73 Minutes of a Painted Sky

73 minutes of a painted sky.
This is what I do with my life; make pictures.
I'm not too pleased with the sky so far, but I don't paint as much as draw. I pretty much know that by the time I'm finished I'll probably be more pleased with it. I don't know what I'll put underneath the sky yet. Some dark field leaning toward twilight, surrounded by dark trees - possibly evergreens. There might be the silhouettes of pylons beyond the trees. Maybe old factory machinery - or the shadows of. I think the field will be littered with leaves, despite being surrounded by possible pine trees. I don't know whether there'll be a figure in there or not. Perhaps a vague one, toward the trees. The possibilities occupy my mind.
This is what I do with my life. This is the real work, not answering phones in a call centre.
Could really have spent more than 73 minutes working on it though...
Oh well.

Songs of Silent Chimneys

The first of the shifted British Summer Time evenings. Nearly 5:00pm and it's as light as the mid-afternoon. We've only put the clocks forward an hour, but it always seem to stretch out the day so much longer. A paradox, as we've lost an hour today. The whole chrono-fusion pleases me - are we earlier - later? Not so much where we are but when we are? The first Sunday always feels timeless, like some memory, some dream, rather than the present moment.
Sat on my sofa in my room. Curtains wide open to the late afternoon. It is still bitterly cold (an earlier walk to the shops to get some gas did not encourage a further constitutional) and though there is no snow, it feels like there should be snow. To balance out this wintry air, there is the sound of a springtime bird singing, some delicate lament against the thuggish squall of the seagulls who themselves are strangely silent.
Waiting for my dinner to cook (baked potatoes and vegeterian sausages), and waiting for the first layer of white paint on a canvas to dry. I'm listening to a long album (one song goes on for half an hour) by a band called Nuclear Torn. Mostly acoustic guitars and pianos, with the occasional burst of violin. Despite the sometime dashes into jarring black metal, the album has the feel of a haunted, timeless landscape... being followed through English fields on days full of white sky and melancholy. Songs for lost days.
I glance back out of the window again, through the spindly branches, looking for wisps of chimney smoke. The chimneys are silent now, and I miss the white wisps, wonder if I imagined them. It is easy to imagine so on quiet Easter Days like this, where there is something both peaceful and deep - lulled to a kind of sleep by a ghost story. Feels like I'me being followed, but I don't really mind.

Silence of Easter Day

The clocks gone forward. British Summer Time. I went to sleep in the deeps of last night. Pulled those quilts over me and drifted into the coma-dark. I dreamt deeply too, but in the coma-dark, the amnesia-shifts took them away,  left me with gaps in sleep and the silence of Easter Day.

12:44am Easter Day

A bottle of mead that Al and Claire bought me for my birthday. Nearly finished now, and I'm sat in my freezing room (out of gas) listening to Death In June's Snow Bunker Tapes, and it feels like winter, like Christmas, like those days after Christmas in 1981 - before 1982. It was that pub we went to yesterday in Hastings. I can't remember the name, but they had a wood fire, and that wood fire was the same smell as Nan and Grandad Stone's house, where we spent the post Christmas week of 1981. I remember the cold of that house, utterly bone chilling and oddly refreshing. A pure cold. Felt like you were out in the middle of the wilds.You were though. Deep Worcestershire wilds. If I'm going to write this, I've got to pay attention to my spelling. Tood runk (hahaha) for my spelling to come naturally tonight. Got to pay attention.
More mead.
It tastes of honey.
Water. I've got a pint of water too.
Eyesight creased with too many roads. With too many memories of roads. Most of them leading upwards, lit by cold lamps. Black nights and secret houses. Dark gardens. Oh, it's London Road in Worcester again. In these memory shift London Road is empty (too late at night) but 136 London Road, where I lived (1997 - 1999) is also empty. Dark rooms, and clattering floorboards. Plague of silence. Plague of too much space, too many storeys stretched out.
There are gaps in my memory.
I remember our second flat in Malta (1976) and I can trace the front room, the long corridor that was the hallway, the kitchen (food frying on a square frying pan), and the path out in the front door. I can't remember the room where I slept, presumably shared with my sister.
I remember even less our first flat in Malta. Only that it had no windows. Which is obviously not true but that's how I remember it anyway.

