in the job centre since the 1980s, despite the fact that she couldn't be older than 25.
Afterwards (not even 9:20am!) I thought that I might go to the churchyard down New Church Road and do some drawing. Over summer it is wonderfully over grown, and like some relic from a Victorian M.R.James-esque ghost story.
I walked around the church. There was a damp, unpleasant air about it all. No benches, and hanging from the trees, monstrous crab-like spiders (shades of M.R.James again... The Ash Tree?). A group of two old men and women on the other side looked deep in discussion.
I headed down the beach instead, thinking to get a coffee from Mrs Bumbles and draw on the stones.
The sky soon clouded up. Thick banks of grey like oncoming depression. Cold drops. Maybe it would clear up? Heavier and heavier. I cut back up onto New Church Road, tried to shelter under trees. Watched the cars pass by, the muted light of October and came home.

Unreal Street

I went for a short walk (hour and a half) last night listening to Tor Lundvall's album 'Turning' Leaves were spat down from trees, and the darkness had that deep, sinewy quality to it that denotes we are moving ever deeper into autumn. There was about the air though, an incredibly strong feeling of early spring, those first few warm nights. Breathe in and taste that electricity of old potentials...

Toward the end of my walk I ended up taking a street down to the seafront I had never taken before. This street was amazing - all the houses were large and detached (three of four storeys) and were all painted white. No colours anywhere. There were no, or very little in the way of front gardens. It all gave it a very dream-like feel, as if I were walking through a strange district of a Mediterranean country. The white against the night-blue of the sky was quite startling.

Flat Light

A flat light has softened - hidden - all angles. Down at the beach, a voracious sleepiness came over me. The pebbles shifted and warped. I imagined I could see a ghost ship on the slight white-out of the waves. The cold wind, forerunner of winter, pricked me to wakefulness.
I came home and though I would sleep, but I lay on my mattress and was unable to. I wished to be back at the sea again, breathing in that clammy air, watching the unreal sea, that lugubrious horizon. I longed for Brighton to have a lighthouse but we do not.
My sleep was full of dreams of cold corridors and abandoned hospitals last night. They lay about me like the petals of a flower. I thought I would remember the dreams when I woke, but apart from that nonsensical image I remembered nothing.

Six Minutes and Deep in October

Welcome to October.
Six minutes in now.
Definitely not summer. September isn't really summer, though it can be a bit ambiguous. This September certainly so. October can in no way be summer. A season after the one in which I left work.
October has always been my favourite month, and October is a huge moon, milky white bone hanging over daylight fields. The coolness of those afternoons promising much.
Whistling with mysteries.
We're deep here. Deep, deep, deep.

11:11pm

Try to look for reasons why people think Mansfield Hospital is so scary, just come across people who have 'heard all the ghost stories'. People seem genuinely unnerved by the place though. I can't imagine getting into an abandoned hospital. I'm afraid my courage would fail me.

I remember drunk urban explorations with Joe, a house under construction, a bakery. the Sainsburys building site near New England House. We tried to get the security guard at the Brighton Pavilion to tell us ghost stories one night. 'Not that old thing!' he moaned (and quite rightly too).

Old rooms in old places. I'm in the spook-out zone again. My room is too messy for me to relax here.and I've got the overhead light on, gives everything the look of my room at Woodstock Drive in Ickenham. Well, my old room. I've not slept a night in there for twenty years, but I still dream of it though.

Damn, time is moving too quickly for me.

41, 41, 41.

It's October tomorrow.

Year ending, and soon, we're in the middle of this decade.

The Attics of Hospitals Walking down Motorways

I read about Mansfield Hospital, long since closed. Almost all urban explorers who have been in the place speak of its less than pleasant atmosphere. None really explain why. The photographs haunt those minutes as I am falling to sleep. Long, cold corridors, and rooms full of movement when there should be nothing.
I hear footsteps somewhere. No-one must ever be able to map this place.
I imagine these places grow at night; stairways and hallways and morgues, operating theatre, attic and...
Oh, imagine the attics of hospitals, of that one hospital that all urban explorers fear.
I hear Mansfield Hospital, half a country away, hear me.
Hear footsteps walking down the motorways as it sends someone dressed as a corridor into possible dreams.

Blue-Dark Gods

Summers. I remember summers. On the edge of a field, watching twilight come through red wine and cigarettes. Swallowing up the trees, and dawn would always be days away. At the edge of the fire, away from the coals, a coolness.
Trees would be like gods at night.

40 Watt Bulb Disasters

Twilight on the beach. I watch the joggers, watch the water wash over stones. Read 'The English Ghost' by Peter Ackroyd. Remember when I first got back from the states I would be reading 'Noctuary' by Thomas Ligotti. Summer bright stones, summer bright tides. Still too clammy but summer feels long gone now.
October tomorrow, that old month, and the breaking down of all mechanisms this month and a half continues. Dials pop, clogs grind to a halt, all rooms seem stuck in some halfway place. 40 watt bulb disaster in the nooks and crannies of this year.
Shall I ask for a shift at the power station, out amongst the cyclops light (some industrial, lighthouse) and all those empty galleys, and beyond that, outside, those quarries that can't be quarries because we're at the docks.
These are machine like gods, like crows. A scarecrow technology.
The beach is dark and I am home, and I still try to hear the waves on the stones.

