Wednesday 24 April 2013

Overheard Conversation Outside the Pub

Sat outside The Stoneham with Em. Sneaky Wednesday pint. Couple of people behind us. One tells everyone how someone with a 'fake facebook profile' contacted him and suggested they have sex. He wrote back and said that he 'wouldn't do that as... (he) ... already has a girlfriend'. The person with the fake facebook profile then sent a message to his girlfriend 'saying that they had had sex'. He knew who it was though, someone he had known for years. I didn't overhear anything else as I was no longer paying any attention.

Footsteps Made of Spears

Balancing on ice. It's getting thinner here, and I'm getting heavier. Putting on weight as I try and make it across this... whatever it is I'm on. I can't see land any more - that is, if this can't be described as land. I don't think it is, but I don't think there's water under this ever thinning ice either. I can't see what it is, but that's exactly it. I think there IS nothing beneath me, just a forever, an abyss of forever that this beginning-to-crack ice is keeping me back from. Every step forward becomes slower, more uncertain, and my tread becomes heavier, and the ice, oh, it's paper thin now, and my footsteps are made of spears.

Tuesday 23 April 2013

After Walk

Went for a long walk to try and dislodge the melancholy of Nan's passing, which is hitting me harder than I expected it to. I had to take today off of work, and I ended up going to London and buying old comics from 30th Century Comics at Putney. This helped a bit, but as soon as I returned home it crept up again, hence the long walk. Walked past the petrol station, along the Old Shoreham Road to Seven Dials, then back to the big Tescos and home again. I have a cheap pie cooking in the oven (83p from the reduced section!). Not looking forward to work tomorrow - can't believe I'm going to Poland this week (though as Em says, maybe it will help things).

Never Sleep Again

The Thames shifts, eternal water deep under blue skies. Never seems to move, and I do not even look at the water, not really. Pass by, as it passes me.
The sun is out, and it's hot, and it should feel like summer, but it doesn't. Every tube station I pass through seems dusty, somehow drained of itself. The air is full of dust, and London itself seems unfocused.
On the too-hot train, I start to nod off to sleep.
Back in my room, and with a thin quilt wrapped around me, the windows open  behind me, the air is cold in some springtime way, and everything still looks unfocused. I am tired and full-up and hungry and feel like I'll never sleep again.
Off to Poland on Friday, then back on Monday, and then up to Nan's funeral on Tuesday. The logistics of it all confound me. I need to print out my boarding pass, I need to change money, I need to work out how I'm going to get to wherever the funeral will be.
A sudden seagull cry outside, a cold sound.
The Thames still shifts, in unseen, unfelt London, as all those streets darken to night, but I am not there now to watch it flow - or not watch it flow - nor to divine in it's superstitious water any futures I might not want to see.



Monday 22 April 2013

Polar Bears

Things spread out, become distant, and all those once-safe things are lost. An ambiguous lost though. They have been here longer than us, and will remain when we're gone. Lost, just the same. Never see the sun fall through certain windows, never watch the sea from a crumbling mine-work I thought I would know till old age, never watch the street lamps switch themselves on in childhood alleys again.
Everything shifts and changes. Ice floes crack, become smaller, and the gaps between the frozen islands we cling to become larger. Gaps full of nasty seas, tides hiding endless abysses of horror and unknowing. Oh, polar bears, hoe can you live like this? I think of you, and you are the perfect metaphor for us all, trying to survive entropy, trying to live with things falling apart.
You can swim, and I can't, and you could plunge into the icy water and survive and I can't.
Sleep the winter, wake the spring. I don't know if you know autumns or summers.
All we know are factories, and I bet the polar bears gave never thought of them at all.

Birdsong

Through the closed curtains, and the closed windows, I hear the birds of morning. Shocked into sudden tunefulness by the belated spring, they suddenly seem much noisier than previous years - or perhaps they only seem so compared to the months of silence over this long winter. I don't know what kind of birds they are - some sound like early summers back in Ickenham, others like cold and misty mornings in Forres. Strangely, the only birds I don't seem to hear are seagulls.

Sunday 21 April 2013

Sunday Coffee

I meet Em for a cup of coffee between her work shifts. Despite the bright sunlight, I am surprised by how cold the air is. I wait on a bench for her, freezing in the breeze.
We go for a coffee at a cafe down George Street - one I've not been in before. At the back of the cafe (we sit out in a pleasing and ramshackle 'conservatory' area) there are a group of women who I imagine might look like they're from mexico. I try to pretend we are in mexico, but even inside it is still too cold.
A large late middle-aged woman sits on the table next to us. She is swears to herself, and when two children run past she mutters under her breath about 'damn kids'. An unpleasant woman. I feel like telling her to fuck off, but today has been a bad enough day as it is, without having an argument with this foul creature who sits next to us.