There Should be Violins

Wrap myself in the warm confusion of Saturday night. I feel like I should have a hangover -and don't- and only had one beer yesterday afternoon because I was working today anyway. Listening to a Green Carnation album I bought in Oxfam today for £1:99. I never heard them back in the day - just one of those bands that would pop up in Terrorizer magazine that Andy would tape me, or I would tape him. Back in the days when black metal and its associate genres were more than nostalgia.
Taping albums for Andy. Used to take me an age to get round to them. Neatly filling out song names and album titles - and I would always include the year the album was released - Andy would always include the country of origin on his tapes. Trying to work out if the songs would fit on the side of the tape. Hearing that click of the tape ending. Not enough room. Trying to fit another song on there instead. Then finding a padded envelope. Enough stamps. Stuffing them in the post box along with a letter.
Green Carnation don't sound very black metal - I'm listening to the album now, one of the albums (I bought two by them along with another by a band called Aeturnus) - and it sounds more like some experimental doom/death. More forgotten bands like In The Woods... all soprano female vocals, echoey guitars. Violins? Are there violins? There should be violins.
The album goes on for 78 minutes.
There'll be violins in there somewhere.

Train-Ride

Then there was that train journey back, all blue, darkening skies and slight sunsets. Reading a book of ghost stories I had bought in some ramshackle book shop in hastings, kept glancing out of the window. Watching the odd wastegrounds drift by in the swelling twilight. Bits of water and broken down caravan. These are places no-one goes, and these scrubby moors then replaced by tangled patches of spindly trees. Too small, too secret to be called a wood. Their bark was cold, their skin like this winter extending into spring. Andy, Claire and Al got off at Lewes and because I'm at work today I returned to Brighton. The train came in a different way to the trains from London, and there was a moment of wondrous panic when an unfamiliar view of Brighton made it seem not like Brighton. It felt, for a second, that I had missed my stop, or I was on a wrong branch line, and I was entering some new and unnamed city at the very last edge of twilight. I looked down onto the city from the viaduct; all those secretive streets, a labyrinth to get lost in, to vanish in, but the train pulled into the main station and it shifted back into being Brighton again.

Thursday Night

Went out for a meal with the people from work last night - China Garden down Preston Street. It was very nice and had too much wine (though really any wine is too much for me).
Headed home about 11:30pm, slightly drunk. Only had to walk along Western Road, but it seemed to take an age. There seemed to be a slightly edgy vibe last night. Too much Bank Holiday drinking starting already. Two men swearing at each other outside a kebab shop - another group of men hollering outside a pub.
Fell to sleep as soon as I got in. Deep wine-sleep. Dreamt I was in Worcester on a bright spring day, with Caro of all people (I went to uni with her though didn't know her that well). We were walking into St Johns.I remember the sunlight on red brick walls, the water if the Severn, and the pale blue sky, both vivid and vague.
Dream-Worcester seems much more real than real Worcester these days.

Glimpse

I walked back along Cromwell Road tonight, as I called in at Dave's Comics after work.
It was quite a relief to be walking back along Cromwell Road. There is something tyrannical about walking to and from work along Western Road, too much of it soaked in freezing winter, and all the bleak claustrophobia of white-out January days. I think it was helped by the sunset-sun hanging in the sky, somehow too high for a sunset, but there it was anyway. Looked like all those winter sunsets I remenber from childhood, but there was something impossibly spring-like through it all.

