Thursday 31 January 2013

Maybe I'll Have Noodles

In the kitchen with Andy, waiting for vegetables to cook, talking about Dead Can Dance's last album. Off to the pub after dinner. Mid-weeker down the Evening Star. Too many buses for the day, one back from work, one back to the pub, one back home again.
Must remember to get my washing out when I return. Must remember to dry it for tomorrow.
Andy confronts his dinner with a puzzled stance.
My vegetables boil.
I still haven't decided what to have with them yet. I would have had ham but I need to save that for my sandwiches tomorrow.
Maybe I'll have noodles.

Wednesday 30 January 2013

Bin on Fire

This was on Monday.
It was lunchtime, and I was walking back to work. I passed a bin that had some smoke coming out from it. I paused to look, expecting to see nothing much. The inside of the bin was on fire. Someone had obviously thrown a cigarette in that had lit some papers. I walked on, and was going to ignore it. I had, however, been reading the headlines in a newspaper window of the Brazil club fire where 200+ people had died. I had crossed road the road by this time, but with thoughts of fiery infernos, I crossed back over the road to the bin again - still on fire. What do people do when a bin is on fire? Do they call for a fire engine? Other people were walking past and were glancing at the bin, but did not seem unduly concerned.
I went in the charity shop the bin is outside of. They'll know what to do I thought they're a charity shop. Why I thought that charity shop workers would have some kind of important information on what to do in the case of fiery bins I'm not quite sure. I queued up patiently. 'I don't know if you know' I began 'but there's a bin on fire outside. I don't know if you want to ring someone'. The woman looked at me like I was mad 'Who do you think we should call?' she asked me. I shrugged and went back to work. The bin was still on fire.

Tuesday 29 January 2013

Night-Poplars

Kind night, with your warms winds and intrusions, winding lanes and the sea, I can't taste the salt and can't remember to imagine I can.
Footsteps in the hallway.
The quiet silence of the lamp.
(there are silences that are not quiet, remember)
Words occur to me today; night-poplars.
A blur of memories, shadowy-raggedness above a hedge,
or hedges, around my grandparents house.
Dark and troubled skies.
Remembering rain.
Church spire Sunday afternoons.
Wish I could sleep there now.

Two Dreams

I dreamt the world had ended and the afterlife was real. To access the afterlife I walked through a wall, and was confronted by a stairwell going up and down. The walls of the down stairwell were covered with graffitti, and obviously led to hell. I took the upstairs steps. I came across one room which had Edgar Allan Poe stopped here written on it. I opened the door and a young slightly punky blonde woman came out. She informed me that she was now staying here. The room nehind her resembled a shower. I eventually found some kinf of canteen where people from work were sitting around in chairs, looking quite relaxes. I picked up a couple of pens I found on the floor and placed them on a table. Heaven seemed to resembled a slightly raggedy halls of residence. I suggested to everyone that we might consider a trip to hell the next day.

On a bus. A number of teenagers. One is giving me trouble, but I see in his noteabook a drawing of flowers. I say these are quite good, and we have a discussion about art. I say to him 'you are at the beginning of your life....'. He says that, by me saying that, I make myself sound really old. I tell him that I am nearly 41. I am living in my parents house which resembles no houses they have lived in - except slightly Bretforton. The teenagers come round there, which slightly unnerves me. I can imagine them being trouble. People from work turn up and go round next door. There is some kind of party there for the daughter of the house. There is cake and crows. I am not sure how the crows are connected to the birthday but they are. I am afraid my friends will be rowdy and cause trouble. I am not enjoying this dream.

Monday 28 January 2013

Rime

Wind, rain.
Watching the street lamps shiver from the fourth floor window at work.
Watching the foamy sea. God, I don't trust that water.
Dark.
Caught the bus home.
Sat in the alcove of The Ancient Mariner.
Two drawn out pints, and a reluctance to leave.
Walking back nearly reminded me of something.
Can't remember what.

