Friday 31 May 2013

Waiting for the Water to Heat up

When I was a teenager - right up until the age of 22 when I left Uxbridge - I used to go to London a lot. Ostensibly this was to buy records (in the 1980s from Shades 'the heavy metal specialists' down a small alley in Soho) but really there was something else I liked about going to London.
There was a certain feeling of freedom and vastness I craved, and also a sense of oldness and secrecy. It always amazed me quite how old and labyrinthine some of the buildings in London seemed. The underground system seemed impossibly deep, and the rattling carriages would lull me into a headache-y reverie.
I remember one night - coming back from a gig with Edward (The Undead? Danzig? Shonen Knife?) and we got stuck at a tube station for a while. The place was deserted, and all I could hear was the humming of the escalators. It must have been getting close to midnight, but I had never heard the Jam song so wasn't that bothered. 
I have no idea why I'm thinking about all this at 7:30am.
Time for a shower anyway.

Tuesday 28 May 2013

The Time Traveller on Brighton Beach

On the beach yesterday with Al and Claire. There is a man silhouetted on the horizon, talking with one or two other people. They seem a quite normal group of middle aged people. The silhouetted man is saying that he has 'been here before of course, about a 150 years ago'. This is said in a quite reasonable tone of voice. So reasonable in fact that I strain to listen to more of the Brighton beach time traveller; 'I've got some photographs. It was very different then'. I wish I had gone over and asked to see the photographs, but I suppose he didn't have them with him. Maybe he left them behind in 1862.

Dream of Hyper-Worcester

I dreamt of hyper-Worcester last night, that dream-city that looks so unlike it's waling counterpart, but is still somehow Worcester, very different and yet the same place that I went to university in.
Raining. I had gotten off at some train station near the town centre, possibly at the base of London Road hill. One of a group of threatening teenagers asked if I had any 'transformers' to give him, referring to the shape changing robot toys that were popular when I was a kid. He asked in an intimidating fashion. I said that I hadn't and walked on. It was about here that I ran into Joe Bird - perhaps my trip to Worcester was to meet him. It felt like late evening - possibly in autumn - in the dream. There looked like many people going home from work.
A shop. Through the window there is a display showing grandfather clocks. The interior of the shop cannot be seen. Behind the shop is a dark cluster of twilight trees. We enter the shop at some basement level and take a set of stairs to the shop level. The shop does not sell grandfather clocks, but masks that are used in occult ceremonies. The proprietor, a middle aged hippy, is closing up for the day. He does seem annoyed we are there (though Joe Bird has vanished by now). I talk to him for a while, and he gestures towards the range of 'teas' he also sells behind the counter. |These unnerve me for they are hallucinogenic teas also used in occult ceremonies.

Monday 27 May 2013

Twilight and Sun

After a short walk along the river in Lewes, we retired to town (navigating the sinister herd of cows again) and had Sunday dinner in the beer garden of a pub whose name I've forgotten. Ale-sleepy drift in the evening air, sunlit and dreamy, sky June-blue (even if it was May) and still a whole day off the next day to come. We pondered catching the train back to Brighton and the continued ale-y delights of the Evening Star. We considered going to another pub in Lewes.
Al took us to a churchyard instead. Blue shadows round the back made it feel like twilight. Great old trees blocking the sun, making this a hidden place. Ditches of cow parsley smelling of fevery-musk and old summers, tombstones lost under the green, and in the raggedy bushes around the edge of the tombs, five or six beehives.
We take photographs amongst the tombs, and there is a pleasing summery serenity -churchyards (unlike in most ghost stories) are peaceful places, places you can sit and dream in, feel quite at home in this world (or another), happy afternoons spent listening to the wind in trees (churchyards always have the best trees) drowsing over ghost stories or notebook sketches.
There is always something slightly mysterious in such moments of serenity though. As we wondered amongst the grassy graves, it struck me how large the graveyard was, full of weedy paths and dead ends you could get lost in, and everywhere a labyrinth of trees, a yew-tree maze, dark and guarding everything like sentinels.
The place was deep in twilight, even though the sun was shining.
We went back to Brighton and the Evening Star, and drank more ale, and before Andy (who had joined us) and myself caught the taxi back, we were caught in some altercation in the 24 hour shop by the station. Some guy - obviously having some kind of psychotic episode - was swearing at everyone to get out of the shop before a 'Jamaican cartel' came in and 'killed everybody'. He shouted at everyone that he had 'seen people being executed' and that he was unlikely to 'survive the next four hours'. The security guard ran away and called the police. Other people tried to calm him down. The police turned up and did nothing ('ignoring him's the best idea. We can't do anything if he's not lamped anyone'). One went to talk to him (the man had stumbled off down the road). Andy and myself caught the taxi back home, and never found out the end of the drama.
 I talked with Andy in the kitchen for a bit, listened to a few Sol Invictus songs online and went so sleep. A few train-miles away, there was a churchyard that was even quieter than earlier, and even if it was past midnight, I wondered if it would still feel like twilight there.
I wonder if I thought about it as I fell asleep.