American Suburbia

American Suburbia exists nowhere, in no time - no place. I'm not talking about real American suburbia of course  - the only part of America I've been to is Hollywood and LA airport (a one night stopover to and from New Zealand a decade ago now), The American Suburbia (and the capitals are intended) I'm talking about is the imagined one, the one cobbled together from the expected sources; films, (mostly horror films,  also Tom Cruise's second film Risky Business) books (The Secret History, The Virgin Suicides) and television - numerous documentaries and dramas (The Wonder Years). Then there are the less expected sources, or at least the less well known, Charles Burns graphic novel Black Hole, and Glenn Danzig's first two bands, horror punk legends The Misfits and noisy death-rockers Samhain. Somehow all this has got mixed up in my imagination, and American Suburbia has become a place and not a place. Suburban areas in real life are connected to cities - the edges of towns - but I cannot imagine this imagined suburbia connected to anywhere. Suburbia without a centre, satellites without a planet to crash into. Portrayals of this suburbia are often negative, places of claustrophobia and other peoples expectations - but there is something about them I find intriguing, places of mystery and possibility, and a strange dream-like solitariness. I hear urban legends whispered about in school yards; the old man who works at the gas station was once a  spy, and that kid who vanished is lost in the sewers beneath the school, still there now and can't get out... and then there is the darkness outside of town. The darkness is that space - usually situated on a hill - where someone can look down at the street lights of the town (and what colour I wonder, are American street lights?). Soft and hidden in rural shadow, this darkness is something comforting and hidden, a place to slip from the imagined squares of American Suburbia (those square clapboard houses set amid neatly mown lawns) to somewhere older and more shadowed. The kind of place where people might vanish or come back - abandoned places, old houses, and you can dream here on the edges of nowhere, before you slip back into the parking lots and the baseball fields and the stores where there are probably old horror comics from the 1950s in some room out the back.
This place doesn't exist - I've spent at most 48 hours in America - but this fictional geography is real to The nostalgia I feel is real too, for the streets where the leaves in autumn are bright and fevered as any old photograph, and where the wind  is cool with those dark hills that watch from the outskirts of these suburbs that belong to no town, no city.

Open Window, Darkened Sky

A certain house, a certain time. It is uncertain that this is being remembered, or dreamt of, but nonetheless, it is real.
That shock of returning to a room deep in evening time. This would be a first floor room - perhaps a childhood bedroom, or perhaps a spare room at your grandparents house. You have not been in the room since morning, oh bright and lost Sunday morning. Now you have gone back upstairs, crept up those Sunday evening steps - perhaps you are thinking of homework - perhaps you are older, some boy, some girl, some band - or perhaps this is only last week. As I said, I don't know whether you're remembering or dreaming this. Up the sacred hush of Sunday nights, and open that door to that spare room where you are currently sleeping. Sudden shock. Cool surprise. It is the cold that strikes you first, deep and precise as a church bell. The window has been left open all day, and the room is now filled with Sunday air.
You pause at the door of the room, breathe in that air, and in it, you don't just taste the night-air, but the afternoon too, as it falls towards night - that slow melancholy of the sun over horizon (touching the tips of trees, poplars swaying like windmills), oe perhaps earlier that day, rainy clouds blossoming and swelling with cold rain. You taste all this. Breathe in, breathe in. The church on the hill, the lane with the broken down telephone box (at least you presume it is broken). The silent horses in the ragged field. The newsagent you only go to on Sundays like this - though you haven't today.
You watch warily the unfamiliar angles of night. Perhaps the curtains move in a slight breeze, sway in that toothpaste-cool breath. Perhaps not. Curtains move because of the night. Even on the stillest of evenings, with the windows open, the curtains will still move.
Open window, darkened sky.
Phrase tumbles inside you, and you don't know where it comes from, but there is something about those four words almost incantatory. It makes you think of pylons, silhouetted against a blue-dark sky, of distant woods, and inside the trees, the sound of water, a small stream, an old wall, crumbling and covered with ivy, the downward glide of a white dove, looking for somewhere to sleep. Slide of ghost-wings, wary of owls and other dangers.
And of this.
Standing at a window, and looking out onto the night, so much like now, but not. Perhaps you are remembering this moment? As you stand looking at the window, thinking of this other window, this other person looking out at their own unknown country, you wonder if they might think of you, standing behind them, Watching them as they watch for something. Night piled on night, and like an arcane rhythm, some tarot card whose meaning eludes, like the thirteenth tarot card of the Major Arcana The Moon/ That phrase echoes, and you would go to close that window, but the words repeat and plays itself. A ghost of ghosts, something like sleep or love or a haunting,
Open window, darkened sky, and you can't remember where you heard it before, if anywhere, and that this whole thing isn't just some half remembered dream you might forget about by morning.

Days of the Anti-Decay

No sign of spring anywhere - no sign of colour either - this extended season has stolen the world of everything but black and white - and even black is fading so everything vanishes into a pale - white void. These are the days of the anti-decay. No movement, no progression - not even regression - or entropy. Everything is frozen, both metaphorically and literally, No snow in Brighton, just a jagged miasma of existential disquiet, and that headline that keeps repeating the longest winter in 50 years. I sit freezing on the sofa, and the hollows of my body feel like this is December, that all that is right to do is to crawl under the covers and sleep for days and days and days.