Nan

Nan was 92 years old when she died this morning, after being taken ill last week. It is very strange to think that she is now gone. Imagine being born in 1920! - It is an impossible age back. I remember talking to her about world war 2. I remember her, when I was a teenager, being less than impressed with my interest in heavy metal. The last time I saw Nan - just before Christmas - she said that, even now, she would see certain patches of countryside that she would call 'Stuart country'. She explained that when I was kid, on country walks, I would always run up ahead - often up some kind of embankment, and hide behind a tree or bush, and jump out on whoever I had been walking with. I have no memory of this, but it sounds like the kind of thing I would do.
I shall miss Nan.

Saturday 20 April 2013

Something I Wrote Last Week


I wrote the following last week while at work. I can't remember when, and forgot all about it. it ends abruptly because I went home ill from work, and didn't think about it again until I found it this morning in my drafts.
Here it is:

Look out of the window, at all the roofs of Brighton, a landscape of chimneys and aerials. A geography of anachronism. Flutters of seagulls. There is a slight haze about everything, a sea mist, been here for a few days. The sun is weak, and can’t break through, reminds me of trying to drag yourself out of the exhausted sleep of convalescence.
I could daydream here for days.
One of those washed out and mysterious spring days. When walking into work this morning, the roads were heavy with rain, or the ghosts of anyway. I don’t remember it raining last night, but the pavements were wet, and there was something shivery about the still leafless trees.
If there is a ghost story for each season, I thought, what would the ghost story for spring be? All I could think of was of certain places – certain kinds of places – that may exercise some kind of influence on someone. Imagine; a drifty-day like this, full of coolness and slight traces of warmth, the taste of some budding and soporific fecundity in the air. I could taste this air in the cool sigh of the stairs here at work – the angles of the shadows were softened and old – and I thought that this was a very ancient day. The kind of day that feels as if it has always been here, shifting at the edges of all the other younger days. Ragged wings. A butterfly song.
The kind of place that might exercise and influence would be one of those small clumpy woods (a few old and tangled trees really) that might huddle by the side of a railway line. The kind of place that might be glimpsed when passing through – perhaps on a train – or walking by, seen across a lazy, wasted field perhaps.
On certain days – such as this one – the place, in this case, the small clump of obscure trees – might, in some way become active. By active (or perhaps alive) I mean that it would become transmitting something, some kind of signal. The person concerned – I suppose I am talking myself – even the most fictional of

Friday 19 April 2013

Brew Crew

Walked home along the seafront after work, and ran into Andy up near the swimming pool in Hove seafront. In the almost-warm sun, we watched a group of scummy looking drinkers rant at a group of foreign students. They brew crew clutched cans of special brew, and swore at each other and the foreign students. The leader of the brew crew - a blonde haired woman who looked like she was collapsing into some addictive corruption - screamed and shrieked about stabbing the foreign students in the eyes with a knife. The brew crew shoved and pushed each other, screamed at the foreign students. 
The foreign students sat and ignored them, and the brew crew wandered off, screaming up the beach. 

Thursday 18 April 2013

Metaphorical Tanker Drivers

When I worked at the petrol station, we had to take in fuel deliveries. This necessitated huge tankers pulling into the forecourt, and the petrol station closing down while I stood drinking coffee with the usually bluff tanker drivers. The tanker drivers were generally an alright lot, though their conversational subjects were of little interest to me; football, their shifts (they loved talking about their shifts for some reason) and... well, that was all they did seem to talk about. I learnt to lie a lot about football. On the occasion that the tanker drivers were more interesting the results could lead into unexpected territory; 'where were you before you came over here?' I said to one tanker driver with an Eastern European accent. 'I was a prisoner in a Serbian concentration camp' came the reply. This left me quite speechless.
The deliveries usually took around 45 minutes, and passed by excruciatingly slow. They weren't that often though - not during the evening shifts - and one could go weeks without seeing in a delivery. 
I cursed the arrival of one delivery though. I had something of a crush on one of my co-workers who was due to return to Poland the next day. This was to be our last shift together (she was a part time worker). In the middle of the shift, and much to my horror, a petrol tanker turned up... This necessitated me having to spend an hour (it was a big delivery) stood chatting inanely to the tanker driver (who was in no rush) while Monika was inside serving customers (who were only forbidden to buy petrol). All I wanted to do was be back inside, and that hour dragged by so slowly...
I only mention this today, because all of work has begun to seem like seeing in that tanker delivery.
Work is just getting in the way of what I want to do, is excruciatingly slow, and is full of crushing tedium. The trouble is, of course, I don't really know what I want to do, and if there is no lost love about to return to foreign climes the next day, I am more than aware that life is passing by all too quickly. How did I get to be 41? How did my thirties pass by that quickly?
Answer's obvious; by wasting my time talking to tanker drivers, those both real and metaphorical.