Friday 24 May 2013

Wood-Pigeon Omens

I don't really know what a wood-pigeon looks like, but their song is threaded in so tight to this time of year their presence is ubiquitous. Even more so this year. I hear them in the morning, and when I walk to work, but mostly in the twilight, like now. Their melodious song, melancholic and beguiling as some folk tale, some sorrowful beautiful thing, calling you somewhere you shouldn't go. Wood-pigeons are the sirens of the landlocked, inviting us not to drown, but to drift. In their song is the sound of being  21, or 17, or 12, the sound of remembering being younger. The sound of wood-pigeons makes me superstitious, particularly this year, and that is never a bad thing. I imagine them as omens for coming summers and lost hours, minutes drifting like December blackberries, tapping against the rainy glass of childhood bedroom windows.

Summer is Usurped, Autumn is Here

The weather keeps shifting, second by second - something sunny and vaguely like summer, then grey skies and something covering the horizon like fog. Thick drops of fat rain. Blue skies. Not summer obviously. Autumn, still somewhere in the future, has got sick of summer's ambiguity, and has wrested an extra three months for itself (perhaps, I imagine it's coup may - or may not be - short lived). There is about the air - and has been since yesterday, despite the sun or the rain or the mist, a certain feeling - almost a note, or a low tone. Something not heard for a long time, certainly not since the 1990s when there were hot summers. It is the sound of the first of autumn days, that low insistent humming, where there is a coldness and a clarity in the sunlight (melancholy orchards, little used lanes disordering itself for the winter). The air is colder in a way that is only noticed toward the end of September.
Summer is usurped.
Autumn is here.

Tuesday 21 May 2013

Disgust

Work drains everything.
We only exist to be employees.
Pieces of meat for call centres and factories.
An anti-factory; we produce nothing.
The process is the reason.
Keep the company alive.
Ruin our lives,
on altars of exhaustion
for gods of infection.

Alarmed

One of the most annoying things in the world is waking up in bed, checking the time and discovering it is only five minutes before the alarm. You don't get up though - which would make sense - you lie there, in dread anticipation of the alarm - being in bed a kind of anticipatory hell. Then the alarm goes off, and another call centre days starts. At least if you're me it does. At least it's sunny out there. I've got My Dying Bride's last album 'A Map of all our Failures' playing to get me in the mood for the day.
-7:34am

Monday 20 May 2013

Old Premonitions

It was three years ago that I boarded the train for a weekend in Worcester. It turned out to be more memorable than I was expecting; on the morning of the first day there (three years back from tomorrow) I learnt that Telegen, the old call centre, had gone into administration and I had lost my job. I remember all of that weekend being heightened, even hallucinatory - Worcester seemed drenched in a kind of unreal power. I was immensely worried of course, but I remember there was something underneath that - that sense of almost occult magic. The whole weekend in memory is one of those psychic checkpoints we all have. The fact that it is three years since then gives me a sense of pause. Three years? Where did all the time go? In some ways, the last three years have been fantastic (mostly all connected with Em, even if we are no longer seeing each other) but in many ways they have been very difficult years too (mostly connected to work, and the effect it has had on my life). Three years ago now though, I was hanging out with Joe Bird, still had short hair and a full beard, and we were waiting for Joe Walmsley to arrive. Tempted though I am to say I had no idea of the news that was coming the next day, I did have a vaguely premonitionary sense of something about the weekend, and even wrote in here about it too.
I don't think premonitionary is an actually word, but you know what I mean.

Old Hangover

I remember waking in Dan's house in the early summer of 2000. Sick and hungover, I lay in the strange bed in the unfamiliarity of the house's spare room. I was unemployed and worried about money. I remember drinking so much I threw up in the street - just outside the London Road market. As I lay in bed and the unemployment-weekday came into hangover-focus around me, I listened to the sound of voices from outside. One of the voices - a man - was complaining about the weather; 'it feels more like autumn than summer!'. He was right, it did, but there was an odd comfort in the wet, grey light too, or maybe I was just hungover.

