Aleister Crowley in the Charity Shop

At lunchtime today I bought The Magick of Thelema A Handbook of the Rituals of Aleister Crowley, from, of all places, the British Heart Foundation charity shop on Western Road. Obviously I will never get around to reading it, but that's another matter. The elderly woman behind the counter, who looked very much like my Nan, looked at it and said 'Now, that does look interesting doesn't it?' It was all a bit like walking into a bookshop and discovering notorious occultist Aleister Crowley (uh... except he's been dead a long while) expressing an interest in Readers Digest, or perhaps espousing an interest in Radio Four soap opera The Archers.

Gaps

The spaces between the lamps grow longer, the darkness on the stairs, between hallway and sleep grow deeper, the time between posts here lengthens and elongates. I really should write something properly at some point, but I can't be bothered... after all, Storage Hunters is back on TV tonight!

Slightly Drunk

...the weekend off...
Back from the pub, well, 'bar'... Oh, why don't they have ale... Well, Witherspoon did, but had a JD and coke instead... Can't type, cold, snow-
Must get to bed.

Church Bells in Pripyat

I slept on the floor last night, and my bad back was better, and I slept, and do not remember dreaming.

A few flutters of snow as I walk to work, butterfly wings made of razors. Less than that, a rumour nothing more, for when I had turned they had gone, and the sky was the clear-white of void.
The wind remains, lasting as long as the church bells that ring over Pripyat, except in Brighton. This day seems to have lasted more than a quarter of a century. Servicing radiation, serving these reminders of bone, and I was fourteen - the summer of 1986 - and Chernobyl was some watchword whose observations I can't remember. At least they can't aim their missiles at us now. Oh yes, I remember those protect and survive leaflets, stuffed through evening doors in London suburbia. Waiting for the siren, waiting for those church chimes.
That wind bought all that back today, and someone might remember this wind in another quarter of a century, and I'll be just entering old age, and I might remember my dreams again.

Until then there's this February wind that makes the day seem so long.

Bad Back

Done something to my back - strained some mechanism - and couldn't sleep last night. This happens from time to time, and meant that sleep was a remote thing. So remote, that the discomfort in my back forced me to get up about 1:30am and sit on the internet for a while.

I went back to bed about 2:00am, and by staying in exactly the same place managed to get back to sleep. My back was fine when I first woke up, and was so until about midday, when that curious nauseous strain crept back again. Went to the shops, bought some Nurofen Express and spent the rest of the day shifting uncomfortably on my chair. I hope I'll get to sleep okay tonight. At least I'm not in till 10:00am this week, so I get an extra hour of fractured sleep. Nearly 41 and I feel twice as old...

Sharpeners

I have to go to W.H.Smiths at lunchtime to buy a sharpener and a ruler. Why I've decided I need them at lunch is beyond me - by the time I get back to work, I'll only have half an hour to work on the picture I'm doing before I get back to work.
The stationery (or is it stationAry?) section of W.H.Smiths is a nightmare, a labyrinth of brightly coloured display files and novelty erasers, a maze of cheap drawing pens and packs of HB pencils. There are lots of excitable children about. It is half term. It feels I have spent all afternoon tracking up and down these shelves looking for a sharpener.
I am beginning to despair. I have sharpener-blindness. I scan the shelves carefully. All the brightly coloured stationary (or is it stationEry?) is giving me a headache. I find the sharpeners, but am now confronted with a new dilemma - too much choice, too expensive. I have sharpeners at home, but I need one now/I finally settle on a metal one which comes with an eraser. £1:99. This is very expensive. I shall probably lose them by the time I get home. I buy them anyway.
As I settle down in the break room at work, I realize I have forgotten the ruler.

Rallying Through Coastal Cliffs

I spent the last half hour of sleep half-dreaming about the phrase rallying through coastal cliffs. I wasn't quite dreaming but wasn't quite awake either. The burden of the alarm hung over any dives back into deep sleep.
The phrase seemed quite important to me, though am not sure why. It was accompanied by a kind of image of a green grassed slope above a cliff below blue skies dotted with fluffy clouds. The track looped about this slope that was dotted with large rocks. There was a steam train that was travelling along this labyrinthine loop of track. The image, despite its bucolic qualities, had an air of drama about it - though that sense of drama was benign, and there was no danger to the train. The phrase rallying through coastal cliffs kept running through my mind.
It wasn't my phrase, but one that a friend at work used in an e-mail to me a month ago or longer. I wanted to do a drawing based on the phrase, but as usual, never got around to it. I have no idea why it turned up in my head just before the alarm went off.
Maybe I should get on with the drawing of it.