Sunday 27 January 2013

Problems with Shadows

Another dream of Woodstock Drive last night. I can 't remember much about it though. I know that I had returned there and was allowed access to the house. No-one else was living there.
It goes without saying that the house, in the dream, was haunted.
Woodstock Drive, or the house we lived in on that road, was haunted in real life too, whatever that means... even if it was only an over active imagination, though lots of people seemed to have an overactive imagination in that house.
The thing that stays with me most about that house was the quality of it's shadows. There was something thick and deep about them. They would gather and swell in corners, cold and grey things that would stretch out across the landings and the hallway, the dining room and bedroom cupboard. There was a permanent conspiracy of them next to the cupboard under the stairs where the telephone table was.
The shadows - at least in memory - seemed to grow deeper over the years. A thickening of wet gray night as adolescence darkened into adulthood until I left the house when I was 21. Those shadows seemed at their strongest on gloomy afternoons, drifty-dreamy things that would taste, if shadows could have taste of anything, of lost streets in suburbia, drizzly days off school, disquieted by mild illness, and watching vague fractions of sunset over the roofs of silent houses.
Since I left there - 20 years ago this March - the shadows have only ever deepened, only now they do so in these recurring dreams I have of returning there.
I remember passing by the house a couple of years ago - November 2011 - and I noticed that Woodstock Drive was a dark road. It was night when I returned - well, just after nightfall, and after a trip into London record and comic shopping, I caught the metropolitan underground line back to Ickenham. The actual night itself seemed deeper, a darkness that could almost be felt. I thought that perhaps this was due to the street lights being spaced too far apart. When I got to our old house, I noticed all the curtains were open and all the lights were on - in every room - as if whoever was living there was having their own problems with shadows.

Saturday 26 January 2013

Atari Force and a Death Metal Twilight

After a late night last night, going to bed at 3:00am, and no, nothing remotely spooky when I turned the light out and went to bed - which makes the earlier presence-on-the -edge-of-sleep even stranger, even if it is all just imagination. When I got up, I had porridge and tidied my room, and after I had finished, sat on my bed and read the last of the Secret Wars graphic novel. Well, part one of anyway. The graphic novel is a collection of the mini-series that came out way back thirty years ago. It got me thinking about other comics I had then. I remember an issue I had of one comic called Atari Force - a science fiction / brand tie in, that I was obscurely fond of, though couldn't remember much about it.
Met Em at 3:00pm, and went for a coffee down George Street.
A bright day, though cold, one of those other January days you get away from the wet snow and cold rain. We called in at the 'Oxfam Down Blatchington Road' (as it must always be referred to, never just 'Oxfam'. Oxfam had a box of old comics in, well, comics from the early eighties, including the very issue of Atari Force (no. 4) I had been thinking about only an hour before.
The coincidence pleased me.
We went for a coffee at Costa Coffee down George Street. This did not please me so much. The whole place had convened for itself all the ingredients of a caffeine hell; noisy machines, claustrophobic interior and floods of squealing, screaming squalling infants. I've never really got the hang of children, let alone children that seemed to embody all the attributes of a panic attack and the exciteability of a school playground on the last break before a summer holiday.
Back here in the peace and quiet of home, in a gentle twilight listening to the calming sounds of various brutal death metal bands.

1:11am

The wind's up tonight.
Can hear it through the rain - splash-noise against the stones of the Mews, rattling up the cat-flap, makes it sound like there's someone trying to get into the house.
Spent most of the evening snoozing on the sofa, watching and half-dreaming through the entire second season of The Office. Odd thing happening as I was on the verge of sleep, a sudden certainty of someone being in the room with me. I could feel her (and it felt like a her) fingers brush against my forehead, could feel her breath in my ear, her calling my name... and then waking with a start and realizing I was alone in the flat - Andy's gone up to Middlesbrough for his sister's engagement party.
All just the effect of the rattling cat flap, the wind, the rain, and a half sleep snooze through the television droning into dreams. Still unnerved though.
Really did feel like there was someone in the room with me.
Got the television on now in the well-lit living room, but when I turn the television off, turn off the lights and lie there alone in the dark... Well, how will it feel then.
I suppose we'll find out.
I suppose I'll find out.
Really does feel like I'm not alone in here tonight.

Friday 25 January 2013

3:00am Noise

Woke up at 3:00am by something. Couldn't tell what it was at first. Seemed to be some shimmery light at the curtains, some strange sound I couldn't place. Groggy shift to the toilet. Open window there. Louder noise. Sudden panic, still couldn't work out what it was. Rhythmical and industrial. Pulsing factory shift. Like a helicopter but not. Had sudden 3:00am inexplicable fear it was a tsunami. Looked out the toilet window. No tsunami. No helicopter either.
Went back to bed. Never found out what that noise was.