Five Minutes on Sunday Night

11:41pm.
Sat on the sofa in my room. The door is open and I can hear the sound of the television from the living room. Studio laughter. Andy watching a comedy show. It sounds like a 'panel-show' rather than a sit-com or a film.
I have just been drawing, so have the overhead light on, as well as both my desk lamps; a pencil sketch of myself gesturing toward that haunted house that I dream about far toof requently, 33 Woodstock Drive.
The sound of the boiler in the kitchen switching itself on.
My stereo is silent. I have just finished playing Bat For Lashes second album 'Two Suns', partly because it reminds me of the January of 2010, more specifically, the type of unimpeachable cold that that month bought. It is the same cold as now, except now is colder, and it is April next week.
The coldest winter in 50 years, the headline in a newspaper I saw today.
Now that I have to go to bed, I feel relatively awake. I can't really justify another cup of tea before bed, but I don't want to go to sleep yet.
The morning will come soon enough anyway.
11:46pm

Walking Home Last Night 2:00am - 3:00am

 It's about 2:00am when I say goodbye to Al and Claire. I don't mean to walk home, but somehow I do. The streets have a pleasingly abandoned quality to them. The arctic spring seems to have stolen the streets of people. I watch the snow in the street lamp halos. My god, it's cold. I stop outside the darkness of St Annes Well Gardens. Peer into the dark park. The silence of the place always impresses me. Even in the brightest of sunny days, there is always something very still and old and watchful about the place.

 Old, old trees, and they're like gods here tonight, or perhaps not gods, but something as old and watchful and silent. How many times have they watched me walk these small hours under their darkness? I used to think of them as a court of trees, a conspiracy of bark and leaf and root. Used to pass them by at the end of summer in the first of the evenign twilights. Walk under that thickened darkness that falls beneath summer trees.

 Peering over the low brick wall into the grounds of a building whose purpose remains obscure. I have always assumed it to be an old peoples home, but I have never seen anyone here. The buildings are often hidden by bushes, but they have been cut back. In a courtyard I see a bench lit by a pale street lamp. It feels like someone is sitting there, alone and invisible in the night, preoccupied as a phantom. I feel the rain, the snow, and I think this could be any time, and I could be lost here.

Shadowy Parkland - Another Dream of Woodstock Drive

These frequent dreams about returning to Woodstock Drive, where I lived as a teenager, continue.
Last night I was walking up that road -grey sky, empty light- approaching my old house. The street was very different, and I noticed to my horror, that a number of houses opposite where I lived had been demolished and replaced by some kind of car showroom. I looked to my old house, and discovered that there were a number of extensions to the side of the houses.
I found myself in a nearby park - some patch of overgrown tangle that was inimically connected with Woodstock Drive, but that does not exist beyond the confines of the dream. This shadowy parkland operated as some kind of hyper-metaphor for the shadows of Woodstock Drive (and I have written before about the problems with shadows I had in that house, both in these dreams and when I lived there).
The parkland was dark - shadowed by overhanging trees, and split by numerous small streams and brooks, that had the feel of something industrial, like a sewer overflow. Some of these brooks were full of thick black mud that had the effect of warping the air around them. I was trying top balance on a line of bricks above these mud channels / rivers. The bricks began to crumble, and the hardened skin of the outer mud broke up to show the wet sucking danger underneath. There was some kind of miniature cataclysm. I found myself ont he ground - perhaps on the banks of a proper river. I remember looking over flowing autumnal water at the opposite bank. The bank had been ripped apart, and I could see into a miniature corridor that was part of the hyper-park's sewage / overflow system. The corridor was lit by at least one lightbulb, hanging from the brick ceiling. I wondered why they bothered to light the corridor as it was really no larger than an average man's arm.

Apocalypse of the Non-Euclidean Geometrists

An arctic spring, but this unseasonal cold has an unexpected side effect of leaching all colour from everything. Interiors are safe (the yellow of the lightbulb) but all exteriors are in grey and white only. There were shadows this morning, but as the day has progressed, even these bled themselves into white. I stand looking at the horizon - where there was once a horizon - from the fourth floor at work. It isn't fog, or mist, it's like all darkness has ceased to exist, all depth, all perspective. Welcome to the two dimensional apocalypse people. I imagine overnight that angles and straight lines will continue to break down. We might wake up to a very different world. The reign of the non-Euclidean geometrists has begun.