Sunday 19 May 2013

Saturday Night and it's Aftermath

So hungover I managed to finally get out of bed at 6:20pm. The whole day spent in bed, drifting into headache-dreams and wondering if I was going to throw up. Never known a headache like it, and I hadn't had that much to drink last night. Not that I remember anyway.
It's 7:30pm, and twilight is here, but to me it feels like morning, like I should be having breakfast. Instead of waiting for baked potatoes to cook. I should be having porridge, but seeing as I had garlic bread for yesterday's breakfast, who knows.
So, last night.
Andy and me caught the taxi to the Heart and Hand in Kemptown, soon joined by Al and Claire. After a pint there we headed off to some pub that may or may not have been called The Black Dove. The Black Dove was incredibly packed. There was some kind of raucous folk band playing - Patch and the Giant? - and it felt like there was some kind of bank holiday festival on.
We then headed up into the heights of Hanover. Found some pub which might have been called The Last Sunset. Or something similar. It was empty. Brightly lit rooms and a solitary barmaid. There was an outside area round the back, where you could look all over Brighton. I couldn't quite work out where we were. Brighton sinking into a strange and new night. Al pointed out that the toilet there (painted a uniform green) had a softened, haunted quality. December afternoons and grey days. 3:30pm as a prelude to twilight. That old line, the eeriest part of a winters day.
Our last pub of the night was The Worlds End on London Road. Another empty place. Al and Claire played pool badly, and Al and me played darts even worse (we broke two of the darts),.
Last orders, the walk home.
We ended up exploring some new (to us anyway) path that led up to the viaduct near Sevendials. This was the place where Joe and myself had got to way back in summer 2004 or 2005. Back then it had been a building sit (the new Sainsburys) and we had spent a rainy hour or two lugging ladders about and climbing fences, eventually ending up in some strange wasteground where a solitary chair stood, as if waiting for us.
It was all different now, and there was an actual footpath that led between railway buildings and was brightly lit by lamps. Bushes, trees. Plenty of shadows. Be worth walking the whole of the path in some future. Just some short-cut, a twilight-tear.
After saying goodbye to Al and Claire, Andy and me ended up buying some fast food (a burger for Andy and a chicken shawarma for me). We headed down the seafront to eat it. I managed to spill most of mine on the ground. Annoyed.
Long empty beach walk home.
Finally got back, I went to my room, collapsed into the bed I have only really just got out of.
When I get up Andy tells me that someone was shot dead down Church Road last night - fifteen minutes away from here. Looking at the news, the police don't think it was gang related. Happened about 11:00pm. Any other night I might have been walking home at that time.
Hope those baked potatoes finish soon. I'm starving.

Saturday 18 May 2013

The Black Woods

I've been thinking a lot about the Black Woods lately. The Black Woods weren't their real name - I think they were called Cluny Woods. The Black Woods was the name given to them by a school friend, and were, of course, alleged to be dangerously haunted.
I knew about the Black Woods before we moved to Forres when I was 10. Before then I had lived in the nearby village of Kinloss. A friend who lived in Forres and then moved back to Kinloss warned me of how creepy they were.
The Black Woods dominated the small Scottish town of Forres. They covered the hill that lay in the centre of town, just up from Grant Park. Wherever you were in Forres you could see the wooded hill, and the tower - Nelson's Tower - that stuck up from the middle of it. The Black Woods referred to a specific part of the woods that lay behind the tower. The graveyard marked the point that you entered The Black Woods, though really, the whole of the woods were pretty spooky, and yes, the spooky woods really did have an old graveyard inside them. My parents bought a house (89 Drumduan Park) at the base of the hill. My bedroom looked up into the woods.
I didn't know anyone in Forres, and I remember hat first winter there - the winter of 1982 - spending long Sunday afternoons listening to the Top 40 and watching it get dark outside, staring up into the woods, trying to see some mystery, some secret there amongst the darkness and the bark and tangle. I remember waiting for the street lights to come on in the narrow lane between the top of the garden and the stone wall that I always imagine held back the wood.
The Black Woods fascinated and troubled me.
I suppose it was the following summer when I first tried to penetrate the depths of that wood. Attempts at investigation weren't very successful. The woods back in Kinloss might have been creepy, but were also safe. The Black Woods were too large to be safe, and because of this far too unnerving to play in... and we didn't play in there, but we did try to explore them. We didn't get very far in, for a number of reasons - it was far too easy to get lost, and there was a creepy manor on the edge of the woods (owned by new age community the Findhorn Community, but as a 10 year old, the Findhorn Community contained all the possibility of a dangerous black magic coven). Discoveries inside the wood themselves did not quieten down any sense of disquiet, didn't lay any ghosts to rest. There were the bones of some animal we discovered lost beneath tangles of ivy (a fox, a dog?) - and in one of those small electricity substations, a fair way into the trees, someone had scratched into the concrete of some kind of lid, the words SATAN MINE HUMBLE HOME. We called this the Pet Cemetary. One summers day, me and my sister tried to have a picnic in the woods. We went in deeper than we had done before, and found a kind of clearing. There was a rusted bedstead, and the skeletal remains of some long dead motorbike. We tried to eat our sandwiches there, but there was some kind of breeze blowing through the trees that sounded too much like sighing, and the darkness in the trees surrounding the clearing was far too spooky to stay. We walked back out from the clearing, and didn't run. We didn't run as we might have done in the woods at Kinloss (from living skeletons, or werewolves, or whatever ghosts we were hunting at the time) because these woods weren't fun, and if we ran that sense of panic might attract something. As we walked very quickly out (don't run, don't run) it felt like there was something hunting us.
When all my friends had left Scotland (we were all RAF kids, and people moved on all the time) I would lay in my bed at night and listen to the wind through the trees at the top of the garden. I would suddenly be glad that my friends had gone because I wouldn't have to go into the Black Woods any more.
I've been thinking about the Black Woods recently. I wish there was a place like them in Brighton, somewhere old and deep and mysterious. I would like to fall asleep in my old room there on a rainy summer afternoon, start to dream with that ponderous silence that still deafens nearly thirty years after I left.