Thursday 24 January 2013

CEX Western Road Scoreboard 2013 Update 1

I bought The Good The Bad and the Ugly the other at CEX, and today bought the Doctor Who Deadly Assassin DVD, which means that CEX have upped their 'being able to find the DVDs ratio' to three out of five times, which means that in 2013, they only have lost the discs 40% of the time, hooray!

Dream of my Grandparents House Burning

 I was with my parents at my grandparents house in Stone. The interior of the house was different to the one in waking life - larger, and with more exposed brickwork. I was sat in some kind of living room area - it was night, or at least there were no windows. Dull yellow light that was strangely harsh. There were a large number of people in the living room, including my parents. I was talking to my parents about all our old dogs, and became convinced there were some dogs I had forgotten. This proved to be correct - though there was trouble remembering the names, and it seemed that I knew the dog under a different name - 'Bongo'. My parents informed me that Bongo, though old, was still alive, but said he spent most of his time sleeping, and that he was never a dog that very much liked company.
Suddenly there was some commotion. Through an interior window that seemed to look out to some darkened hallway, there was flame - my grandparents house was on fire! Flames licked the window frame (which really resembled a large rectangular hole in the wall). There was little concern at first - certainly no haste - and even I was only slightly troubled by the hungry flames.
The flames grew and grew - this was an emergency now. We needed to leave. I found myself upstairs. There were crowds of people in the house. There was a great creaking sound from the ceiling. This caused much panic and consternation. 'It's the timbers' someone yelled 'we've got to get out now!'. Everyone rushed outside. Everyone began strolling down the front driveway to gather outside a local shop. This bears no resemblance to the real - life village of Stone, and in fact more resembled Bretforton where my parents lived from 1993 - 1997. As I walked down the driveway I noticed someone walking toward the house, a regular down the Evening Star (I don't know him in waking life - I have no idea why he was in the dream). He seemed to be visiting my grandparents house, but hadn't yet seen the fire. He's in for shock, I thought, and watched his face for signs of reaction, but there were none, when when I was sur ehe could see the blazing ruins.
There is a hotel at the bottom of the drive. There is a goth-y looking woman saying there is no room for everyone to stay - there are too many of affected by the fire. I start to wonder if anyone has been killed by the fire, including the forgotten dog Bongo. Though I am not certain, I think that Bongo is alright.

Wednesday 23 January 2013

Strawberryade

In the summer of 2007, between walking out of my job at the petrol station and finding a job at Telegen, I had a week 'looking for work'. I didn't really look for work, but meant most of my time worrying, playing Manic Miner (an old Spectrum computer game) and reading Victorian ghost stories in various parks around Brighton and Hove.
One day, in one of the newsagents down Western Road, I came across a new strawberry flavour of fizzy soft drink Fanta. I have always liked strawberry flavoured drinks, so naturally bought a can, and then went to sit in Palmeira Square park to read ghost stories. The ring pull of the can was of the old fashioned sort, the type that was actually pulled off, leaving a tear shaped hole in the lid of the can to drink through. I hadn't seen one of these ring pulls for years, since childhood, and thought that everyone had stopped using them. 
It was the loveliest drink ever, a veritable revelation of fizzy soft drink-ness.
I went back a day or two later to buy more strawberry Fanta, but they were gone. Perhaps I had the wrong shop? I checked all the shops, and I never found the strawberry flavour Fanta ever again. I have often wondered if it was some kind of summery hallucination that came to occupy my mind when I was spending too much time sitting in park reading obscure ghost stories and worrying about finding work.

Tuesday 22 January 2013

Strange Darkness

Snow turns to rain, then snows again. A great sea hangs over everything. When I walk back at night, the people I pass by turn into shadows whose movements are indistinct. Spend the hours avoiding pools of water by the roadside, and revel in the unremembering of sun, and of other light than this; produced in factories collapsing under the weight of their own twilight.
Sleep is heavy and dreamless, and in the mornings when the alarm wakes me, and it should be getting light, the night is still in full dominion of us all. Swing out of bed, and all movements are slow and laboured and each morning light witnessed is estranged with touches of the bizzare and nostalgic. Is this memory is this dream?
We gather by the windows at work, and someone notices that the darkness out there is different. People postulate a powercut, or offer that the street lamps may not be working. I think it may be the fact that the lights in the hotel next to the call centre are all off.
None of this is true, and all the lights are working, but each light trying to shine is ineffectual, dimmed and darkened in the air that is the breath of this season.
I run into Sarah in the rain on the way home. She has an umbrella and we shelter under there for a while.