C.V Hell

I turn my attentions to writing my CV. As I cannot access my old one, I must start from scratch. I have problems with the word processor (Abiword, my Microsoft Word Starter never worked properly). I become frustrated due to word processor problems, increasing disheartened at the amateurish of the finished product and not being at all convinced that I can find a way to print it or send it on to potential employers.
I'm not even sure that I've saved it correctly...

Voivod - Nothingface (Fragments of Reactions)

I remember 'Nothingface', Voivod's fifth album.
I bought it on cassette tape from Our Price in Uxbridge, autumn fading into winter 1989.
Cold days.
Remember playing it for the first time, but can't remember what I felt, apart from being surprised that the Pink Floyd cover 'Astronomy Domine' sounded very Voivod-ish, and that the opening part of 'Missing Sequences' was very exciting.
The album got into my spine.
Something polar about it all, crisp and clean, like a shiny new hospital from another dimension. Emptied out of people, made pure by the snow. I had got it into my head that the album was a concept album, and portrayed the Voivod creature's journey into his own mind.
'Missing Sequences' made me think of people waltzing in the ruins of a factory or some kind of reactor. 'Pre-Ignition' rumbled along with a sense of growing disaster while 'Into my Hypercube' successfully managed to combine the sounds of a Morricone-esque spaghetti western soundtrack with a suburban haunted house.
An unnerving album. It sounds haunted, even now, 25 years after it was released.

Imagine Being Here at Night

I wrote this last year. I have no idea why I decided to write everything in the 3rd person, nor why I decided to fictionalise all names. I also changed round some details of the murder that had happened. I'm superstitious that way. It was all about a creepy trip to Wild Park woods in Moulscoomb that Joe and me made in the autumn of 2006.

The more he thought of his 35th autumn, the less it seemed that autumn had begun on that hot afternoon on the beach. He remembered - suddenly- (or perhaps not, this suddenly was stretched over a number of days) something that had occurred in October of that year. This day had the taste of something blue and wrong, a too big moon, wrongly reflecting, something bitter in the water. A light poison perhaps, too thin to poison anyone. It hadn't been very much really, nothing at all, not even an event, hardly worth remembering.
He remembered James' mouth, sober and thin lipped, and the dark cast of his eyes, remembered him rolling a cigarette as they stood at the base of the woods near the edge of town. 'There's not much of a fort there - not really a fort at all - just a wall really'. The last point been a lie too. The 'iron age fort' that the maps of North Lane Station had promised was only a few stones on top of a hill in a large circle. He had been before and was inevitably disappointed.
He couldn't remember why he had wanted James to come so much to the woods that day. It had been a Saturday in October - one of those nondescript days where the sun seemed cool and the air refreshing. Perhaps it had even been grey. Town had bored them, and the usual ritual of cafes and bookshops and charity shops had soon paled. 'It's not far' (another lie) 'just up Abbotsbury Road'.
When he had first moved to North Lane Station, he had lived in one of the dismal Sunday estates on the edge of town, right at the end of Abbotsbury Road. Liminal roads of houses, rumours of bored teenage gangs looking for trouble that he never seemed to see. The days before night-buses. Endless post-pub walks down the long parallels of Abbotsbury Road. Sometimes in the small hours, he thought to himself that he seemed to have been walking forever.
It had taken them about an hour to reach the base of the woods - the entrance just behind some kind of small industrial estate full of squat buildings without name. They first had to ascend a small slope to reach the trees - dewy grass, and the occasional empty beer of can (this made him nervous for some reason - a place for drunks and not for families - empty cartons of orange juice might have made him feel better) and all this amid sinisterly hidden piles of stinking dog shit. They looked up at the woods, at the trees above them. They weren't impressive trees - didn't really get impressive trees down here on the south coast - but in their thick and tangled nature there was something a little oppressive about them. As they moved up through the wood - and the trees were too close together - they tasted the darkness of the air and the dank breaths taken in of a place that people rarely came to.
James knew about the murder, though he can't remember if he had told him that day, or previously. A child found dead here in the 1980s (the late summer of 1986 to be precise). A man arrested whose name he had forgotten, charged and probably still alive in some prison somewhere. 1986. He had been 14 at the time. The same age. They stopped for a while, smoked roll-ups and wrote poems, sat on the edge of a fallen trunk whose underside was rich with the forbidding white of mushrooms. He couldn't remember any of his poem, but remembered a line from James; why would anyone want to come here? The place was unnerving, but was this place itself or the knowledge of what had happened? '
This is real corner-of-the-eye stuff' James had said, 'imagine being here at night'.
Their creepy glee had become laced through with something else.
Imagine being here at night.
They moved up further into the wood. The ground levelled out slightly. There were trees felled here, and over the stumps someone had lain a track of planks, a waist high ramshackle rollercoaster, made from bits of roughly nailed wood. Cobbled fences. Stolen bonfire fuel probably going back years of autumn. It was quite impressive. They had discussed who had built this - this makeshift course for riding BMX bikes over. It displayed a certain level of ingenuity, but this deep in the woods (they were only ten minutes up from the road) it was a little unnerving.
Why would anyone want to come here?
Disquiet turned to a small panic when they heard voices - and a flash of teenager-bright shirt through the trees. The people who had built the tracks no doubt, or people who were using them. Through silent agreement both him and James moved silently and quickly away. Leave this place behind. He presumed they came eventually to the disappointing stones of the fort, but he didn't remember that at all