Thursday 16 May 2013

Thursday Afternoon


4:00pm.
Afternoon exhaustion, crawling with tiredness. No reason to be tired. I slept well, and for seven hours, but not as well as the night before where I slept for longer, even though the flat rattled in the wind and kept me awake. ‘Like it was trying to tear itself apart’, Andy commented.
Just gone to the toilet, then went to the break room to get a coffee. The break room smelled of the past, of a certain kind of summery emptiness, like spending Saturday evening indoors (how you long for the pub on certain early June days!). Even if you are expecting to spend Saturday evening inside, on these certain kinds of summery days, it always feels there is something that has gone missing, and something oddly nostalgic (but not in a good way) about it all.
Feels summery again today, and I feel better after the apocalyptic gloom and Armageddon-rain of Tuesday.
Just got back from printing up my letters. Stood by the printer watching the sun fall on West Street four floors below. The pavement looks hot. A girl skips by. People look like they’re on holiday. 6:00pm suddenly seems like a long way away.
My body is thick with the sluggishness of too much ice-cream, which is a lie as I have not had ice-cream for. It is that similar unpleasant heaviness though. A heavy dinner and a bowl of ice-cream, crawl to bed with a cup of tea, and long evenings open up, and the air is heavy with June and your stretched stomach is uncomfortable with digestion and you fall into a fitful sleep, and when you wake it still  hasn’t got dark.

Tuesday 14 May 2013

Message from Work (Gloomy Tuesday)


It's an awful, awful day out there. A thick white layer of glaring cloud has covered the sky (it was vaguely sunny when I walked in this morning, an eternity ago now), and since lunchtime there has been a steady stream of tedious rain. Rain entirely without drama or interest. A light and soaking sheen. It seems to have robbed the day of everything noteworthy or interesting or meaningful.
Sat in the office in the last hour of work. The yellow glow of the overhead lights is too glaring and thick – succeeds in illuminating nothing. The temperature in here is sickly and warm, makes me feel exhausted and mildly ill.
Look outside – awful autumnal gloom. People move about the call centre, speak with voices that sound too sharp and full of brightness.
It’s been a tiring month – some good – the trip to Poland – and some bad – Nan dying, not going to Bruges, work becoming intolerable. I suppose it’s all catching up with me now.
I suppose if the weather were brighter, and full of that strange electric mystery of most May days (at least those May days in memory anyway) I suppose I mightbe feeling less that life is one big, empty cul-de-sac I can’t get out of (a labyrinth of knee high walls and neglected gardens in this suburban labyrinth of my mind).
I went to pay the council tax in the post office today. The man behind the counter looked at the ragged bill I handed him with disdain; ‘this has to last youanother year!’ he joked. I’m not sure how the bill has got so ragged. This is only the second month of paying it. It has to last us until January 2014…
2014. What an odd year that sounds. Full of angles and wood. I think it’s the fault of the ‘4’ at the end, all folded in on itself. Something pleasing ramshackle about the number ‘4’. It’s always reminded me of a ramshackle jungle hut, mixed with a kind ‘cute pylon’ feel. That’s synaesthesia for you I suppose.
Fifteen minutes till I finish work. Through the slats of the blind over all the windows in the call centre, the evening still seems insufferable and cold. Not looking forward to the walk home (shall I take the bus?) – except I have a strange urge to visit twilight in St Annes Well park. Rainy days are made somewhat more tolerable by sheltering under trees in a slowly darkening park (though what I would do now to experience this too-early dusk in the middle of a forest!).