Monday 21 January 2013

Slightly Shivery

Shivery with a mild cold - well, some mild form of illness anyway. Very mild, barely there... I only know it's there because I know I am not well... if that makes sense. 
The light goes deep with a mild illness, the two lamps in my room cast an old light, yellowed like the pages of attic-books. I'm listening to The Tors of Dartmoor - an album I only got through the post today, but feels like I listened to it years ago.
Snow gone now just about. When I left work, the pavements were damp with rainy glitter, but I don't remember it raining.
My bed is looking tempting. Just gone 8:00pm and I might just creep into bed...

Sunday 20 January 2013

Snowy Sunday

Went out for a walk with Em through the snow to Benfield Valley Park. Crunch of boots on the white, a nostalgic sound, mixed with the noise of cooing pigeons. Never noticed that in previous snowfalls.
White sky and no sign of the sun, muted behind all those clouds - and still snowing out there now. Got back just as twiligth had started, and I looked back along the road, and noticed the sky above Portland Road had that violet tinge of portentousness that snowy twilights always have.
I have a slightly sore throat, and my internal organs feel a little too warm - in contrast to my skin which feels a little too warm. My mind feels like it may lapse into a daydream I would find it hard to get out of.
I may have a cold coming, so time to eat dinner and drift in front of bad TV.

Saturday 19 January 2013

The Existential Concerns of Four Pint Hangovers

Last night.
Four pints between the Prestonville and the Evening Star. I catch a taxi back (£10 exactly - Andy caught a taxi later on, and this was also £10 exactly). I get in and go straight to sleep, as it is my Saturday shift at work.
I wake sometime in the small hours when it is still dark. I feel somewhat ill and wonder if I am about to throw up. I go to the toilet. I really do not want to throw up. I rub water on myself. Why do we do these silly things when we are trying not to throw up? My body is very uncomfortable.
I go back to my room and open the window. Cold snowy air. I think if I leave my curtains open, the sight of the night will make me feel better.
I do not throw up.
I go back to sleep.

My four hours at work are fortunately quiet, and though I feel somewhat hungover, I am able to begin a drawing of Lovecraft's elder god Cthulhu I am quite pleased with. I go straight home after work, and fall asleep on the sofa watching Come Dine With Me. I wake up and drink cup of tea after cup of tea, the mild physical nausea of the morning has passed into the hangover phase of existential concern and nostalgic haunting. I watch a documentary on a DVD I bought last week about the making of the Doctor Who story Frontios. This begins to unsettle me as the actors start talking about the deaths and breakdown associated with the production. Outside the white skies begin to fade slowly to twilight. The documentary makes me think of Forres, and when I first watched the story, in early 1984. Snowy then too I imagine. Drained-out pre-adolescent days, and fast approaching my last year in Scotland. Last year of childhood. The air tastes the same now as it does then. I lie down for a while and watch the Doctor Who story Day of the Daleks. I used to have this on VHS tape. I begin to dread Monday already. I download Death in June's Peaceful Snow album. Perhaps this will make the hangover better, even though I am oddly enjoying it too.
There is a coldness about the flat. Well, apart from the living room, which is cosy and warm, but I really must turn off the television.
I wonder if it snowing again?

Friday 18 January 2013

A Sea for Drowning Gods in

Watching the snow from the call centre window. A few flurries in the morning quickly ramping up to blizzardy gusts. Oh the sea, the sea is wild and deadly. Polar tides, arctic water. A sea for drowning gods in, and the sky is the grey of a childhood-forever, an always without horizon or end.
Catch the bus back with Genevieve. Watch the snow outside the window. Bright lamp streets brighter with the snow, that strange white-light. Step off the bus, and yes, the taste of snow, brings me back always to some unspecified past.
Open my window to the labyrinth of roofs and gardens, changed under the ghost-white. A sobriety out there, and I taste the air, that sharp cold, and I will soon be out in it again. bus-ride to the Prestonville, for evening ales and that walk home through that air that may have witnessed the death of gods.