For the Love of Old Hospitals

I long for an abandoned hospital to explore.
I'm not sure I'd have the courage to do any kind of urban exploration though - I'm far too easily freaked out. I pore through other peoples photographs though - plaster strewn stares, abandoned chairs, old beds are particularly creepy...
Imagine sleeping in such a place!
A bed up on a ward on the third or fourth floor, listening to the night-sounds of the hospital; a door banging in a breeze, pipes clanging, floorboards settling at night...
It wouldn't be ghost stories that would unnerve me (at least not in an unpleasant way) but less welcome visitors; security guards, tramps, psychos... With that kind of fear, I'd never be able to enjoy it.
Endless corridors, rooms full of rusting equipment whose purpose is long lost, always locked rooms somewhere, attics, attics in hospitals...
I long for these places, to stay until twilight, make my way out when the street lamps come on in a cooling autumn day outside.

Night Falls Quickly

My shoelaces look like snakes. The poisonous patterns of caterpillars.
I'm up in Lewes by the river. I remember being here in summer. I'm with Al and Claire again. It's claggy and humid and cooler. The long grass looks like it might hide twilight dog shit. Muddy field edge. Watch the cows across the other side of the water. There are people blackberry picking. I want to tell them they might disappear but I do not.
On the train to Lewes we are doing impressions of someone we used to know. The train pulls into Moulscoomb station. The man we are doing impressions of is at the station getting on with his girlfriend. We see him at Lewes. He is going for a walk in the country too. He tells us of another friend we all fell out with years ago is getting married next week in Devon.
There is no sun in Lewes.
We get back to Brighton and go for a drink at the Evening Star.
When we leave I take a slow walk back along the promenade. Watch the still sea, and by the time I get back here it is full dark.
I am surprised by how quickly night falls.

Walking along Western Road last Night

Walking back from the Evening Star last night, down Western Road. Was about midnight, maybe a bit later.
Couple of guys. Looked young. Looked like they had rich parents. One of them walks out in front of me, about to say something. I cut him off, shaking my head; 'nah' and walk on.
I don't see them again, but my reaction seems to puzzle them. I hear one of them repeat 'nah', and then say 'hair cut?' and the other say 'big issue?'.
Trying to sound hard but they end up sounding sad and puzzled.

Saturday Silence

I watch an old DVD of the television series 'The IT Crowd' last night. This lifts my spirits a little. I sleep deeply, and remember very little in the way of dreams (a subterranean chamber, wondering whether or not to watch a Dr Who DVD on the huge flat screen). I hear Andy leave for work as I lay in bed - it  must be later than I think - but I get up and discover that it is only 11:00am.
Saturday silence.
Em is away for the weekend. I have not spoken to anyone but her since Wednesday afternoon when I saw Andy briefly - well, not counting people in shops (ordering endless instant coffees to takeaway). It was strange last night, being outside from midday until it was dark, There is something portentous and beautiful about watching the night fall outside. I was down by the beach so this was unleavened by street light. Just watched the sea darken, the sky turn red, and finally the lamps on the promenade came on behind me.
It shall soon turn colder, and I will no longer be able to do that.
October next week.
(and October is a moon in a blue-dark sky above a wild fluster of branches).
I can hear nothing - not even the coffee shop across the passage.
There may well have been a disaster that has wiped out the world.
Or it might just be a quiet Saturday.

Wandering Downwards

I try to access my CV, saved to my e-mail, but am unable to because I do not have Microsoft Office. I leave the house instead - it is midday - and wonder down to the beach. I drink a can of Diet Coke and look at the waves. It is somehow too warm and cold at the same time.
I meet Em at Hove library, and we wander back down the beach. Tea at Mrs Bumbles. Sit back on the stones, and feel the sick anxiety I cannot shake begin to grow, again. Em leaves for work and I wander into town. Waterstones, Trafalgar Street Records, a couple of bookshops down the North Laine. I don't buy anything and end up at the beach again.
I get a cup of tea and sit on the stones. Watch the sea again. I try and do some drawing, but feel a little bit nauseous. I continue reading Phil Rickman's The Secret of Pan, and after I have finished my coffee begin to fall into a fitful sleep. The jagged shards of dreams just beginning.
After a while I wander up the promenade, end up buying another coffee at the petrol station by the swimming pool. This is a couple of hours since I first hit the beach. I find a bench on the seafront and watch it get dark. A bloated beautiful sun like some pregnant horror comic icon hanging over the distant power station. The Shoreham industrial zone seems swathed in mystery. When the sun has gone, I continue walking, the red lights on the chimney, the street lights of even further distant Worthing. I walk slowly. I am in no hurry to get anywhere.