Wednesday 17 April 2013

Snake Day

7:15pm..? Feels like I've only just finished work (well, I have, I finished at 6:00pm) - and we're already deep into the evening. These days are passing by like quicksilver...
Feels more like spring now. There were rumours of the sun for seconds.
Hacking into the limbo-system of metaphysical computers. Oh, what do we find; time pooled up like cul-de-sacs, wasted days and exhausted evenings. A virus made up of watching the sky darken top dusk, and in the silence some knot of disquiet unraveling in a serpentine and sinister fashion.
I remember the heatwave of last year. It didn't last for long. I remember listening to Pantera's back catalogue, and reading John Burnside's A Summer of Drowning, I remember the summery air that wasn't, of course, to last.

Tuesday 16 April 2013

Petrol Station Tarot

In the petrol station dusk of first springtime evenings. Outside the window, the light - or lack of it - is an impossible shade of blue. I remember I used to watch all these old twilights from here, gaze past the counter, look across the petrol pumps, down the Old Shoreham Road and into the cool darkness of Hove Park.
During certain Sunday afternoons - usually those that accompany the end of summer - and if it was a grey day, I used to think that the distance has made those houses a mystery. I'm not sure exactly what I was referring to, nor can I remember exactly where those houses were. On those first cloudy days of late summer (when there were summers) there was a certain sense of shadowy possibility of those distant houses (their locations now lost), a dreamy sense of sleep split through with something cool and vast...
When I left the petrol station, I did not glance up the road, but I knew what would have been there. The darkness of the Old Shoreham Road, accentuated by those monolithic street lights. They used to remind me of dinosaurs, something pterodactyl-like in their shape. When I used to shut the petrol station down at 10:30pm, and walk home underneath their lurid orange glow, I would feel quite removed from any other time. It was as if the only thing that ever existed was this, myself walking down the Old Shoreham Road, alone in those strange hours before midnight. There was a secrecy here, and I would gladly greet all those psychic landmarks I had named; The House on the Bordeland, Farewell Corner, Black Dog Bridge, The Mask in the Woods, The Substation... Even in the unhappier seasons of my life there would be a strange recompense here, a kind of peace. Serenity would vie with mystery, and everything, home, life and the petrol station, would seem a welcome infinity away.

Monday 15 April 2013

Worcester Tales - The Miniature Den

136 London Road, autumn of 1997.
Being students we spent a lot of time stoned or drunk, and we had plenty of time on our hands to engage in both activities (twelve hours of lectures a week!). Perhaps this explains why one day, in the long and narrow garden of the aforementioned house we had built a kind of 'miniature den'. this 'den' was made up of things we had found in the garden and the play room of the house; bits of wood, corrugated plastic, an old town. It looked like the kind of thing a child might make to camp out in, except in was far too small for even a child. You could carry it in your arms, except it would collapse of course. I have no idea why we had built this thing. Bored probably.
We forgot about the miniature den until one Friday night (or it may have been a Saturday night). We were drunk and stoned again, and had decided to have a look at the back garden in the gathering October cold. Someone pointed out that there was something in the den. we approached carefully. We could hear it move. Panicky movements. What had we caught? We approached slowly, so as not to scare the thing, when in reality it was because, drunk and stoned, we were all terrified. 'Whatever it is' said Sally's boyfriend 'it looks very frightened'. It was very dark, but, yes, I could definitely see some kind of movement. Had we caught a cat or a fox? I began to feel guilty, hoping it wasn't injured. It took us a further couple of minutes of scared crawling to reach the miniature den, which had now turned into some kind of trap, only to discover there was nothing there of course. 
We had imagined the while thing.
We dismantled the miniature den slowly.
Just in case we imagined something else.

Things That Can't Possibly Exist

Just watched Juno. It was good. Need to brush my teeth and go to sleep. I can already hear the Tuesday mornign alarm, even though I've got tomorrow off. The flat is silent. This could be back in December but it's warmer. I yearn for vague things I can't quite define, a certain sense of time - or place - rather than event or object or love. It probably wouldn't help if I could define them, and anyway, it;s quite fun yearning for something numinous - like having nostalgia for a time that couldn't possibly exist.