Conversation with a Ninety Year Old Woman

At some point, I thought I should start taking notes, otherwise I wouldn't remember anything of what she was saying. This is what I managed to put together from those notes. It's not a nice story - not all of it - and it's a bit confused because she is ninety years old and was talking to me for over an hour.

When her husband came back at the end of World War 2, he was in a 'right old state', weighing six and a half stone, even though he was well over six foot. He had been captured by the Germans -somewhere near Russia? With Russians? He was put on some kind of death-march. Very, very cold   - no boots and no cover. They slept in the snow. He had had enough, and begged the German officer; 'do me a favour, shoot me'. The Officer nodded and walked away. He was left in the snow, and thought he would die there, beneath the white, and found when the snow thawed. The people in a nearby cottage gave him soup and saved him. He was sent to an Italian prisoner of war camp, but the S.S came to pick him up. He didn't know where he was sent, but in his cell there was only 'a shelf' to sleep on. The S.S would come to torture the prisoners. They would hear the boots come along the corridor, and all the prisoners would pray don't let it be me, don't let it be me, and if the boots went by the cell, they knew it would be someone else's turn, and he would feel guilty, because he felt that he had wished it on them. She said that her husband talked of 'hooks' and 'screaming'. She said that she felt 'someone' was watching over her husband, for the S.S then took him to work at a flour mill, where they stole what food they could. He was then sent to another P.O.W camp 'full of cut-throats' who would 'kill you for nothing'. He befriended an ex-sailor, who warned him 'not to go in the cubbyhole' because the prisoners would kill him. They heard rumours that the allies were coming. There was some kind of revolt, and they (the prisoners) grabbed the guards rifles, and 'got the guards strung up - hung them with barbed wire'. She said that her husband refused to talk about what else had happened. There were Americans at the gate of the P.O.W camp, but the prisoners seemed to have gone insane and 'were shooting people left, right and centre'. When he returned to England he 'suffered dreadful nightmares' and 'gradually, his mind went'. He would attack her. 'He thought I was a German' she said 'and I would hold him and say 'it's alright Fred, I won't let them touch you'. While she was trying to care for her husband, she was also caring for her blind mother who lived around the corner. She found herself in a 'right old state'.
She talked more, about her life as a spiritual healer (and despite what one thinks about spiritual healing, her descriptions of her experience were lucid and fascinating). She said she 'worked for Churchill' during World War 2, though in what capacity she wasn't clear on, and whether she meant literally or figuratively I wasn't able to tell. She said that she was housebound now, and couldn't really walk and says that her 'days just hang... you can't do anything, you can't go anywhere... it drags...' Written down, it sounds like Hell without hope, but she also spoke about her plans for her ninetieth birthday, and her children, and a trip she recently - comparatively - took to Gambia - 'I had never flown in an aeroplane before'.
I wished had taken more notes - what notes I did scrawl are quite illegible - and I wish I could have talked to her for longer. 'If there's anything you want to do' she said 'just do it, don't wait, because time passes by'.

Last Day of Being 40

My last day of being 40. I've never really got the hang of ageing, but when the alternative is ddeath, I think I'll stick with ageing thank you very much. Just ripping Brutal Truth's Sounds of the Animal Kingdom to listen to on the way to work, which has little to do with anything really, but have a mild cold and can't be bothered to go to the bathroom to brush my teeth.

All thats left are Factories

'I once had ambitions - mild hopes -' he said 'and now all I have are factories'.
Grey day, low horizons. I drink a cup of tea.
'Factories..?'
'Oh you know' he gestures to the shallow buildings behind him 'wide rooms where we spend all day fitting bits of metal into other bits of metal.. The kind of place where you learn to day-dream really well, because you're too tired to do anything else'.
I imagine the factories going on into a horizon beyond all horizons. Endless shifts spent in abstract and virtuoso displays of fitting bits of metal into other bits of metal.
'But what for? What is it all for?'
Something curious happens to his expressions. Ripples across his forehead.
'For. For themselves.'
'The managers?'
'The bits of metal we spend all day fitting into other bits of metal. They're running the show. We do it for them'.
My cup of tea is cold, grey like the day and those low horizons.
I would like to say to him that at least I have hopes - mild though they may be - but he is gone, and all there are, of course, are the factories.