Waiting for Em

I meet Em at Hove train station last night. She comes back at about 10:20am. I glance into the Station pub as I pass by. I had never though of it as a particularly unpleasant pub, but Andy had been in there on Saturday night, where a drunk man had offered to 'take him outside'. I find a copy of The Metro and read this while leant against the closed newsagent kiosk. People pass by from other trains. A woman sits down on a bench on the other side of the ticket barriers. Em's train comes on time, and I walk her home. I then walk back home and am asleep by midnight.
My sleep is full of vivid dreams.

4:27pm

I got up at about 2:00pm this afternoon. I didn't go to sleep till 6:00am. Lay there reading threads on urban exploration forums about the creepiest things that had happened to people while in abandoned buildings. I got into the spook-out zone, so even the dawn against the curtains began to creep me out. I started thinking about ideas for a novel (which I never intend to write of course) where an old homeless guy spends years squatting in an abandoned hospital. The hospital is haunted (or in his head, he's an alcoholic) and the book would be about the effect of living in such a place would have on him, how he would become to be infected by such a toxic environment.
I got up after Andy had left for work. I've flicked through graphic novels (The Marvel ones that will eventually form a set of 60, that I've been getting for a year and a half now). I've drank one cup of tea, and listened to the sound of the workshops below.
I deactivated my facebook account yesterday. I'm not sure why, but it seemed like some kind of good idea. I suppose I was wasting too much time on it, being maudlin and looking at old photographs.
I might go for a walk down the beach or something. I went down the beach yesterday, but felt too hot and panicky and came back. Summer is beginning to seem a long time ago now, even though it doesn't really feel like autumn. I can't imagine doing any artwork. I feel like I'm just waiting around until I get the motivation and courage (or desperation) to get a job (some menial, petrol station type of thing, or maybe some call centre, at least for a few months). Even when I handed in my notice at the old call centre, I had a feeling that this would happen... this lethargy. I told everyone that I was going to 'concentrate on my art', but now I have the time to concentrate on my art, I feel little in the way of motivation for it. With facebook now out of the way, I don't have an audience for it (I would post photographs of any pieces up there).
Maybe it's good to do nothing for a while.
Funny. A year ago I was in Kinloss with Emily - though by now we were probably back in Forres, about to catch the train back to Inverness. I was happier then, or if not happier, at least less disquieted.
There's no weather out there today.
I can see a splash, a smudge, of blue sky.

3:03am

It could be any time, but surely the morning is a lie. There is silence here, interrupted only by footsteps on the landing. I do not feel tired. I feel other 3:00am. I remember the cafe at Tescos 10 hours ago. I feel the autumn stretching out to winter. I want it to remain 3:00am for hours.

1:35am (Black Bridge and Broken Years)

The beach was drowned in fog. A tropical heat. I began to feel sick and headed up into town to escape the gloom, and buy too much chocolate.
I got home about 5:00pm, and nauseous lay down on my mattress to try and sleep. Em ran and I joined her at Tescos for a cup of tea. Early darkness and rain that didn't break the tension.
She went to work and I went for a long walk - down Cromwell Road, and up onto Wilbury Crescent (angles of my old room, I was happy living here). I pass by the petrol station - closed as there was a tanker delivery - and cut down Sackville Road, under the Black Bridge (my name for the railway that cuts over the road). Called in at Sainsburys - ignored our next door neighbour - came home.
Spent all evening lying on the mattress. Try to spend all night awake so I can sleep the day.
God, I can see why people drink now. This is a broken year.

Panic and Despair (All Hail the God of Anxieties and Phobia!)

Job centre went okay. Hot day. Endless sun. Feverish summer echoes. Walked to town afterwards to hand in the documents at the housing benefit office. Turns out that my contract is an 'old' contract. What they want is a letter from the landlord saying how much rent I pay, when it is due, if I am in arrears etc. As I would rather shoot myself in the head than ask my landlord for this (all hail the God of Anxieties and Phobia!) I am not getting housing benefit. For the first time since leaving my job, a real sense of panic and despair is beginning to coil. I really think I might have fucked things up leaving that job that was slowly killing me.

Job Centre Dread

That familiar pointless job centre dread. Why do these places inculcate in me such a sense of despair? I have an interview there this afternoon. It's not for the money (I left my job voluntarily so as far as I know I won't get any money) but to make my housing benefit application easier. Despite this, an air of anxiety hangs over the whole thing, as if I might give the wrong answers and get myself into some unspecified form of trouble.

Overripe Summer

The papers predict a tropical heatwave , only about 20' but the humidity will make it feel 10' hotter.
I always imagine jungles to be steamy and shadowy, overgrown tangles of alarming insects and toxic plants.
Imagine if the tropical heatwave has this effect on Brighton.
Autumn has slipped away again, and it feels now like an old, old overripe summer.

Coil

We're past the autumnal equinox now, beginning that long slope down into winter. It is still too hot to be autumn, though the heat is of a tired, clammy variety, far from the bright optimism of the heatwave back in July. Autumn lies coiled like a spring. I can almost hear the tension - a low, humming, electricity substation songs, a pylon crackle.
I keep my curtains firmly closed when I sleep now (over summer, I left a gap in the curtains so I could wake with the dawn). I sleep deeply and do not remember my dreams as well as I used to. When I wake I can feel the fluid air of autumn.
Childhood landscapes, lost days when I was 12.