Thursday 17 January 2013

A Note for Richard T Montague

Oh Richard T Montague. I didn't mind you coming up the stairs at first because you seemed like a competent train guard. I knew you had to check the tickets, but I didn't mind, because I was on the front seat of the upstairs carriage of the train. Sunny day and a wide empty carriage. You checked my tickets but then asked me to help sort out the seats. This I tried to do - as a favour because you seemed alone - and I couldn't put the seats back again. I'm sure it was in no way connected to this, but the upstairs carriage of the train became larger, and resembled my Nan's bathroom when she lived down Wells Road. I managed to remove more seats, and was unable to put them back again. I was very worried, but then I suddenly realised; this was not my job, and I could not possibly get into any kind of trouble. In fact, I was sure that you, Richard T Montague would probably not even remember it was me who ripped up the seats and couldn't put them back again - even though it was you who asked me to help. 
At this juncture I, of course, woke up.

Wednesday 16 January 2013

Midsummer Paths that led Nowhere

Too far from Christmas and the New Year, too far from spring time, or even the end of winter.
We are nowhere.
I find myself thinking about midsummer paths, which refer neither to an actual route or any kind of physical passage. Midsummer itself is inappropriate, as these paths refers to a specific time of last May. A heatwave week where I read John Burnside's Summer of Drowning on the rooftop terrace at work on the fifth floor, where Em and myself took a long Sunday walk along the Thames, and where, before I met Em, I walked across the railway bridge over the Old Shoreham Road. Looking down those rust coloured tracks, and the embankments thick and lustrous and disordered with green. These were the midsummer paths and I don't know why, and they promised to lead somewhere, but didn't and haunted me instead.
Followed me into rainy June, and I lost them by the disillusioned July.
Adrift here on this nowhere time, the midsummer paths seem as near as anywhere - or anytime - else.
I suppose it is cold, but January 16th feels as unreal as a dream or a memory, remembered in some far flung future time.

Tuesday 15 January 2013

CEX Western Road Scoreboard 2013

CEX down Western Road is one of my favourite shops. They are a chain of secondhand stores dealing in DVDs, computer games and phones. I have no interest in phones or computer games, but am very interested in DVDs. CEX usually have something I want, and usually for a very good price, but can they ever find their DVDs? Of course fucking not. I exaggerate of course, but as Em said 'you can understand them not finding DVDs occasionally, but it seems to happen all the time'. I couldn't help but agree with her, but surely they can't be that bad..? I have decided to keep track over 2013 of how many purchases I make (or try to make) in CEX and see just how often DVDs are missing / unable to be found.
So, in 2013 I have made three purchasing trips to CEX. The first one was fine DVD found no problem. (The Dr Who story Nightmare of Eden). On Sunday the CEX curse struck again, and they were unable to find another Doctor Who story (Deadly Assassin). Oh well, I thought, one out of two wasn't bad... After work today, I popped into CEX (it's on my way home) and was pleased to discover, yes, another Doctor Who DVD I wanted (Day of the Daleks). All seemed to be well, and I paid (on my card) and was kneeling down when I thought I'd just check the right DVDs were in there (it has happened on more than one occasion that I've got home only to discover the wrong DVDs were in the case - very annoying). I opened up the box, and... no. The wrong disc was in there. I sighed - not really surprised and returned to the counter. They couldn't find the right disc and had to give me a refund - which took another five minutes... So, well done CEX two weeks into the new year, and two out of three times I've tried to buy something there I wasn't able to! This makes an astonishing 66% of times (A third!) that I wasn't able to buy something they were (ostensibly) selling... Surely they can't continue this badly..? Let the 2013 CEX missing DVDs tally commence!

Monday 14 January 2013

The Dog full of Sunday Nightfall

Yesterday afternoon.
Met Al, Em and Claire and went for a pot of tea (or two) at a small place off of Western Road called Tea for Two. After that we took a walk along the fading-light beach. Em went to work and Al, Claire and myself decided to go for 'a half' at the nearby Neptune.
The Neptune is set along a small parade of shops, and one of the shops there is a hairdresser. Claire pointed out something in the darkened window (all the shops were closed by now) and we gathered round to look. There was a dog - a black labrador I think - sat on the leather sofa just under the window. It had it's legs up on the back of the sofa and stared out at the world with lugubrious eyes. "Look how human it looks!" said Claire.
There was indeed something very human about the dog. The eyes were particularly unnerving, ancient and knowledgeable, and despite the three of us crowded about the window, showed no interest in us whatsoever. It wasn't just the eyes though, there was something about its posture, some undefinable thing about its behaviour that made the dog seem something other than canine. The rest of the hairdressers was dark. The dog didn't seem to mind and seemed very relaxed and at home in it's Sunday-nightfall environment.
"Maybe someone left it here while they went to get a pint" said Claire.
We did the same, and after we had had a pint we passed by the hairdressers again but the dog was gone.