Sunday 14 April 2013

Lines Written on Hove Promenade, Sunday Afternoon

I pause outside your room, and listen to the great churning of factory machines inside. I imagine you lulled into a nepenthe of sleep, a cathedral-like reverie of exhaustion. I have known you for years, but in your room I do not know you at all. The same must be said for me of course. I imagine you imagining me, and I know you fail, as I do, if you imagine at all.
There is a paradise in shutting the door of my room, no poison jibber-jabber of the babbling world (aside from the children of the Polish mother next door). There is a sense of loss though. A loneliness that is always in the rooms we sleep in alone.
What we need makes us mourn.
There is no room here. I'm sat on one of the seafront benches, on the first sunny day of the year. The late afternoon is ragged with the remains of the Brighton Marathon, and the cries of children, shocked into a joyful trauma by a day that actually seems like spring.
Both our rooms are silent now. I am listening to the sea and you are at work. Nothing moves there - nothing that I will see anyway - and there is a part of me that does not want to return.
I would prefer to sleep on the pebbles in the warm sun, let myself drop into sleep as the tide creeps up to cover us and all the rooms we pretend to own.

Intermittent Sun

Intermittent sun.
I watch it out of the window - sudden surges of hope combine with caution - I remember yesterday when a walk into town turned into a soggy mess. Shall I wait, shall I go? Shall I download another album for the inevitable walk?
Yesterday's melancholy was dissipated by artwork, as is often the case. I returned back to the drawing of London Road, Worcester I started back in the autumn of 2011. I worked until past midnight on it, and woke this morning at 9:30am and finished it. There is something quite relieving about finishing old projects that you never thought would be completed.
Beyond the clouds there are a few strands of blue skies, rumours more than anything else. I think of the beach, but it will be difficult to access thanks to the Brighton Marathon. As I made my third cup of tea of the morning I could hear the shouts and cheers down on New Church Road. I presumed they were shouts and cheers, over the noise of the boiling kettle, they could also be mistaken for a riot, or perhaps a lynch mob.

Alarmed

I remember old nights like this. Up late with no thought of the morning. I've got tomorrow - and Monday off - but O can still hear that alarm clock on Tuesday morning. Still hear the factory calling me.

Saturday 13 April 2013

Footsteps

The splinter of wood, like footsteps. I long for those days - surely they can't all be lost? - of lying in   a churchyard on a hot afternoon, reading Fernando Pessoa's Book of Disquiet.

Splinter

The sound of twilight birds made me feel nostalgic, but I didn't know what for.

This is Brighton, not Bruges

Left the house to walk up town, thought the air would clear the heavy melancholy of a weekend where I should be somewhere else, but thanks to a sudden bout of illness - passed now - I am still in Brighton.
I had hoped that the grey might pass, but the skies remained immutable. I walked down the beach, listening to the Garden of Delight album I had just downloaded, 'Rediscovered 2013'. This started to remind me (as everything reminds me of everything else) of the last time I had downloaded a Garden of Delight album, back in the August of 2008.
That weekend had a similarly melancholy feel to this one - an empty house, grey and cold weather, and an odd feeling of loss. Both my flatmates were away, and no-one else was about. I can't remember why now. I remember sitting out in the garden of Wilbury Crescent feeling sorry for myself under the shelter of the apple trees. Looking back I can't see how anyone could feel sorry for themselves when sat under an apple tree in a beautiful garden, but there you go, such are the laws of melancholy for you. The heavy grey of the sky darkened to rain, and I took to sheltering in the shed that was never used, and sat on a rocking chair I had bought down from the living room. It was quite comfortable in there, but I remember the heaviness of that day, a Sunday if I remember rightly, and how everything bright and light was robbed out of the day... except it wasn't leached from the day, but was leached, of course, from me.
I walked down first of all to Hove Lagoon. It's bleakness appeals to me. Cold water, sailing clubs with all the appeal of nowhere-provincial towns, benches under distant shelters on the far side, the haunt of teenagers on dark afternoons. The beach was full of dog walkers wrapped up against the increasingly inclement weather. I thought - briefly - about stopping at the Meeting House Cafe for a coffee, but the weather made it too unpleasant, and I headed into town instead. I bought The Tomorrow People volume 5 on DVD from CEX (as well as The Last King of Scotland). I walked down the North Laine, crammed with too many people. Made me feel like screaming at them. I went to Dave's Comics which was packed with people. I've never known as comic shop so popular. I bought a couple of new releases (Age of Ultron and a one-off Ultron special), flicked through a few graphic novels, went to Trafalgar Street Records (Not it's real name - I can never remember what it's called) and came home.
The rain had got worse as I started to walk back, a cold freezing drizzle that soaked me to the skin. If everything had gone right, I should have been in Brugges, basking in the novelty and anxiety of a new city in a country I have never been in before, but instead here I was, in Brighton alone, and soaked through.
I watched the humourless Tomorrow People story called 'Into The Unknown' then retreated to my room, put on the one Raison D'etre album I have, and drifted into a cold and troubled sleep. I have only recently woken.
Still raining outside. I watch it with equanimity. Guilt presses in on me. All I want to do is make a cup of tea and stare at the gathering evening outside, but if I don't expend my energy on artwork, this weekend will turn into a wasted as well as a melancholy one.