Facing the Sea

Sat on the pebbles and the silent, still sea is a mystery. Boats hover in the light sea mist, white apocalypse eating up horizons. Waiting for something, a seagull shiver, watching the beach. In the distance to my right the power station chimney rises like some monarch. I think of the labyrinth there, the port-machines, displaced quarry claws, scrubby grass fenced off and desolately attractive.

The air is clammy; too hot and like a sleep that might claim you for days.

Tropical Saturday Night

A night that looks like autumn, but feels like some memory of a tropical jungle. By the time I get to the Evening Star I am dripping with sweat. It seems to take an age to get served. After a pint there we head to the Black Lion. Lancs' leaving do. He is going travelling around the world in December and does not intend to come back; 'return tickets are not part of the plan'. There is a DJ tent set up out the back. The beat overlays everything. I never go to places like this any more. Echoes of ten years ago. Everyone looks shiny and sharp. On the way out I accidentally nudge an empty glass from the table that shatters all over the floor. No-one notices. Keep walking. Don't look back.
We end up back at the Star. It's still too hot. The manager tells us how he sometimes dreams of the twins that used to live there, siamese twins  Daisy and Violet Hilton who appeared in notorious 1932 horror film Freaks. Doctor Occult joins us at some point. He orders a pint of cider and has a glass of ice 'on the side'. He is wearing a beautiful scarf, silk with some kind of pattern influenced by some late pre-Raphaelite furniture designer. He worries that the scarf is 'too ostentatious'. Claire reminds him that he has been known to come out in a purple suit including a very purple trilby hat.
When I get home I go straight to sleep.
I am woken with a start sometime in the night by a crash of books from One of the towers of books has fallen over.
I go back to sleep.

Secret Toilets in Hove

There is a secret public toilet opposite Hove Town Hall. It is located in the basement of a building whose purpose is uncertain, but I suspect may be connected to the coucil, and the aforementioned town hall. To enter the toilets one must walk down a sloping corridor, and enter into a labyrinthine room that holds many doors, to many toilets and toilet facilities. The frosted glass of the windows is scratched by the bushy-leaves growing outside, a cool shadowy atmosphere that inexplicably smells of childhood (to be precise, of Burnside, where I lived in 1981 / 1982). No-one is ever in these toilets, hence they are secret and somehow slightly sinister. There are rumours, among those who know of these toilets, that they are closed during the week, but no-one knows for sure.

Saturday Morning, a Quarter Way through September

Autumnal white skies are very different from the desolate depression of springtime white skies. White skies in September (or October) deepen the air, the flat-light makes something unreal about the streets; breathe in ghost-stories, churchyard days and brooding alley...
I think it's the stillness, the feeling that things are waiting for something else.
The last autumn in Ickenham, 1992.
I was signing on, working part-time at W.H.Smiths. Days were spent doing art, or writing, or recording music, walking the dogs during the evening. Because I had all that time to myself, I had that leisure to watch that autumn change from summer and deepen slowly to winter.
A dog barks somewhere, the washing machine turns in the kitchen, someone moves down in the Mews.
Can't hear anything else.
No, wait! A heavy parcel has just thumped through the letter box. Got to go. It must be the Best American Comics volume 9 I ordered last week.
Got to go!

Washing Line

Washing on a line at night.
Dancing like all the summery breezes you have ever known.
You could sleep there, in the darkness beyond
the washing line.
Under the trees in the wood.

Same old Chords, Still can't Sing

...i'll meet you there across the fields,
where the light grows dim
upon our churchyard skin.

(lyrics from a song I've been trying to write for 14 years, still no nearer to finishing)

Nine Lines on Sunny Autumn Day

My back to the window.
A sunny day.
I wish I could remember what autumn this reminds me of
(a bridge at night over a dark stream,
lights of a village,
the taste of damp nightfall)
The air is altered though.
A coolness
makes me think of playgrounds.

The Luxury of 1:30am

I'm getting to know this time of night so well. I love the quiet here, the silence that my typing makes, the way that, if I lay me head back whilst lying reading on my bed, there is almost the breath of some other time, some almost memory.
I lay on bed earlier, and watched the closed curtains, and easily imagined that beyond them was not the back gardens of Hove, but the night-black countryside of somewhere in Worcestershire in December, Whitbourne or Stone perhaps. I could imagine lampless lanes, and the dead silhouettes of sleeping houses, breathing the milky silver of stars. Without street lamps, being outside is almost an exercise in a benevolent cosmic panic.
I don't have a job (and after five weeks of not having a job, am still not bored) and don't have to get up early in the morning. The small hours are addictive though. It becomes an effort to go to sleep. I could stay awake and watch 4:00am come, 5:00am... and I am afraid of that because it might be that I might watch dawn come, and there is nothing more terrifying than watching daybreak merely because you've been awake all night.
It's only just 1:30am though.
I might stay awake an hour or two longer.
Oh, the luxury of it all...

White Rain

White rain.
A very specific kind of rain. Daydreamy and headachy and nostalgic all at once. Maths at school staring out of the window at the 2:00pm gloom, watching the fields in November, the clicky-clacky woods.
Light spilling from kitchen windows onto pavements. Coming home from college. Slick pavements, and the hallways of each house I pass a conduit no-one knows. No-one lingers long in hallways.
Afternoons slip into evening. Night holds itself here, knows it's time is coming. Winter is it's dominion.
Summer - the past - is seeming a long time away now.