The Inevitable Morning

By the side of the Thames, I watch the water, blue calm reflecting calmer skies, fluffy clouds in a Ladybird Books sky. The water is split by rowing boats. Someone in another boat shouts approval, or dissent; "Stop stopping!".
It rises up from the water as inevitable as morning. Oh, bird-flu god, here you are again. Ragged seaweed ribcage dripping with cold water the colour of everything lost; love, days, that toy you had when you were a kid. Skull made of twisted branches, and no eyes, but the hollows there glint with an anti-jewel; you didn't bury me last autumn. Stretches out it's cold winds, and should take to the sky, some February apocalypse, but I glance back again, and the bird-flu god is gone, back under water to drift and dream and wait for that inevitable morning again.
Delays on the train coming back, stuck at Clapham and East Croydon. Some power failure at Purley. Carriages rammed with unfortunate passengers. Nothing works here - even the information screen is showing orange static. No stations, no destination.
I do the crossword with Em, and try to read Peter Akroyd's The English Ghost.
Sometimes it seems the train isn't moving, but we only get back an hour later than we would have anyway.

Patterns in the Carpet

We had a training day today at work in the Thistle Hotel on Brighton seafront.
All hotels, purely by the very reason of them being hotels, remind me of The Overlook in Kubrick's  flawed adaptation of The Shining. I think it's the fact that all hotels have those always brightly lit windowless corridors, and every hotel I've been, even the tiny ones, have a floor plan that seem to have been designed by M.C.Escher in the depths of some hallucinogenic fever.
Disquieting places hotels, full of dead ends and secret rooms and the feeling of there being some undercurrent just behind the closed doors you pass by. Hotels are rarely eerie though (unlike The Overlook) - they are too brightly lit and busy to ever be consider even slightly spooky.
The carpet in the Thistle Hotel (it seemed the same in every room) was made up of a series of three interlocking squares. During the quiet times of the training day, I kept finding myself drawn into the patterns on the carpet. If you squinted your eyes a certain way, the patterns would form some kind of three dimensional grid suspended over some endless, empty space. Imagine falling between the grids, and out into that nothingness...
I jerked myself out of this reverie, remembering suddenly that there was a bit in The Shining (the novel, not the film) where main character Jack Torrance discovers, amongst old papers in the cellar, a handwritten note - something about being spooked out by patterns in the carpet or a rug. I can't really remember - it's been a while since I last read it. I remember it started with the words 'Medoc - are you here?' or something similar.
I didn't get caught in the patterns in the carpet for long. I extricated myself when the day finished, and in the sunset-gloom of the 5:00pm twilight, got only slightly lost trying to find my way out.

Noodles and Melancholy

I caught the bus back from work - overcrowded and unpleasant as usual, but I had bad back, and the thought of walking home was not conducive to pleasant thoughts.
I managed to find a seat, and sat down staring at my reflection in the window. On the seat next to me, a young man talked to an older Chinese man about noodles. Their conversation was hypnotically fascinating. The young man seemed quite eager to express his opinion that certain types of noodles were better than other noodles. He said to the older man that as he had noodles every day, he was quite an expert. He did not like noodles that were too spicy. He was impressed with the cheapness of them. It soon became apparent that the two did not know each other previous to the bus journey - or perhaps the bus stop preceding the journey. The Chinese man's english was rudimentary, and his side of the conversation consisted of interjections such as 'prawn - better', and 'yes - it depends how you like'. The younger man continued in his attempt to engage the older man in some kind of heated discussion regarding noodles. This continued for the whole journey. There was one odd point in this conversation - I had lost thread of the conversation and had been staring at my reflection in the bus window, trying to see what I would like in ten years time when I am 50. I had almost succeeded when a certain of voice the Chinese man used bought me back to listening to him again. I have no idea what they had been talking about, but the Chiense man said 'it is a very clean place'. I have no idea whether they were talking about countries, restaurants, or even noodles, but there was a certain sense of yearning in the Chinese man's voice, a melancholy as if longing for a home that was far away. The younger man continued talking about noodles and Chinese restaurants, and I got off the bus, and have no idea how the conversation turned out.