A Word for this I Can't Rememver

White skies. No perspective, no colour, no movement, no sound. In a cathedral of silence - this is an anti-whispering gallery - and I imagine the streets there twined with altars, the seafront laying with pews, and prayers resting in the Churchill Square shopping centre, the cafe on the seafront, the newsagent across the road. Is it cold or warm? I can't tell. There is something unsettled out there - something mixed from a pensiveness and a sleepiness, an anachronistic disorder, a juxtaposition of typhoid and the best day ever. Maybe. Time for me to go out there. My limbs are filled with a sluggishness, a lethargy that make me think of bed, but my mind is full of all of yesterday (most of yesterday) spent indoors. I am neither one or the other. There is word for this that I can't remember.

Friday 12 April 2013

The Timeless

Sometimes he could seem timeless, though I caught only glimpses of this.
He could find in reading a book a sense of fulfillment that always escaped me. Evenings of red wine and Eastern European literature, interspersed with staring out of the window at the now lost back garden at a certain tree. We called it the Magpie Tree because we had once seen magpies there, and we were superstitious, though weren't sure why.
When I was at the flat, I would drift from my small, shadowy room to the large living room, the kitchen. down to the garden, back again, up to the attic, rattling around. It was only when hungover I could find a sense of peace at being there - despite the fact that it was the happiest place I've lived. Time would always press in on me. I was jealous that he could find an eternity in a bottle of wine, a whole religion in a book he bought at Waterstones on some lost Sunday after Christmas.
This was what I thought anyway and is probably not true, and I never asked him, because in his timelessness I might find my own, even though I never did.

Welcome to Blank

An emptiness. The inevitable destination.
(walking back through rain alone, dark streets, post-midnight hollows, a few drunk people expelled from bars I avoid like the plague, a sudden thought of sudden violence, but i realise they don't see me and i slip through without being noticed)
Back again.
A grey country, spreading like a slow flood, and this is where I am to remain, at least for a while, and perhaps longer. There is nothing here. Flat fields, scrubby bushes. The air is cold and tired and I cannot tell if that is sunlight or fever.
I must rest in these empty rooms.
I remember other empty rooms.
(a weekend in Worcester, spring 1998, and I lie on my bed, hollowed out with a mild devastation, and i do not leave my room for the whole weekend, and there is no meaning in these hours, and there is no reason for me to leave and i listen to the same album again and again (a band called Crisis, hardcore band with a female singer) looking for some kind of release. Slow release. Headache pills won't work on no headache, and I take - took - them anyway)
Four days I no longer want, at least not in the way I thought I did two days ago. There is sunlight outside that means nothing to me now. I could sleep but I don't feel tired. There is nostalgia, but it just reminds me of empty times. I remember a schizophrenic friend describing a state of mind in the afterlife - a place in his deep delusions he was familiar - and found some meaning - with - and this state of mind was called blank, which he called depression without depression.
Sunlight on the houses outside the window. Cool air, icy-pure with spring cold. Forthcoming Fire's first album playing. My room, with the curtains drawn far back, is light and open.
Hours elongate, spread into days and weeks, and all those landscapes of growing older.
Crossing the line.
Welcome to blank.

Thursday 11 April 2013

Summer and the Gods

'Summer and the Gods'
pen and ink on 7.5" x 10" paper
April 8th - 9th 2013

Wednesday 10 April 2013

Nearing Distance

Lulled into daydream to by the cold spring weather and too many calls (again) at work. A miasma of vaguely hallucinogenic perception settles over me. Everything feels too bright and hyper-real. Rain outside, but a cold spring rain - it no longer feels like winter, even though it is by no means warm. The washing machine in the kitchen, a spin-cycle tide that brings currents of other places I've never seen but are as intimate as those dreams I can't remember from last night. A shadowed kitchen in a deep summer, a Mediterranean house full of secret rooms, a garden in Scotland, deep and shivery with a tangle of trees. Places known and not known.
Springtime drift.
The sky outside the window is a white / gray. All those old springtimes are here - not winter, not spring - I hear the cars pass by on the wet road, tyres and rain, and I swear I hear the sound of the distance not too far away.