Strange Meeting

Yesterday evening.
I was coming back home from the beach where I had spent a happy hour doodling in my notebook. Walking up one of the roads from the seafront that led me to New Church Road, I noticed a man stood in front of one of the front gardens. His attitude suggested he was a resident of of the house behind him. I was listening to my headphones, and stopped when I realised he wanted my attention. He was drinking from a can of beer, but didn't seem drunk though. I'd estimate his age to be in his mid-40s. As soon as I saw him, I had the feeling that he was the kind of person to be wary of. He looked like a heroin user, a street drinker, a mugger, a thief. Like everyone you ever want to avoid.
'What music you listening to mate?'
I wasn't expecting this.
'A band called Reigns' I replied.
'What are they, a rock band?'
Reigns aren't an easy band to describe at the best of times. The album I was listening to 'House on the Causeway' is a concept album about a phantasmal house appearing on a mysterious promontory. There are no names for the members of the band, merely 'operative a' and 'operative b'. Their last album, The Widow Blades, was about an old woman who disappeared in a snow storm.
I didn't explain this to him, and agreed that they were a 'rock band'.
He then told me the bands he liked; 'U2, Madonna, Tracey Chapman, Kate Bush...'
I had no idea where this was leading, but it was obvious he wanted something from me now.
'Yeah, I like Kate Bush too...'
I began to wonder where this was all leading, and what I could do to get out of this situation. I was beginning to feel very uncomfortable.
'Do you have any of her albums?'
'Yeah, a few...'
'Tell you what, if I gave you some computer discs could you burn some for me..?'
Here was my get-out clause.
'Sorry mate, my computer's fucked'.
'Oh...'
He looked disappointed, not that he wasn't getting any Kate Bush albums, but that his ruse (whatever it was for) wasn't working.
'Anyway' I continued 'Nice talking to you mate'.
I headed off up the street, eminently puzzled by the whole experience. Maybe he just wanted some Kate Bush albums... Maybe he was going to invite me into his house 'just to get the discs' and then murder me.
I suppose I'll never know. Just as well really.

1:13am

I went down the sea and watched the waves, drifted off to a coffee I bought from Cafe Nero. Cool sobriety in September air. Watched people at the waterside. Drew in my notebook.
Walked home into the sun, and the sun was bright and hid the power station chimney. The power station chimney  reminds me of childhood summers.
I bought two bars of chocolate at Sainsburys - but this was later. I thought I would have a nap this evening, but I didn't.

Heartbreak, end of 1996

I remember the dark hollows of that heartbreak, the empty skies of those following days, white with rain and not-rain, and summers gone. Long afternoons faded away. I smoked cigarettes, and knew that beauty is experienced harshly, at it's deepest when it slips away. Rainwater down drains.
There was a pylon that in the darkness looked like a ferris wheel, and when I nearly forgot heartbreak, that ferris wheel would call it back. There was the bridge that I would walk over only to attend evening lectures where I talked to no-one.
December was like something gone wrong. Great icicles outside the window, epic fits of insomnia - 4:00am was a familiar friend, and I would have to set the alarm to wake up any time before mid-afternoon. I thought I was happy then, but I was not, and now I realise I was and long for it back.

Nostalgia for Autumnal Cigarettes

Mild illness has turned into a racking cough, but at least the debilitating headache of the last few days is gone, and I was able to sleep quite well last night.
It rained almost all day yesterday, which suited my mood, a poisonous desolate melancholy, and I got soaked walking into town and back. Whilst in W.H.Smith flicking through 2000ad, I ran into someone who I used to work with, who filled me in on all the latest people leaving the company. It seems that things haven't improved there at all.
Back to being sunny today - at least what I see through the gap in the curtains. I should go out there and make the most of it before the winter comes, which is always soon enough. Autumn never lasts long enough.
I feel nostalgic for cigarettes this morning, which doesn't mean I want them. There were certain autumnal cigarettes I long for. These were cigarettes smoked on certain, well, autumnal days, bright and at the beginning of the season. Silk-cut fug filling lungs, taste of mornings and odd romantic optimism, first breath of cold in the air.
No cigarettes for me though, autumnal or otherwise.
I am listening to Warfare's just downloaded 'Metal Anarchy' album. The one thing I can't remember though is whether or not I used to have this on vinyl.
No idea at all.
Still, I remember the Warfare album, a compilation 'The New Age of Total Warfare', I ordered from Amazon last year. The first time I listened to it was making my way home after a works do (I think it was the Values Awards at the Hilton Metropole on the seafront). December night - I can't remember if it was cold, but the air had that crispy feel of coming up to Christmas - and I was a bit drunk but pleased with how the night had gone.
Feels like a long time ago now.

00:35am

Because I read a comic called 'signs of spring' now I am thinking about spring. I start to look forward to spring even though it is barely autumn, and autumn is my favourite season.

10:04pm

It feels like the sea has gone mad and drowned the town, and I move about the streets as if everything is normal, only emptier.