Consolations of Twilight

Left work at 5:00pm - the first time I've done so for a number of weeks now. The first time this year it has not been completely pitch black when I leave work either.
It is a cliche to say that twilight is a favourite time of day - I would reserve much mistrust for an individual who is not, in some way, in love with the blue hour of dusk - but what is it about this numinous hour that is so alluring?
Perhaps it is the colour of the sky - tonight's sky was a brilliant blue - the colour of sea shallows, or perhaps spring in some remote polar county. Perhaps not. Sometimes the sky at twilight is obscured by clouds, and the night seems to seep up from pools hidden beneath the road.
Perhaps it is the thought of the quietening landscape that is so intriguing, those hidden corners of the city lost to night, and out beyond the lamp lit suburbs, the darkening fields slipping into nightfall. As the light fades, those fields and coppices and silent streams, spinneys, pools and embankment-heavy lanes become some other thing, an unmapped geography, a country of shadows and possibility. We might never see this land, but we know, as we walk back through the kind consolations of twilight, that in the night, when we wake from sleep, it waits for us, perhaps only a few well known streets or roads away, the last wilderness, a night-made unknown.

Unloved Factories

In that last phase of winter now that lasts too long. A dirty grey period, made in blackened factories without safety regulations. Breathe in, and every breath is an exhaustion. The air even looks heavy - and even that is obscured in the half-light of February.
Snow in December and over Christmas is magical, and snow in January is expected - snow in  February different though; dirty and toxic and unwanted. I watched it snow from the call centre window too. Watched it dash itself against the rain soaked pavements.
It didn't stick though - too wet and miserable.
The days are getting longer. This end of winter though, the daylight has more in common with grimy twilight than anything.
The busiest time of year for those unloved factories.

Celtic Frost T-shirt Coincidence

It's 9:30am and I go to the newsagents to buy a copy of The Sunday Times. It is cold and wet outside, that heavy drenching cold that makes the outside seem a place of remoteness and absolute discomfort. A bit like when you're mildly ill, and any place outside of bed (or sofa, under quilt) becomes a new and unknown country, full of all manner of possible dangers.
The newsagent, fortunately, is only across the road. It is full of Sunday-people buying their own copy of The Sunday Times.
I am wearing my Celtic Frost 'Morbid Tales' t-shirt, and I am alarmed and pleased to discover a young asian man wearing a Celtic Frost 'Emperors Return' t-shirt. The scene is both mundane and surreal. If this were the centre of London - even the centre of Brighton, nothing might be said. Because this is a small newsagent in suburban Hove, attention must be drawn to this. We admire each others T-shirts, and say nothing of interest but 'what a coincidence!' and 'small world!'.
We sound like old men, pleased over some spurious, mundane coincidence - perhaps we once visited the same city when we were young, or attended the same wedding of a mutual friend.
I go our separate ways. The man (well young boy - the newsagent just seems to employ young boys - perhaps children or grandchildren of the proprietor) behind the counter calls back the Emperors Return man. He has forgotten his receipt. The man behind the counter seems eager that he has his receipt for his own copy of The Sunday Times. I wonder why. Why is everybody buying     The Sunday Times this morning? The Emperors Return man does not seem unduly concerned about his receipt. He shakes his head, smiling, as if still delighted at the Celtic Frost T-shirt coincidence.
I pay for my own copy of The Sunday Times, and go home to a cup of tea and a bowl of porridge. I find myself quite delighted over the Celtic Frost T-shirt coincidence, though am not entirely sure why.
The porridge is enjoyable, though wish I had remembered to buy more honey the night before.

Someone Could Vanish Here

Last night.

After the work do (a company wide quiz) held in some seafront hotel whose name I can't recall (The Metropole? The Travelodge?) I walked back home along the seafront road. Whisky, wine, beer. 

Didn't listen to music. Not drunk, just not sober enough to.

Something strange about walking home along the seafront road late at night. It's busy and impersonal, and the Shoreham power station industrial zone in the distance glimmers in it's dark roads and floodlit geographies, something full of both warning and desolate invitation.