Tuesday 9 April 2013

Worcester Tales - A Party in the Countryside, Spring 1997

I remember a party, deep in the Worcestershire country, late spring of 1997. The party was the friend of one of my then-housemates, whom I had met before, but didn't know too well. My flatmate's boyfriend drove us there. I have vague memories of the drive; miles and miles of sunlit countryside. I've never really got the hang of parties - so many people in one place unnerve me - and I drank too much to compensate.
The house - what I can remember of it - was quite old, quite large, and in a proper rural location, and was surrounded by outsize trees that you don't get down here in Sussex. I have very few memories of the party itself, except getting increasingly more uncomfortable, and increasingly drunk (I have a vague memory of playing with an axe, and telling my housemate and then her boyfriend how they wished they would be as cool as me when they were 25).
I insisted in sleeping in my flatmate's boyfriend's car. He was quite nervous about this as he had some fear (quite reasonable as I was stupidly drunk) that I might hotwire the car and drive off. I got my way, and spent a deep, drunken night  crammed into his car. Why I didn't sleep in the house is beyond me.
Dawn came early (it was spring bordering on summer) and I woke early. There was the sound of gunshots - this was deep in farming country. I remember the bright sun on the trees, the wind blowing through the leaves like the sound of a sea. This led into an odd dream where I was living in the Worcestershire countryside, and would survive on food stolen from a house that was having an endless party.
I woke up headache-y and hangover, and shamefaced, came in for a fried breakfast.
I was very glad to get back to Worcester later that day.

Monday 8 April 2013

Gods and Dark Fields

The Grand Union Canal leading out of Uxbridge. No, something smaller. A river. One of those manifold rivers that creased and circled this Metropolitan terminus station town. Early summer, when the air is rich and heavy and glutted with all the seeds and leaves and green. Shadowed river. So much foliage. Walking by this darkened stream, this June-brook, and I don't know when. 1993? 1994? The air tastes of river-earth, and the sun-dried path I'm walking on is narrow, cracked, and invaded by weeds. To my left is a ditch - and I only know this because I have been here in winter when one can see the ditch. Now it is crammed full of plants; nodding heads of cow parsley, scattering of daisies at the base, fevery dandelions. I imagine there is dark water beneath, secret  water. Does it flow, does it trickle, does it sing? You don't get summers like this after your mid-twenties when they became mundane things burnt through by work and all that tedious shit we fill our lives with to survive. When you're young - younger - these times are filled with the potential for something. On the other side of the ditch is a fence, and on the other side of the fence is some kind of industrial landscape. A place filled with squat factories with nameless purpose, chimneys, pipes, windows. You can only see a fraction of it, because there is so much foliage. The edge of these factory-lands is riven with trees. A breeze moves through them, makes you think of the sea, even though you're miles and miles inland. Breathe in the air, and it tastes like lightning to a god; sleep, wine, sex, youth, ghosts, and of lying in a dark field somewhere you can't remember waiting for it to get light. Dew on your back, and it makes you think sweetly of winter, or of autumn at least, or maybe those cool and rainy early days in a mild spring. You have to go back, back to the ground floor rented room in a town you've been trying to leave for years. The path stretches on into an infinitesimal distance. How promising that path looks, how mysterious and divine, and forever... but you must return back, and in that rented room of a town you are soon to leave you find cooling shadows and feel something loss. Sleep, dream. Try not to think of paths that lead to destinations never visited, only ever rumoured to be on horizons. It would have disappointed you, you tell yourself, and in years to come, when you are not young - or not as young - or whatever age-related appellation you wish to apply to yourself, you remember you were right. It would have disappointed you. That mysterious river, that shadowed path, would only have led to a glum housing estate, then after that through those flat scrubby fields robbed of poetry or mystery. The industrial estates, while only glimpsed, may have been full of a dream-like obscure splendor  but seen, they would have been planes of flat, sunshine-y glass and security guards, and those neat little bushes that remind you of Sunday garden centres. Still, you think, exhausted from another day at work, you'll never really know, because you were young then, and things might have been different, and you'll never know because you left that town that summer, and anyway, you'd been desperate to leave that town for years. You don't really want to think how far back that time was anyway.

Sunday 7 April 2013

Teenage Bedroom

This was my bedroom at Woodstock Drive in Ickenham in early 1988. I can tell this because of the Battle of the Halji boardgame on my bed that was a present that Christmas. Also, hanging over the headboard I can see the timetable for my mock GCSE exams that were to take place in January / February that year.
Like all teenagers, I plastered my bedroom with posters of my favourite bands - and not so favourite - I was never really a fan of Ozzy Osbourne or Kiss, but I can see posters of them. I imagine that they came from a copy of Kerrang! or Metal Hammer.
In the photograph there is a certain brightness of light that I associate with my teenage years - or at least that portion of it that happened when I was 15. That brightness was oddly harsh and strangely empty, mirroring the mild isolation I felt living in Ickenham where I knew no-one. Most of my friends lived in Hayes, while others lived in Hillingdon, and another in Uxbridge. These places were near enough that we could visit each others houses, but this required planning and co-operation from parents regarding lifts. I missed getting back from school and just hanging out with friends for an hour or two.
I liked my teenage bedroom. It was large and light, and was at the end of the house, looking out onto the front garden. My room was on the detached side of the semi-detached, if that makes sense. When I passed by here after nightfall in the November of 2011, the curtains were open and the lights were on and I could see straight into my old room. It was a very strange and surreal experience.
I would love to see my old room in real life, and not just in those frequent dreams where I am in my old room, and everything is dark and fascinating and haunted. I wonder what the current occupants would say if I rang on the door and asked them if I could have a look around? What would I say if someone rang the door of the flat here and asked the same?