See Nothing

I write these notes to document this sinking.
They are encrypted in metaphors that
only mean something to myself
because
I want no-one else to understand what I
am documenting.
An anti-drama, an infinite regression, and
if this was a landscape, I imagine
it would be a mire.
Black mud
and days like headaches. Poetry hides
mundane self obsession
but doesn't make me proud.
I didn't sleep well last night, and I dreamt
of a petrol station that was dark,
where I once worked, and I
was working again.
The aisles were empty, and the till
was hidden in a corner where I could

see nothing.

Nine Lines in the Small Hours

2:21am.
There has only ever been this time,
but the night is passing too quickly

and I do not wish to see the morning.
I can imagine nothing
not even sleep

except perhaps waking,
and I would like to sleep
for days.

Old Ghosts III

Inside a vast cathedral.
The space between and inside walls.
Gods recognise gods.

I recognise the reorganisation
of illusions
to make this some other air.

Breathe again 2001
or 2006, say, and know
you breathe these older than you were.

Only time has gone somewhere.
You're still here.

Old Ghosts II

Shadows and old ghosts.
Corrupted twilight.
Sleeping in a city of murdered men.
Seagulls.
Sundays.
5'o'clock Roads.
Old days are gone.

Still Ill

Still ill.
Headache.
Didn't sleep well last night.
Constant images of a blonde, tattooed woman.
Feels like an old sunny autumn out there.

Mildly Ill (11:15pm)

Mildly ill.
Cold and hot at the same time.
Headache.
Slight nausea.
Slight cough.
Day-dreaminess.
Nostalgia.

Sunday Afternoon 1:20pm

I say goodbye to my friends stood outside the door to the flat. Long corridors with surprisingly few doors. What used to be dumb waiters set into the walls. 'These used to be the sevants quarters'.
Outside there has been a deepening of the air again, and a darkening of the darkness; it is autumn. It is still not quite cool enough to be classed as truly autumnal though. However, there is that subterranean feel about the night, those unseen stars (I never think about the stars in summer) and somewhere, I swear, are the ghosts of rain.
I quickly fall into sleep when I get back home. I have a mild illness - not really a cold, a slight sore throat, a slight temperature, a slight nausea. I wake up shivering in the middle of the night, go to the toilet, then get back into bed. Pulling the covers over myself is heaven. I would not mind having a period of mild, unserious illness (a week with a common cold say). I may actually be able to relax for a little. I am constantly on edge these days, and think that any time I do relax, I should be doing something else (looking for a job, preparing my CV, doing something (that old line) with my artwork. With a cold though; the luxuries of Nurofen and DVDs during the day, slipping into afternoon sleep, and baths like heaven, and a trip to the local shopto get some coke becomes some great and glorious quest.
I got up at around midday.
Grey skies outside. Feels like autumn. The light that falls into the room is soft, almost crepuscilar, though to describe light as 'crepuscular' is, of course, an impossibility. Andy is out at work, and the flat is silent, and I am only slightly disturbed by the sound of a door opening and closing somewhere (perhaps the wind, perhaps next door).
I cannot imagine a voice, I cannot imagine speaking.
It is almost peaceful here.

Witch Factory

A facebook page for my artwork can be found here.
Welcome to the Witch Factory.

Old Ghosts Rise

Old ghosts rise that I thought had long been lain.
The skies are white, the colour of nothing.
I have a mild headache.
This at least may be laid to rest by paracetemol.

I walked slowly walk back from town.
My footsteps felt broken.

Langley College, 20 Years Ago Today

Twenty years ago today.

I can't remember what the weather was like, though remember it being grey and warm (much like now). I caught the yellow 458 bus from Uxbridge Station to Langley. I remember vague fragments of the journey. There was a girl on the bus who was really loud and annoying. I remember one of the other passengers saying that 'she was like this every morning!' Soon enough I was at my destination, Langley College, where I was to spend the next year (well nine months really) doing a foundation course in art and design.

I was 21, and the three years since I had left school had not exactly been successful. I had taken my art A-level in a year at Uxbridge College (and failed), then went to a college in Harrow to do my first foundation course, but left a couple of months before I finished it. I had spent the year previous to starting Langley College being unemployed and working part-time at W.H.Smiths. 

I remember asking someone where the room I needed to be was. So delighted was I that somebody knew the answer. So delighted was I that somebody knew the answer that I didn't listen to the directions at all. I found the room I needed, somewhere up on the first or second floor. It was a long room where and my fellow students all sat around a long rectangle of tables.

I remember one girl saying that she was only 16, and it transpired that she was in the wrong room, and should have been elsewhere - probably on some two year BTEC course elsewhere. I remember the people around me. I remember Owen saying that his favourite band was Voivod. I remember going down the park at lunchtime and buying cans of beer. I remember Claude, whom I had sat next to, expressing some kind of concern about this, as if we were on the slippery slope to some kind of street drinking delinquency.

I can't say for sure what else happened on that day (Was it the first day that everybody showed their summer projects, which I hadn't done because I had never received the brief? Was it the first day that we all drew still-life (still-lives?) from objects bought from home?). I have vague memories of waiting for the bus home, being slightly uncomfortable for some reason - was it raining? Was the post uncomfortable? I remember watching the shops across the road which I would come to know so well over the next three quarters if a year ("10 Silk Cut please!").