Not Recognising People


It is strange when you see a friend you have not seen for ages – years in this case. I used to work with her, and saw her crossing the road today – I nearly said hello, but then I looked again. Was it her? I was no longer sure. It might have been her, but it might not have been her. I haven’t seen her for a good couple of years. She looked different. But it has been a good few years. It might have been her, but could have been someone who looked like her. In case it wasn’t her, I decided not to say anything.
I have a condition called prosopagnosia or ‘face-blindness’. It’s fairly obvious to me now that I’ve always had it, but it’s only over the last five years or so that I’ve recognised it as such. It means I don’t recognise peoples faces, even people I know well. If I see them out of context (in a place I am not expecting to see them) or if they have changed their appearance (a new hairstyle or new manner of dress) I will either not recognise them at all, or I may suspect that the person might be them, but also be completely uncertain it is (as in today’s case). The more I look at their face, the more their features will seem to become ‘fluid – the person-in-question’s face becomes almost a complete stranger. At the same time, still resembling, in some way, the person whom it might (or might not) be.By this time, if I am unable to recognise them by any other way (voice, manner of walking, posture) I usually wait to see if they recognise me. If I continue to try and look at them (I usually don’t – it makes me look very weird) totry and ascertain whether or not I know them, their features somehow shift further, and I become absolutely convinced that the person concerned is not the person I originally thought.
This can happen with best friends (even my flat mate Andy whom I have known for fifteen years). Meeting new people can be a nightmare – the next time I see them, I probably won’t even recognise it’s them – unless they see me first of course.
My old job was a nightmare. It was another call centre and I used to have to mark people’s telephone calls and give them feedback. There was a high turnover of staff, and people used to sit in a different position every day. The person I saw today was one of those people I used to take with me to point out whom exactly I was giving feedback to – even if I had spoken to them just the day before. In fact, it was this person who first suggested that I might have some kind of facial blindness.
I thought I saw her last week too – the first time I would have seen her for about two and a half years. That same uncertainty came down – I really couldn’t tell if it was her or not. All this sparked off an odd dream that depressed me a little – of meeting her at Hove Station, and she – or I – being late, and she was angry with me for something, and wasn’t talking to me anymore. Seeing her today (if it was her) has just increased the odd feeling that dream left with me – particularly as next week is the three year anniversary since the old call centre went into administration and we all lost our jobs.
There’s something strangely melancholy about it all.
It suddenly seems a long time since we were all at the old call centre.

Monday 13 May 2013

Another Message from Work


A strange day yesterday. I didn’t see anybody until the pub quiz last night. Andy was at work, and it was too cold and wet to venture far outside. I couldn’t relax into any activity – though did do an hour of drawing as the afternoon slipped to evening. I felt oddly restless, and when I had an afternoon snooze, it was with an odd aura of mild dread.
I was glad to get to the pub quiz. As we walked from the car (Mark picked me up) the twilight gloom seemed to deepen. Cold and wet. Some ghost of autumn.
My team came second, but it was a special Star Wars night. I was no help at all, and answered no questions. I drank three pints of Bedlam ale and promised myself that I should really get round to watch the Star Wars films again. At least the first three anyway.
A few minutes till I finish work. It looks quite sunny out there, but there’s an ambiguous quality to the light.
Now I have finished.
Time to get changed and go home.