You can almost hear the silence there. Red-eye on the chimney. Something peaceful about it - that red light shining through every sleep, and everything is right with the world.

The seafront road is empty - well, of walkers - but there are always plenty of cars, though these seem empty, machines without drivers. Something escaped from that industrial zone.

Pass by the Neptune, pass by the petrol station, and in the beige light of the street lamps, everything is too bright and heightened, an overwhelming colour that only increases the slight nausea of walking home when not drunk, just not sober.

Past the other side of the petrol station, the buildings serve no obvious purpose. If they are hotels, they are ragged decaying ones - who would stay here? - and if they are private buildings they seem too large and too full of imagined corridors that would swallow you up. Blank windows give no indication of occupants or interiors. 

You could vanish here, I always think, and at this point I cast a look to the sea, out beyond the hunched over roofs of the beach huts, across the dark lawns of bowling greens. The sky above the hidden water is black, and would be full of stars but I don't remember seeing anyway.

Short walk back home, fall into bed, and am glad I didn't have work today.

The Lost Album

I bought it last August, put it on my i-pod and didn't play it much because, well, I always buy far too much music and some albums just end up being lost. I had a few i-tunes disasters, and ended up having to restart my library again, and then I got a new laptop, and started yet again... and I forgot about the album, and didn't put it back on my i-pod.
The last time I listened to the album was falling asleep on the coach coming back from Scotland on the last day or so of September.
Lately, it has started to recur to me again.
I'm not sure that sentence is in English, but let me explain. I remember very little about the album. I remember it was short (32 minutes) and then it was kind of like old favourite indie-goths the Cranes, mixed with a slight 1950s feel, and a touch of Italian horror-prog-disco pioneers Goblin. I remember I liked the album... but nothing much more. Over the past week though, fragments of the album started to, well, recur. These fragments consisted of a strangeness, and little else, redolent of that time between the end of summer and the beginning of autumn. September like a fragment of a dream fading fast, a lost landscape, and this forgotten album was a soundtrack, a map to that odd surely-not-real country.
September last year was odd.
I couldn't even remember the name of the band.
So I hunted for the CD tonight. More difficult than you might think. I am untidy and my CDs are scattered around various shadowy nooks of my room. I couldn't find it. Anywhere. Maybe I had thrown it away. Because I couldn't find the album, it turned into the best album ever.
I looked at one of the pile of CDs I had put on my bed.
There it was.
The band are Still Corners, and the album is called Creatures of an Hour.
I had mistaken the CD for another CD I had bought last summer. They had similar cover designs. I can't remember the name of that band either. Even as I'm burning Creatures of an Hour, I'm thinking; what was the name of the other band? Something about Corridors and the album title about the hour being late?
I can't remember much about the music on that CD either... It had Violins on, and a heartbeat-dark dramatic quality, a bit like Italian horror-prog-disco-pioneers Goblin...
I can't find the album.
Maybe I've thrown it away.
I must find it.
It might be the best album ever...

Think Twice about the Cold

The cold is back.
This air tastes like knives, something sharp and prickly and not-be-messed-with. I barely notice the sea, except to catalogue the glitter of the sun on the father-water.
Everything like yesterday, still monochrome.
A still black-and-white photograph.
Eyes in old photographs, the slightly blurred butcher boys and flower girls longing for parasols. I try to walk the pavement in Victorian times, taste the air before street lamps and aircraft, and I'd buy penny dreadfuls instead of horror comics.
There are photographs of today, studied in the future, but no-one there will think twice about this cold.

Bone-Cold and Wandering

It always seems to be dark when I am at home - more so than December, which makes no sense. it should feel like it's getting lighter now, but night in February seems constant. Bone-cold too - can feel it walking up and down Western Road, to and from work. The colour seems turned down on everything.
The sea looked beautiful today. Shiny gold sun on the tips of the distance - an old September refined and dusted on frothy waves, tasting of petrol station coffee in the September of 1998, and the year before, long fields stretching out in the first of autumn dawns.

Jagosphere

Joe has a blog called Jagosphere. It has been going as long as Tales from Bridge 39. So far he has done, without aberration, one post a year. You should read it as it is very good, and might encourage him to write more than once a year. His blog can be found here.