I have no memories of the journey home, nor of that evening.

After I had finished Langley College, I went to Southampton to study illustration for two years. Because of the people I met at Southampton, I ended up (after doing an English degree at Worcester for three years afterwards) moving to Brighton where I am now. In it's own way, my year at Langley College, had a very profound effect on my future, and there are certainly still things from an artistic point of view, that I still remember and use now (Negative space! Intensity of mark making!).

I'd love to go back two decades and do the whole thing again.

Walk

I left the house at 8:00 this morning and walked along the beach to the Marina. Sharpness in the air. Autumn always feels like coming home. The sun soon came out though, made it feel (almost) like summer again. Footsteps on the stones. Watch people throwing balls to their dogs. Walk on, walk on.
The Marina is always a less than inspiring place. Overshadowed by the cliffs, and the grubby architecture, it feels like a Wolverhampton shopping centre in the 1970s. I bought canvas and paints and headed back along the beach again.
Met Em for a cup of tea, then headed home. Another cup of tea then fell asleep on me bed almost immediately. 6:45pm, and it's twilight. This day - these days - have fled by. It is a month since I left work.
Might go out into the twilight.
Walk on, walk on.
Walk by.
Walk away.

Consolatory Skies

12:44pm.

Sat in my room. There is a light rain outside. I am hoping it will end because I want to go for a walk into town. The light is soft and reminds me of childhood in Scotland - or certain childhood days anyway - of sleepy headaches and old comic daydreams. In the rain there is a silence, and in this room, shadows of remembered attics stay in the corners. No. Not remembered attics - but attics that may be dreamt of. The shadows in this room are the shadows of attics with windows, and, apart from Wilbury Crescent, I have known no other attics with windows. I did know a cellar with a window once - my first house in Worcester, and a cellar without a window - my second house in Worcester. The latter memory has a nightmare-ish tinge to it. I had been living in the house for a few months before we found out there was a cellar, a great black room, empty and waiting for murders.

I use too much cross-hatching in my drawings. I need to minimise. I might get more comic strips done. 

Rain at Dawn

Around dawn, I got up to go to the toilet. The toilet window was open, and I noticed it was raining hard. I couldn't hear it from my room - my windows shut. I went back to my room, and in the blue-nowhere light of dawn I went back to sleep and remembered no dreams.

Quarter past Midnight

The sea offered recompense again. Autumn in the foamy-waves, in the breeze. October is coming, winter is coming. Time moves fast, but it seems forever since I got back from America. Town was full of panic and sadness, and the future looking too blank and shadowy, full of old refrains I didn't think I'd hear again.
Came home, slept for an hour or two, watched television.
Try to stay awake as long as I can so I can sleep the day.
This wasn't quite what I had in mind when I left work, nearly a month ago now.

Curtain Gap

Drank the last of the vodka from the bottle I won at the work raffle a few months ago. Fell asleep fully clothed on my bed. Kept being awoken by the wind banging doors somewhere in the house. I kept trying to get up to investigate but fell back to sleep again. Now I am awake and the gap in the curtains tells me that it might be summer or autumn out there. The sun makes me think of summer, the blue in the sky is autumnal.

An Autumn Lost Somewhere

I walked with Em to Brighton Station, and then I went down the beach. I sat on the stones, drinking a cup of coffee from the Meeting Place. Foamy waves. Deep blue sky. A few wispy-white clouds. After the rain of earlier, it had cleared up, the sun came out and became warmer. It didn't -doesn't- feel like summer though.
A cold breeze blew from the sea. I wrapped my jacket around me. That sea looks autumnal I thought. I'm not sure what it was, something about the light striking the spindrift, the colour of that light.
Shadows on the waves, autumn on the breeze.
I've longed thought that there has been a lost autumn - an autumn that should have happened, but, for whatever reason, didn't. I'm not sure what should have happened in this lost autumn, something romantic and mysterious no doubt. Certain autumns have come close - 1993 and 1997 to name a couple - perhaps even as late as 2002.
I feel the absence of this lost autumn in my life though, a place somewhere where something should have happened but never did.
I watched the sea, read Thomas Ligotti's short story The Medusa and consoled myself with the fantasy that this lost autumn might be looking for me.
When it got too uncomfortable (shadows growing too long) to stay on the beach, I walked home along the boulevard, and despite the bright sun (dropping quickly) that blinded me, I could not be fooled into thinking it was a summer sun any more.

Splinter

3:06pm.
Sun out again, and it feels more like summer, albeit a less feverish one than yesterday. Watch the shadow of the chimney fall across the roof of the houses below them, beyond the chimney, the church, some vast factory claiming the sky. There is the sound of the workshops; saws, drills, planks of wood moving about.

Rain Day

The first morning that feels like autumn.
The rain started at some point during the night, and is still raining now. Between the gap in my curtains the sky is a heavy grey, the kind of grey that does not look transient. The light that falls through the gap is wet and soft and old, and makes me think of empty streets and alleyways and abandoned parks.
My bedside lamp is still on (the curtains aren't fully open), and my room seems full of corners, themselves full of shadows, albeit of a consolatory rather than a threatening variety.