Wednesday 8 May 2013

Message from Work


It’s gone quiet at work  for the first time in what seems forever – no call for about five minutes. Grey outside though still humid. My body feels heavy and headache-y. I bought the Pan Book of Horror Stories volume 3 at lunchtime for 70p. I used to have them all, but were lost somewhere over the various moves I’ve done over the last 20 years. I’m trying to get them all again.
A work colleague has pointed out that the sea looks autumnal, and there is something autumnal about it out there. It’s not just the greyness of the day, but something else… the sea reminds me of the sun on mid-September days, warm, and laced through with something, some trace of the coolness coming.
Too warm in here. I would turn the air conditioning on but am afraid that people would feel the cold.
I watch people pass by on the sea front, four floors below. They walk in silence and talk in silence, and don’t know I’m half-heartedly watching them. The cars pass by in silence. The day passes by in silence. I don’t want to be here any more.
Only an hour and twenty minutes left. Only three or four months till I leave here permanently. Every day I work here I find myself more and more diminished. Slowly fading away – no, I’m fading quickly now, a rapid decompositioninto a husk of exhaustion and eye-strain. I have no plans for when I leave but anywhere must surely be better than this.

Office Air

The air in the office is oddly poisonous, full of too many angles, too many shallows. In the break room I long to open the window and breathe air full of curves and deeps. I keep thinking of a spaceship heading towards a point of singularity - how I long to slip from this Sargasso Sea dimension to somewhere else. The artificial light of the office (the overhead fluorescent lights are making me sick to the soul)makes everyone's eyes seem full of uninteresting shipwrecks and car parks on drizzly days.

Tuesday 7 May 2013

The Colour of Imagined Electricity

An afternoon on the beach; Sunday sun, calm sea the colour of electricity (the imagined colour of electricity anyway) and the oddly melancholy smell of barbecues. Up above, there;s some kind of light aircraft - a stunt plane - whorls and loops and stomach-tightening dives, and we're all impressed, but I can't help imagining that plane crashing into that still sea.
Andy and myself are photographed posing inside a tank. 'Don't touch anything!' the soldier-lady warns, as if a 41 and 36 year old man are going to start messing about with buttons. However, considering that being photographed posing by a tank is normally the province of 9 year old boys, perhaps we were well warned. Nobody knows what the tank is doing in a side street off Western Road, and we do not ask. Perhaps there will be a secret military coup.
I manage to only have three pints in the Evening Star. I am too aware of work the next day, and of how it doesn't feel like Sunday (It's not Sunday - it's Bank Holiday Monday). After Claire's brother and his girlfriend leave, and Al and Claire go home, I leave Andy in the pub and wend my way home, listening to Burzum's album of re-recorded early songs From the Depths of Darkness on my i-pod.
I sleep well, and am having a stretched out morning - this is my week of lates. When I stepped into the kitchen this morning, the air there felt like those few too-short days when Corin was visiting in Worcester, the summer of 1998 - mid July to be precise. Unreal, bright air, taste of sun - and something cool laced there which might mean that summer (or that summer anyway) might deepen and last forever.
It didn't, of course. I grew old and became middle-aged instead,

Sunday 5 May 2013

The Dark Streets of Kimballs Green

There was a childrens television programme back in the 1970s I never watched. Perhaps I was too young, or perhaps because it was on ITV and I preferred the BBC's kids TV. The programme was called Shadows. Each episode was 25 minutes long, and was a self contained ghost story. As I said, I never watched it when I was a kid, but I did get hold of the first season a couple of weeks ago. I've mentioned before about how utterly strange 1970s childrens television shows could be. Shadows is no exception.
Very little happens in the six or so stories I've seen. One or two characters (children or teenagers) find themselves in some isolated environment (a country cottage, an old manor house, a school when all the kids have gone home). There is a gradual increase in atmosphere and tension, leading to a series of supernatural incidents (poltergeist activity, possession, time slips), culminating in a climax where everything isn't quite explained...
In one story, The Waiting Room, two teenagers trapped in a railway station for the night encounter two characters from the past, who died in a railway disaster years decades previous. They elect not to get on the train that arrive for them - obviously some ghost train heading for the same disaster - or so you are meant to think. However, dawn comes, and the train the main characters are waiting for does arrive. However, two characters turn up who are obviously the ghosts from the past - but dressed in modern clothes, and speaking the same lines the previous ghosts did... The protagonists elect not to get on this train either - even if it is the one they were meant to catch - obviously some other disaster awaits.
A disquieting tale - is the railway station haunted? Is the station some kind of breeding ground for railway disasters? How did the two protagonists leave the station if every train that turned up seemed to be headed for some disaster? These stories were only 25 minutes long. There was a lot packed into them.
These tales were on at around about 4:30pm - an after school  - and are intelligent and well written, masterpieces of atmosphere that in no way talks down to their audience, (unlike television now of course, blah blah blah, ramblings of a middle aged man, things aren't as good as they used to be etc etc etc...).
As I said,  never watched the show when I was a kid. What I did have, however, was a book based on the series. It was called The Best of Shadows. I remember the front cover, of a yellowing tree with a human face (this was based on the episode where a caretaker who hated children got turned into a tree). After I had got the DVD a couple of weeks ago, I looked online for the book I used to have. I found some entry on it somewhere, and scanned through the titles.
The Dark Streets of Kimballs Green.
I don't remember the story - aside from the one about the caretaker who turned into a tree - I don't remember any of the stories. That title though... As I read it, there were some vague flickers of something, some old fascination. I could almost recall, as a kid, being fascinated by that title, about what that story might be about that I never got around to reading.
As an adult, that title fixed on my imagination too. It came with an image - of being stood on a pavement outside of some kind of urban park at night. The town had the feel of some Midlands town, a large sprawling dreamy place beginning to decay. The park itself (the fence surrounding the park was rusted iron) was dark, and across the other side of the park, a line of street lamps lit a line of twilight-lowered houses. Chimney smoke, cracked pavements, television aerials on roofs, silhouetted against a blue-black star pitted sky. This was Kimballs Green, an area of that nameless Midlands town. Kimballs Green would be a place that might have subtly haunted my childhood - I would have no friends there, I would have no reason to ever go there. I would only become aware of it when passing by, on the other side of the park - perhaps in the back seat of a car, being picked up from school or cub scouts of wherever. Kimballs Green would seep into my consciousness slowly - never as anything important - but something that would occur to me on windy nights deep in October when I couldn't sleep. Things would continue this way until secondary school when I would meet a girl and we would talk, and she would say that she came from Kimballs Green...
That's how far the image - or whatever it is - goes. I don't want to think about it too deeply because it might rob the image of it's power, and neither do I want to watch the original episode (in season 3) because it is bound to be a disappointment.
Perhaps I should keep it for windy October nights when I can't sleep.