Houses in Daytime

All houses are haunted. This much is obvious, though in this case it has nothing to do with ghosts.
This haunting works when you have a day to yourself, and you want to spend it inside. You actually don't want to do anything, for whatever reason; you need to catch up with yourself, you want to read, or draw, or just sleep and relax after another too-busy week at work.
Maybe it's a sense of guilt - that you shouldn't be 'wasting' your time just mooching about the house, and you should be doing something 'productive'. You don't want to do anything 'productive' though... the idea of sitting down to do a drawing is anathema...
I got up about 9:00 am and relocated to the living room, where I flicked through a graphic novels (reprints of Captain America and the Avengers). I couldn't relax. I should be doing something else. I tried watching television, a programme about World War II. This was quite interesting. I felt guilty watching it. The walls of the living room seemed to close in on me. I went back to my room, slept for a while. The air seemed full of grays, full of too many shadows. Outside seemed too cold to venture out despite the sun. I had lunch. I listened to music. I went back to sleep again.
By the time I got to leaving the house, at about 4:00pm, to meet Al and Claire at the Evening Star, it felt the house was haunted by a sense of... something. A sense of waste, of time going by too quick, and a certain heaviness in the air. I had had a headache all day, but within five minutes of leaving the house it had gone.
It was also bright and sunny outside, and felt like spring. I wished I had left the house earlier. The house seemed colder than the outside.
On the bus I thought about the flat, those dark, shadowy rooms, always cold and full of a soporific lethargy.
I've never got the hang of houses. Not in daylight anyway. By the time night falls, they seem perfectly habitable again. This haunting only works in daylight.

Friday 5 April 2013

Horror Comic Trees

Walking back from work tonight after finishing at 7:00pm.
Icy air - still (there had been flurries of snow in the morning) - made it feel like winter - the light - bright anf still light at 7:00pm - and this felt like spring - and I couldn't tell what season it was and it felt like some kind of chronopocalypse. Fragmenting moments - I watch a flock of birds - pigeons I think- land on the roof of a shop down Western Road, and I think this is their spring. Do they know the light, the change, or do they just feel the cold, their juust survived winter? Their movements as they landed reminded me of spring-times of twenty years ago and more - Swakeleys Park in Ickenham - buying Anathema's first album Serenades - about to leave home - watching the willow in the back garden of Woodstock Drive deepen to green - and in Swakeley's Park, a line of cut-back, coppiced trees, jagged branches against the sunset-skies of London Suburbia. Horror comic trees, and I wasn't yet 21 years old, and the future was so vast it was frightening.
41 years old now, and walking down Western Road, and that same sunset sky is behind different trees. Bare branches against the impossible red of sunset, and these were horror comic trees too. I could look beyond the building that blocked my way, back, back, back, beyond Shoreham Power Station, beyond the sea, and here, oh yes... and it's 30 years ago, and I'm 11. Up in Scotland, living in Forres, and thanks to a chapter in a book called the Encyclopedia of Horror, I am aware of something amazing which I never knew existed called a horror comic. The idea fascinates me, and Forres, where we live in Scotland becomes some kind of horror comic playground, I imagine vampires in the Black Woods, and the living dead rising from the tiny churchyards on the outskirts of town, and vampires under the street lamps of Drumduan Park. Not an urban gothic but a late-winter gothic.
There were plenty of trees here that were horror comic trees, plenty of those deep sunset skies that promised so much mystery, and I can always taste it; rain, earth, Sunday afternoons, and drawing horror comic trees in HB pencil on whatever scraps of paper I could find.

Quiet Desperation

Another day at work looms, and facing another 100+ calls. Fortunately I've got the weekend off, so all I've got to do is just concentrate on getting through it, and then I'll have the weekend to get myself together before another week of similar busy-ness. As I'm sitting here drinking my cup of tea (I couldn't face my normal bowl of porridge and only finished half) I start to dread that first shift - those first five hours of taking call after call after call with only a single ten minute break to try and gain some kind of mental recuperation. I lay in bed last night and all I could hear in my head was endless beeps (the signal that another call is coming through) and generic customer-voices. This followed me into sleep where I dreamt of call centres and exhaustion. 
Maybe it will be quieter today.