Sunday 13 January 2013

Storage Hunters

My new favorite programme is something called Storage Hunters. How long it will remain in the top spot remains uncertain, probably only until this afternoon when Come Dine With Me might be on, or Man Vs Food, or the endless reruns of The Big Bang Theory, which I never seem to tire of.
Storage Hunters is a documentary which revolves around an American ex-boxer and his wife. They travel around the country to various storage auctions. A burly man armed with a huge set of pliers will bust the padlock on a 'lock-up' - most of the lock-ups tend to look like very narrow garages. A group of people stand around and bid for the items inside. There is an auctioneer who speaks in that fascinatingly incomprehensible way that all auctioneers do, all rolled 'r's and with an incredible amount of syllables in each quickfire sentence. After the auctions are over we usually get to see what kind of profit has been made by the ex-boxer and his wife.
I have just watched one this morning, where they have been down to a storage auction in New Orleans. The lock-ups were situated down some kind of back street, a dead-end area. It looked hot there. There was something very familiar about that kind of heat, though I'm not sure why. Something very familiar -and fascinating- about that kind of locale too, the Stephen King territory of lower working class America. The lock-ups in the episode I've just seen provided such things as an old car, a voodoo altar, a stuffed leopard and a three huge mardi-gras masks. The people who come to these auctions are a fascinating lot. They seem like mardi-gras characters themselves, and seen from across the Atlantic, their Americanisms are at once familiar and strange. There was an unpleasant character who called himself 'the ragin' cajun' and another bearded fellow who called himself 'the pirate'. They both looked like serial killers.

Saturday 12 January 2013

The Hollows under the Mattress

Last night, I delved into the mysteries of what lay in my bed. By this, I mean, the hollow interior of my bed, beneath the mattress. The bed is split into two parts, one of which you are meant to open to use as a storage space, and the other section you weren't, but does now, thanks to the application of a cheap craft knife to the thin material. 
There was a lot of stuff in there. Most of the stuff was just clothes, and records (I don't have a record player). There were some CDs I wanted (I found the Stupids' Peel Sessions CD again) a few magazines (mostly Sunday supplements) and bags full of the kind of nonsense that really should have been got rid of a long time ago; old receipts, old wage slips. One bag seemed full of a mixture of tarot cards from different packs, a thousand futures all collapsing in on itself. There were a few photographs stretching back to me teenage years. One even showing a blurry picture of a school trip dating from when I was 9 or 10. Funny the things that follow you about through the years when other things get lost. I found a book of poems from the summer of 2004. I used to write poems prolifically. This notebook contained around about 150. I didn't bother reading them.
I stuffed everything back under the bed (I really only wanted to retrieve any CDs that were there) and stuffed everything back into the musty hollows.
When I went to sleep later on (No work today, so this was about 2:00am) I thought of those hollows below me, full of things that weren't much use or that much interest to me, but that I still couldn't get rid of nonetheless.

Friday 11 January 2013

January Demands an Unspoken Sacrifice

We;re in that odd January land now, where it's not really cold, but doesn't feel like anywhere else but January. The streets have that odd monochrome look about them - colour drained away - aside from odd flashes of brightness, the red of a post box say, that have miraculously managed to stay away from January's fadings.
When I walk to work in the morning, the air is fresh and points towards spring, but the murky light is a mockery of morning - the idea of morning as dreamt by the small hours themselves - if such tiny and lightless hours could be said to think.
Night still falls to early, and the nights that fall in January seem heavy things. January is ome great god that demands great sacrifice... but January is always so remote that it was unable to tell us what that sacrifice might be.