Saturday 4 May 2013

These aren't my Sundays

I think sometimes of Sunday evenings.
Not the Sunday evenings of now of course, nor of then. I'm not sure these Sunday evenings have ever really existed.
These Sundays are thick with rain and shadowy hills, of stretched out afternoons lying on a bed in a country room, and listening to the sounds of the white skies in the distance. Deep woods, silent rivers, churchyard days.
These unreal Sundays fall to evening. Sunday evening - about 6:00pm - feels heavy as a pool - perhaps in one of those deep woods a few sentences back. 6:00pm is full of church spires, and something vaguely industrial - certainly of chimneys anyway, exuding a smoke that tastes of factories, nostalgia and Kate Bush albums overheard in an older siblings room.
As I said, these aren't my Sundays - I have no older siblings, and owned every Kate Bush album myself.
Perhaps someone was listening to me.

Friday 3 May 2013

Quiet Song

Al does music. You should listen. Here it is, it's called Quiet Song and sounds like all those half dreams of Worcester and wherever you were fifteen years ago.

Thursday 2 May 2013

'I Suppose I'll Never Know How The Picture Finishes'

It's a picture I began way back in time - 2009 - and haven't picked up since, as is the way of such things. It shows a man on a country track, hands behind his back, staring into the horizon. A stormy skies fades down to a lighter distance.
I was on the train coming back from Nan's funeral. Caught the train from Worcester Foregate Street at 10:00am. Happy watching the landscape pass by, all sunlit and feeling like summer. Summery anyway. Shafts of sun flung down into the carriage, then taken by the shadow of some embankment, some tunnel, some other season as the train made it's way home.
I pulled out the picture and continued with the sky. At some point an older man sat next to me - he said he was 85 - and we started talking about my picture. His wife - sat on the seat opposite, talked with the girl next to her about the knitting she was doing. He said that he had always wanted to be an artist - but real life had gotten in the way. He had been involved in some kind of espionage over World War 2, and after that had finished he had done a three week course in art, one of the happiest times in his life.
He commented on my picture, over the 'dream-like atmosphere' and how he wondered at what the figure was looking at, suggesting, perhaps, some surrealist element in the distance. He soon changed his mind, saying that it was better to not know exactly what the figure was watching.
I had been through all these thoughts myself. It was like talking to a version of myself from the future - or the past depending which way you look at it.
He left before I did, and said, with a strange air of melancholy, that he would never know how the picture finished. True enough I suppose, but I think he gave me the title of the picture, whoever he was.