Thursday 4 April 2013

Sisyphus and the Call Centre

The number of calls I took today actually went up. I took close on 115 calls today. Over the first 5 hour period I had a single ten minute break. Aside from that it was call after call after call without let up. Then there was an hour for lunch, and then three hours (again with a single ten minute break - these breaks are now strictly monitored) of call after call after call. Around 5:00pm it began to achieve all the dimensions of a Sisyphian hell.


Wednesday 3 April 2013

Work

Another day in the call-centre. My second day of taking over a hundred calls. Left work at 7:00pm exhausted, my eyes fucked from staring at a computer screen for 7 hours and 40 minutes. (This doesn't count lunches and break-times - an hour and 20 minutes altogether). Walking home through the sudden snow (fat white drops of rainy pavements) and thinking there is a better way to live than this. My life is being consumed by that place. Time to go soon I think.

Tuesday 2 April 2013

Knot

Wake up with that knot of dread in my stomach, that dark disquiet that makes you want to tell the day to go away. Still freezing cold, you swing yourself out of bed, get disappointed to realize that you forgot to get porridge at the shop yesterday, and have to have two slices of toast instead. It's going to be one of those days; long and melancholic (a 10 - 7 shift at the call centre today) and when 7:00pm finally comes I'm off to see noisy post-industrialist legends band the Swans in town.

Monday 1 April 2013

Suburban Ghost Stories: Woodstock drive, Ickenham

Pen and ink on 7.5" x 10" paper
March - April 2013
The house I always dream about is haunting my drawings too. My room was the top left hand window. I slept here from when I was 13 - 21. It is almost exactly 20 years since I moved out, shortly after my 21st birthday in 1993.

Hats and Hungry Seas

You throw something out onto the sea. I don't know what - it doesn't really matter - but it's not a message in a bottle, because you expect to get nothing back. At first whatever you have thrown out onto the sea - lets pretend it's a straw hat (because I nearly lost one in the sea when I was an infant) - stays near you. It's almost like it's still with you. You can reach out and touch it, pick it up if you want to. You don't though. you watch it on the swell, on the up-and-down tides. It gets further out. You can't reach it any more - but even if you can't touch, it's still comforting to know it's still there. You watch the hat bobbing up and down, rain or sun, it doesn't matter, wild or calm, it's still there. It gets further and further away - nearly gone now! -  the inevitable approaches. You begin to feel uneasy.You know what will happen. You still see that hat though - just - still there, till one time you look, and, yes, the hat is gone. All that's left is the sea and those tides and the current that has swallowed everything.

Dream-Town

My room was so incredibly cold last night that it took hours to fall asleep. I was late to bed anyway (2:00am) because I was trying to rescue my i-tunes library from the recycle bin. I have no idea how it got there. I slept fully clothed - with a fleece on as well as a t-shirt -and beneath two quilts- and I was still cold. 'Cold' doesn't really begin to describe it though. It felt like the air (like the outside was under the covers with me!) was coming down with the flu, as if the air I was breathing had become infected. I lay there for what seemed hours shivering, wondering if I should put on a jacket as well as my numerous layers.
I had a dream shortly before waking. One of those 'multiple viewpoint' dreams - in that the narrative of the dream (not that anything happened much) was seen as illustrations in a comic strip, old photographs, and through myself, in a room, looking back through these photographs, wondering at other panels in these comic strip. I was looking through old photographs of myself stood in various snowy streets. They showed me with short hair, so had been taken some time before. I was also wearing my old long goth-jacket I used to wear. I was wondering whether or not to use one as my Facebook profile, but felt it was cheating as my hair had changed so much. These photographs were also seen as comic strip illustrations. I think these were comic strips I had drawn but am not sure. One picture showed me from behind, stood at the the head of a set of outside stairs, that led down between two buildings. From where this drawn-self stood, I could see the town - or city - spread out beneath me. It was a snowy day - the sky (no ink there) was white - full of snow and cold. I had lived in this town once, though bears no resemblance to any town I have lived in in life. The town was full of old-fashioned factories and a strange nostalgia. I wondered about other panels in this comic strip - if I was to draw more, what would come before or afterwards? I thought that, if I drew myself as a stickman, then I might be more inspired to continue, or finish, this comic strip. I think, during the dream, that I did realize why I never finished a comic strip - I have forgotten it no though. A shame. It might have been useful. The oddest thing about the dream was the fact that these images - particularly the comic strip image of myself stood at the head of the steps - had a soundtrack. The soundtrack - playing throughout the dream, much in the way of a film score, was the song 'Alaska' by Sad Lovers and Giants. I don't know why, as I've not listened to it for many months. I've got it running round my head now, as if it's still playing; it's snowing on the fields of my childhood home...