Just out of Reach

The first spring of this decade.
Three years ago now, and a season, in one way or another, of things ending - culminating, of course, in the old call centre going bust, and everyone losing their job. It was my first spring in the bedsit - I was not happy at having to live there - and work was no longer quite as fun as it had been.
Despite this, that spring has started to achieve an odd resonance. I can't quite think why though, but my memories of those few months from when winter finished (a spring day in February - I bought Schulz's Street of Crocodiles and it no longer felt like winter) until that fateful day in hot May, have a certain feeling of dream-like euphoria about them. It has a lot to do with the sofa I found abandoned in the fog (and am now sitting on nearly three years later), probably because it made my bedsit feel a bit more homely. Also mixed in is the third Reigns album House on the Causeway and the Buffy the Vampire Slayer DVDS I was watching (I bought the whole series bar one that Spring, completing my collection).
I say dream-like euphoria and that is more pertinent than may appear. There is something dream-like about that season, and dream-like in the way that there is something there I can't quite grasp, like trying to remember something in a dream you have just awoken from but can't. All you're left with a few fleeting glimpses of things wonderful and alluring precisely because all your left with are fragments, and those fragments fading fast too.
There is something lost about that time, something I should remember but remains just out of reach.

Cthulhu Fhtagn

...alternative title 'Worse Things Happen at Sea'
Pen and ink on A4 paper
January - February 2013

Photographs of Impossible Places

I have as my background on my laptop, a photograph I took just before Christmas. The photograph is of a Midlands countryside - I would like to say it is Worcestershire, but could well be Staffordshire. I can't remember whether it was on the trip Dad and me took to Shrewsbury or Kidderminster.
The photograph is taken from the passenger seat of the car, and shows a twilight landscape. A late twilight landscape - almost night. A curving road is lined by spiky dark silhouette-trees. The sky is a cloudy maelstrom of blues and greys and violets, a Worcestershire sky, even though it might be Staffordshire.
It looks wet and cold and oddly remote, the kind of landscape that could only exist in deep December. If one were to return in summer, it would be a very different landscape. December landscapes are most often seen through windows - of cars and trains and the unfamiliar windows of the houses of visited relatives - I suppose it is too cold and wet to spend much time in them skin to skin. Viewed thus - and at an even greater remove through the further window of the laptop screen, the landscapes achieve a kind of deep and dreamy resonance, a country as unreal as that found outside of a plane window above the cloud-line.
I could lose myself in that photograph, wonder about those dark night-fields that line the road and what might - or might not - be found there. Despite the fact I have a photograph of it, it would be impossible to find that spot again, even on a wet, remote deep December day. In this sense, the landscape is a truly lost country, a country that I not only visited, but also photographed.
I might delete the photograph though, and then there would be no proof that that landscape ever existed only as anything other than a product of imagination or half-remembered dream, or even a lie, and as I will not include that photograph here there will be no way of knowing.
Unless someone looks at my laptop of course.

Skeleton in the Attic

I have lately been thinking about buying a ladder which will gain us access to the mysterious loft above us. Well, only mysterious, because we don't have access to it now. Andy has been up there, and has confirmed there is nothing mysterious there. Nonetheless, lofts are always mysterious, and as I walked to work I imagined what might be found up there. Inevitably I began to imagine finding skeletons up there - well one skeleton anyway. What would we do, I wondered, if we did find a skeleton up there? I know that Andy has confirmed there are no skeletons in the attic (well, nothing mysterious anyway) but perhaps there is some distant corner of the loft where a tiny skeleton might be hidden? I suppose we would have to ring the police... would we be scared or sad? And how would a skeleton get up there anyway? I was quite getting into this fantasy of skeletons forund in lofts when It came time to go into Sainsburys to buy my apples for the day. I was still caught up in the daydream, and it was a sudden jolt when I read on local paper the Argus's front cover Skeleton found in flat. The story concerned a landlord breaking into his flat where the rent had not been paid for a while, and finding, behind an armchair in the living room, the skeleton of his tenant that had lain there undiscovered for two years. The other tenants in the house of flats said that they did not notice anything amiss, and thought the man had just moved on. 'We keep ourselves to ourselves here', one tenant said. while another said there had been a 'slight musty odour' outside his flat door.
I hope the smell in our flat is just damp and not anything else...