(with apologies to Thomas Ligotti, our most temporary of supervisors)

Too Many Triangles

The evening tastes blue, something celestial and oceanic. The coolness has traces of snow left inside it, but there is something else too. I can't see, my eyes are too tired from the tyranny of geometery. Our lived are full of too many angles, too many straight lines. Can't sleep because I've got indigestion from eating too many triangles.
Pavements, buildings, offices, the walk to work and back. Even sleep is too ordered, and my dreams are full of things not done, things not remembered, and things that slip away.
I concentrate on twilight again.
There is something vast here, an arctic relief - fragments and snapshots of haunted summers - trees at the edge of the field in a metal breeze - under constant blue skies - the wind through the wheat, a winding path.
I long to disappear here, fall into that moment of falling to sleep -balancing there- for ever.
(the sound of a flute,
 the sound of singing, across a secret pool of water, at dusk,
 picking blackberries in haunted places
 a boat drifting)

9:55pm

I hear the sound of the television from the living room. Not sure why I've left it on. There was a programme I was half watching about creativity, which was half interesting. I'm waiting to rip Meshuggah's album Contradictions Collapse onto my i-pod. There is a worrying smell of burning coming from the kitchen. I wonder if I have left the oven on from the baked potatoes earlier. I'm reading a story by Cherrie Wilder called The House on Cemetery Street. I think. I'm not sure the spelling of her name either. The snow's all gone. A late shift tomorrow, and an early shift on Saturday, then off to London to watch Inade play somewhere. Dreamt last night that I was on a coach and I had a ticket for drinks, and everyone else got on the coach and found seats, and I couldn't and the interior of the coach had turned into some liminal mansion that resembled a waiting room. haven't had a cup of tea yet. Time for the kettle.

Night Voice

I went to the toilet in the middle of the night. After I had just shut the door of the toilet, I heard the most hideous and terrifying voice. It was my flatmate in his room, sleep-talking, or sleep-shrieking. It sounded like exactly the kind of thing you don't want to hear in an empty house at night. It was only one single ululation, halfway between a sigh of supernatural insanity and agonised terror. After this one sound, there was silence, which was, somehow, worse.

Somewhere near Findon

Snow. Getting deeper. Deceptive flurries - looking like they'd be gone in seconds, but these not-there flurries didn't stop, and by the time I got to go home (late shift this week) all buses had been cancelled, and the snow was looking decidedly not transient.

Walked back with people from work. Laughing at fear of slipping. Watching the cars and the vans slide on even the lightest gradient. Snow seems suddenly dangerous. A woman falls in front of us. We go to help her up. She is worried that she has banged her head (she hasn't). We do not know whether the woman who has fallen is a masculine woman or a transvestite. Debate rages until we go our separate ways.

Looking down at the Mews, and the ghost-flurries continue, covering the footsteps I left there earlier. When I got back from work, there was a lost man looking for number 12. I walked with him to the end of the Mews, where the number '12' was quite prominently displayed on the door. Left him knocking on the post-flap (suddenly forgot what they're called - you know, those things you post letters through - post box? No, they're the red things you leave your letters in... Letter box? Letter flap?)

The strange sadness of last night has transmuted itself into something else, some kind of portent. Post-midnight air seems full of omens. Go to sleep and wake up, half expecting to be under siege by the snow - I imagine work will be dilapidated tomorrow. All those people stuck at their outlying towns; Eastbourne, Peacehaven, Newhaven... Andy gets a lift back from work, and half an hour after that gets a text from the person who gave him the lift back, saying that he is stuck 'somewhere near Findon' and is having to stay in his car the night...

The middle of March and it suddenly feels like the snow of early 1991... to be precise. The last great snowfall I can remember before, all those years - over a decade - a decade and a half - of snowless winters and too-hot summers.

I remember the first snow of 1991. I remember helping a man push his car up Woodstock Drive, I remember a man in his fifties, looking like he had stepped out of 1950s New York looking for a church, I remember being two and a half hours late for an interview at Chelsea art college, the bearded man who gave me my interview, and my apologies for my lateness 'yes, of course, the snow, all the tube trains must be delayed'.