Thursday 10 January 2013

Dream of Clarkson, May and a Middle-Aged Chinese Woman

Quickly, because I am about to leave for work (why does the hour between 7:00 and 8:00am go so quickly?):
Dreamt I was crossing a road with s minor TV celebrity, I can't remember who. In the middle of the road, leaning nonchalantly against a bollard was Jeremy Clatkson, presenter of laddish television programme Top Gear. He seemed quite happy. The minor television presenter who I was with thought that Clarkson was smiling at him. He was quite pleased by this and smiled and waved back. Clarkson did not return these waves from my friend. I saw that Clarkson was not standing in the middle of the road smiling at my friend but at someone on the pavement. This was James May, also a television presenter on laddish television programme Top Geart. May was taking photographs of Clarkson - perhaps as some new job - perhaps his television career had stalled or - more likely - this was a segment that was to feature in a future television programme. A hefty middle aged woman, Chinese (perhaps) and dressed in black, crossed the road with her camera.  When I next looked up, she was taking photographs of Clarkson, with the camera stuck in his face. Clarkson did not mind. I thought it was a photographic free-for-all, and all because there were celebrities involved.

Wednesday 9 January 2013

Houses are Deep after Waking from Dreams

I wake in the night after vaguely disquieting dreams. I was renting a house - or a series of rooms - from a famous serial killer. His son was there too. The serial killer had forgotten something that was vital to my survival. He may have forgotten he was a killer, or that he was renting some rooms in his large house out to me. There was a great deal of tension. I was worried for my safety. I told Em that if she ever got a text from me that said 'FW' it meant that I was in trouble. The house was tall and narrow. Grey rain, gloomy afternoons. Sat on the sofa with the killer and his son, hoping that what I didn't want to be remembered would stay forgotten.
When I woke, the flat had that curious property that all homes do after one wakes from vaguely disquieting dreams, that of there being more rooms or other levels than there actually are. As I lay in the cozy eerie darkness, may half-sleep listening could detect the sound of doors being opened on downstairs floors (there are only workshops below us) and I could almost feel other rooms beween, for instance, my room and the living room (they are next to each other). These rooms felt blue and cold, empty and oddly alluring. I fell asleep again.
In these last few minutes before I leave for work, the house has resumed its normal dimensions, but these extra floors and secret rooms, curled up nooks and crannies, sneaky as cats, are here somewhere, waiting for the next vaguely disquieting dream to unfold themselves again.

Tuesday 8 January 2013

Man made of Glass

The white sky clears, and from the white mist of these metaphoric days, a transmission makes it through. Wide field under white skies. Blue threaded with white clouds, and it feels like the gold, or gods, of September. Poplar trees in the warm afternoon, a rumour of rivers, and I find on the grass a postcard of a steam train, still on a coastal branch line. Still sea, still sky, and the steam looks as uncertain as the sway of the poplar trees that surround me. Ahead of me, a man made of glass. Coming closer I see myself reflected in the translucent surface, clear as imagined ice - ice is dirty and muddied when not imagined - but as easy to break.
Perhaps.
The breach in the white sky closes again, and I do not know whether that lost country is inches or millenia away.

Monday 7 January 2013

7:58am

Ten minutes before I have to leave for work.
The flat smells inexplicably of when we first moved in, an olfactory ghost from a year and a third ago. As I move through the rooms, collecting things I need for work, glimpses of the day outside, between badly drawn curtains, show a thick gloom. Surely it should be lighter than this out there now?
I dreamt of Ickenham again last night. I was walking through Swakeleys Park and it was sunny. I was quite happy walking here. There were a few new dream-additions; some kind of bar, and a wooden boat on which a truanting schoolboy lay in an inefficient attempt at hiding. I must have walked up Woodstock Drive but I don't remember. There was a DIY shop between Ickenham and Uxbridge. I got lost in here for a while, but managed to find my way out of the dark woods of it's interior. I wondered if there was a comic shop in town I could look round. I couldn't remember.

Sunday 6 January 2013

Doctor Occult and the Mystery of the Melancholy Trees

'Doctor Occult and the Mystery of the Melancholy Trees'
Acrylic on 16" x 24" canvas
November 2012 - January 2013

...and remember, there are small coppices behind certain petrols stations in singularly dismal tracts of English countryside, and in them, the sky is always grey and troubled, a haunted shade that hangs over housing estates on the edges of town, and the air breathed here might taste of Sunday afternoons in the autumn of a year, when the night threatens rain and a long slow evening full of daydreams and half-snatches of nostalgic sleep...

12:54am

Turn round.
White winds blowing dust from pavements.
Vast old skies.
33 days.
Like a whisper.
I remember an unreal city.
Underneath the shadow of a tree.
Of a sun.
And we are back again.

Saturday 5 January 2013

Drifting On

The morning was laid over with a white haziness, not quite mist and not quite rain, but some twilight arrangement between the two. The tops of buildings softened into a void, and from the call centre, the sea shifted and moved in an odd manner, as if beholden to its own wishes rather than that of moons and tides and currents.
After work and walking through the North Laine with Em, and everything is washed out with that clear January clarity, and the white of the sky like 2013's still blank page. No history here yet, and the sheen has gone from everything. After the cloying sentimentality of Christmas, January's harsh realism is a relief and pleasure.

Friday 4 January 2013

Not Quite Dark

Went for a stroll and ran into Em, who herself was going for a stroll. We ended up walking down Portland Road and then up to the Old Shoreham Road and back past the cemeteries. An incredibly mild night, and strangely light too. It had all the pale and not-quite-night texture of early summer. not one trace of winter here...
January 2004. The night before Andy moved down. In St Nicholas Churchyard with Paul, lying on a tombstone, and a stunning un-winter warmth. Smoking and lying and watching the sky, and I think I had just lost a pen that I had been using on a picture I had been working on for a month or two. Paul, insane and rich, offered to lend me the £15 for a new pen, but I found the pen when I returned home.
Almost felt like hopping over the walls into the graveyard, wander among the not-quite-dark pathways till I find the place I used to go to over the summer of 2010 when I was unemployed. After signing on at Portslade job centre I would come here, smoke cigarettes and daydream and but cheap energy drinks from a small newsagent up on the Old Shoreham Road.

Thursday 3 January 2013

Conversation with Prince George

That sword's gonna fall tomorrow?
Really? Nothing I can do?
No. Just the one sword though.
What's the damage?
Don't know. I know the sword is gonna fall though.
I don't want to know.
Too late now, you know. just try to enjoy tonight.
Knowing that sword's gonna fall?
Nothing else to do. It will fall. There will be damage.
Nothing else to say.

Wednesday 2 January 2013

Remembrance of Things Past Again

I remember trying to read Swanns Way (the first part of Proust's Rememberance of Things Past) before. This was back over the autumn of 2008. I used to read it on those luxuriously long intervals between calls at the old call centre job. Or at least I think I did. I took it down to Cornwall with me to in November of that year, read it to a soundtrack of Darkthrone's Dark Thrones and Black Flags album which had just been released. At some point over that week, I decided there was no point in continuing it as I wasn't enjoying it all. I wonder what happened to that copy of it. It was a large cheaply printed copy, and I can't even remember where I bought it from... but I do know it was from a bookshop closed down. I'm reading it again now, obviously, and so far I am enjoying it, but it's a long book, and the shadow of that earlier failure hangs over me. I don't want another reading incident like last summer where Bolano's The Savage Detectives hung like a weight round my neck, an albatross that stretched all over summer, from the Jubilee till whenever. I was so sick of that book by the end, and really just wasn't paying any attention to it. It became like some endurance test rather than something to be enjoyed, and it was a fantastic book, but I just didn't have the attention span required for it then. I hope my focus has improved this year, Remembrance of Things Past is even longer...

Tuesday 1 January 2013

Tarot Card Moon

I walk Em home about 1:00am, through the streets unfamiliar with their busyness; people leaving house parties, getting into cars, groups of one or two, noisily moving through the usually emptied streets, a solitary stumbler whose eyes are sharp as suspicion. Something predatory there.
When I get back home, I am still hungry. Make some cheese on toast, flick through the television. Go to bed about 2:30am.
Welcome to 2013.
I wake at 10:00am. Drag myself out of bed. A cup of tea and the living room. Flick through the television and start to read Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. After a while I become restless, do some drawing instead. Something I began early last summer. This already has a title, Our Lady of Bulletbelts and Laundry Days showing the figure of a woman against a background of a weedy embankment above which hangs a washing line. A strange saint for strange days. I can't help but think the moon that would shine for her would be a tarot card moon, and I can't help bit think this because the tarot card moon was mentioned in a song I have been listening to. Can't remember,-don't know the title, but it was on the Boyd Rice / Death in June album collaboration Alarm Agents. 
Em comes round about 1:00pm, mirroring the time she left twelve hours before. We go down the beach which is crowded with people, probably because of the bright blue skies and even brighter sun. Hundreds of people, all wrapped up in scarves and coats and new years cheer, a myriad of out of season holiday makers, -but they probably all live here. Long lines of people at the seafront coffee stalls mean no coffee (I have no patience to wait) so I watch the foamy exuberance of the sea instead.