Ham and Snow

Despite the premonitions of springtime that certain days last week promised - or at least rumoured, I wake today to find that it is snowing outside. Tyrannical white / grey sky, the colour of existential childhood nightmares, drifting flakes meandering insolently to the ground, and perturbed seagulls on the roofs of the houses opposite.

My ham had frozen together in the fridge, and had to defrost them by means of the toaster and kettle.

Colonel Gadaffi's Grocery Store

There is a local shop I never go into. I'm not sure why. It sells groceries and other useful items - the newsagent next door just sells newspapers and snacks, yet I am always reluctant to enter. The man who runs the shop bears more than a passing resemblance to deposed (and dead) Libyan dictator Colonel Gadaffi, but on the rare occasions I have spoken to him (about twice including today) he has always been very polite and friendly.
Perhaps it is the shop itself. It is a medium size (medium for a local shop) room without any central shelves. All the produce are stacked around the walls. This gives the shop an exposed and watched air. The colonel slouches behind the till with the air of an old Marvel comic book super villain. I had to go in there today to buy some toilet paper (I went to the Sainsburys on Portland Road first of all, but bought The Sunday Times and completely forgot about toilet paper). I didn't even know whether or not they sold toilet paper. Still, a local shop selling groceries and other useful items would be bound to sell toilet paper.
The Colonel greeted me as I entered. I went to one corner of the small room - I don't know why - and looked intently at the corner that was selling a variety of cleaning products. I turned back to the Colonel; 'Excuse me, do you sell toilet paper?'. He gestured toward the door, where I had passed a large pyramid-construction of various brands of toilet paper, both cheap and expensive. I thought it would be ostentatious to go for a quilted variety so settled for Andres instead.

St Marys Moon

You never remember the things you think you're going to remember. The ghosts that stay with you are rarely those you look for at the time. I'm listening to the album Viva by Xmal Deutschland, just downloaded from Amazon. I used to have this on cassette tape, and not heard it for years. I bought it first nineteen years ago.
The spring of 1994.
I was 22 years old, and in the last few months of a foundation course in art and design at Langley College, just outside of Slough. Those last few months were a whirlwind of trying to get a portfolio of artwork together, trying to get a place at some college or university when the course finished (I ended up studing illustration at Southampton) and the usual dramas, both dismal and delightful, that accompany being 22 years old.
When I play this album, this isn't what I remember - those things I thought would come back.
It's this:
At the time I was living in a rented room in Uxbridge - I had grown away from my old friends, and my social group centred around those people I went to college with, most of whom lived in Reading and Bracknell. This meant that those weekends when we didn't meet up in Reading became somewhat isolated affairs. I didn't have a job, and it was not unusual to spend the entire weekend in that cool and sunless room, reading bad horror novels and working on artwork.
I would sometimes take myself into London after I had got back from college. There were a number of second hand record shops that opened late - and it was in one of these, the Record and Tape Exchange at Notting Hill Gate, that I found this tape.
That spring was a hot one - more like an imagined summer than anything else. I remember the electric taste of the air, wandering round London, and wondering about my future, where I would end up when college had finished, if I would find a place at university or be doomed to spend the rest of my days in the Metropolitan-terminus town of Uxbridge.
Returning back top my room, I must have spent the weekend in that shadowy listless room, the end of term coming up all too quickly, trying not to be annoyed that the album was on tape, and not CD or vinyl, which I preferred, but couldn't afford, or find. Lonely weekends. It wasn't a very sociable house I lived in then and it was always a relief to get back to college on Monday if I hadn't gone out. I remember the yellow 458 bus from Uxbridge to Langley, each day a slight panic at all that time slipping away...
The album sounds like all those absences, those long spaces when I was on my own (I remember one too hot evening I walked back from Langley to Uxbridge, across all that outer-London wasteland of landscapes that seemed tinged with some undefined surreality). Spring time opening up into summer, back in those days when each summer promised some myth, some adventure, some fear...
The album encapsulates all that loneliness, all that hope, songs of lost youth.
Perhaps.
There was one song on the album called Morning, where the lyrics were taken from an Emily Dickinson poem. I remember the words haunting those in-between days: will there really be a morning?

Southampton was nowhere near as enjoyable as Langley had been. A drab and uninspiring place, a topography that inspired an introverted desperation, but I remember this too:
I was walking back from the Southampton Institute of Higher Education (grey blocks like car parks) on a spring evening, about a year from when I had first bought the album. I don't imagine I was very happy - I spent most of my time at Southampton not being happy. It was one of those spring evenings that seemed electrified and unreal, where the sky is creased violet and seems threaded through with unseen, unheard lightning. I remember one song starting (I can't remember the title now - it was on the first side of the cassette tape) just as I entered the less than salubrious environs of St Marys. As I walked into the streets where I lived, the song and the streets seemed to somehow synchronise, as if something somewhere - some hidden landscape - was just opening up. There is an image connected to this, though I can't remember if it is a memory, or the distillation of that spring evening encapsulated into a single image; a pink moon in a violet sky, pale and bloated over the houses. A St Marys Moon, I remember thinking, and in that moon, whether it was imagined or remembered, was all that was missing from my time at Southampton, all that magic and hope and fear which had been there the year before but had been too close to it to see it.

Must be the last few song of the album now, and as the downloaded music comes to an end (no cassette tape now) I am surprised by how familiar it all is, as if the last time I heard the album wasn't at least ten years ago but last week, or last month.
Anyhow.
Song's faded out now, and the album's over.
Friday night and another weekend looms, but instead of an art college to return to on Monday, there's a call centre, and instead of a painting or a drawing or a lino-cut, there will be calls to answer, complaints to write, and a clock to watch.
Keep thinking about that St Mary's moon now.
Funny the things that stay with you.

Gods and Eastenders

Pockets of summer in the late winter air; blossoms and the echoes - premonitions - of deep spring evenings, breathe in, and the air tastes of flowers and rivers, dark water and a certain tilt of horizons under not-quite-dark skies.
Gods are violet, and turn their myths into a silence.
I finish the crossword in the Independent newspaper by midday. I think I was justified in using the internet to look up the answer to 'Norfolk fishing port'. I would never have guessed it was Great Yarmouth. I wasn't even really sure where Norfolk was really. Looking on Googlemaps, I see it was in that part of the country I've never gone to, lost fragment of Britain on the right-hand side.
The day slipped by like mercury, lost that silver snake somewhere. Lost like the east in the drains of the day.
Now to make the evening go by slowly. Maybe I'll ask those violet gods to slow everything down... or just watch Eastenders, which makes every second seem an eternity anyway.

7:56am

Subtle shift in the light - or the air - some undefined element, and though it's still bone-crushingly cold, it feels more like spring now than winter.
I slept on the floor again last night, which is good for my back - and surprisingly comfortable. I would have hoped that this would have led to more interesting dreams, but to no avail.
There is - or was - some seagull on the (presumably) roof of the house next door - what a bloodcurdling noise! Maybe it was the seagull I saw last night, stalking along the flat roof with a sour and primordial expression on its face. It walked with the gait of a bad tempered mafia hitman - possibly - I've never seen any in real life, and because I don't watch films that much, even  less in films.
I probably pass by assassins every day.
Ah well. Five minutes till another machine-life day at work.

Solace and Machine-Life

It was on a programme I watched a week or so ago. Not a particularly original thought, but like all true ones, something you can't quiet shake off. The programme was a documentary set in a 'fried chicken shop' in South London. One of the workers was being interviewed, a thoughtful young man who was studying in England, after moving over from India (I think). He said that life in this country consisted of work and sleep and work and sleep, a 'machine life' he called it. Not an original thought, like I said, but a true one. Just got back from work, exhausted and drained - too many days like this - and I would like to draw or read, but I'll just stare at the TV, wait to go back to sleep, and work, and sleep, and work, and sleep. Machine-life.
I snatch bits of solace on the way home; the sight of an icy-white street lamp down a side road I never noticed before, two old men getting out of a car, looking delighted, listening to the Hunter not the Hunted album by And Also The Trees, and watching the road ahead of me vanish into an imagined distance of poplar trees and drawn-curtain windows in tilting houses.

Knights, Terminators, Friends and Endangered Species

My friend Mark has just started a blog, and you should all read it... found here. Go on, you'll be pleased you did.