Wednesday 1 May 2013

Poland - Fragments

We walk out of Krakow airport, because the train station is just around the corner. Blinking in the newness of an unfamiliar country, the country is made even stranger by the heatwave. Bright blue sky, and the trees tall and vivid - hyper-vivid - trees in a dream. I look at a small wood behind a high fence - some kind of military complex perhaps - I don't know, because I can't read Polish - and this, this isn't England any more. Even the air tastes different - sharper and paler - of ice cubes and childhood, and other things I couldn't quite define.
England already seems impossible.
(...you know, I can't remember if it was a train we took, or was it a tram or some kind of bus? I remember staring out of the window at Poland, I remember a man on the bus, reading a book - looked like some kind of university textbook, and I think, to him, this unfamiliar country is home...)
We get to the centre of Krakow, to the building where we will pick up the keys for the apartment we have rented for the weekend. There is some debate over whether or not we should pay the deposit. I wait with the luggage outside, watch people pass by. Busy park, green trees. The sun is hot and I become afraid of sunstroke. We decide to pay the deposit and we go to our apartment located on the fourth floor of an adjacent building. This building is full of angles and bright planes. There are no windows, but two skylights in the living room, letting in the blue of the above.
I cannot find matches to light the cooker.
I would like a cup of tea.
Joe comes. I have not seen Joe since Al and Claire got married, a year and a half ago. We go out for a drink, and then come back. I fall asleep on the sofa for an hour or two. I am exhausted. I spent the night before at Gatwick Airport. Instead of sleeping in the cool silence of the small hours, I drank too much coffee and spent the night drawing.
We leave the apartment to meet Dagmara. I have not seen Dagmara since the December of 1998. I remember the night she arrived. I was sat on the phone in the hallway of 136 London Road. I can't remember who I was on the phone to - Ruth? Mina? - I remember the conversation was about our thieving landlord though. I remember there was a thunderstorm, a deep dark thing, all lightning flashes, driving rain qnd drama, - all those cliches that we never get tired of.
Before the jazz festival we sit on tables outside the venue, and drink beer in the twilight. I watch the river, the Vistula - and I think of how all cities that are split by great rivers - Prague, Worcester, Krakow - have a similar feel - as if they could be the same city but experienced - shifted - by their different languages.
During the gig, I watch a leaf fall from the ceiling. It seems a portent of something, but I can't think what.
A single leaf and that is all that falls.
I sleep deeply that night, and when I wake in the morning, I am still tired.
Coffee and breakfast sort me out.
(...memories of travel elude me... did we catch the tram to the art gallery or did we walk..?)
There is an exhibition on called Madness. I wish I could remember the artist's name. Great canvases full of nostalgia and atrocities. My god, he was prolific. Still painting now in his seventies. I bet he wouldn't have been so prolific if he worked in a call centre 40 hours a week. Joe points out that in one of the paintings, - of the interior of a room - there is another painting on the wall - a roughly sketched factory - who would have a picture of a factory on their wall? I would love a painting of a factory on my wall, oh, I would. Paintings within paintings, the joys of an infinite regress. Upstairs there is an exhibit consisting of mirrors and pillars and mirrors and pillars. Watch yourself curve off into forever. Watch your reflections, watch for that one reflection behaving differently, fourteen or fifteen mirrors down.
This might be the one which would follow you home.
Emily finds me a free newspaper full of comic strips. One comic strip shows a man walking a city street at night. He finds himself in a cinema watching a film of himself, ending with a scene of himself sitting in a cinema watching a scene of himself sitting in cinema, watching a scene of... well, you know the end, and there isn't one, of course.
It's twilight when we leave. It rains for a while. The gallery is situated in an area of the city that feels like Poland, I don't know why. Crooked street lamps, train tracks heading into a weedy nowhere, mysterious blocks of buildings that look like their interior walls are covered with pictures of factories.
After dinner at a restaurant full of dark paintings and clown figures, we head back to the apartment, and I fall into the sleep of a dead man again. Alistair says that someone knocks at the door in the night, but I do not hear them, and I do not remember dreaming either.
On Sunday night, everyone else goes out to a jazz gig (funk de nite) and I elect to stay in the apartment. We are due to fly back the next morning, and when I return, I have to grab a few things and catch the train up to the Midlands for Nan's funeral. I do not feel like going out, and stay in the apartment relaxing, drawing my energies together for the next couple of days.
Or try to.
At some point the knocking starts. Drunk people out in the stairwell. One seems very eager for someone named 'Coco' to let him in. He rants and screeches and shouts and pounds the door. This goes on for about an hour, then quietens. Then other drunk people turn up. There is more shouting and pounding. Voices come near to the door. I hope I locked the door. I imagine being murdered by Polish assassins. At one point I hear someone shout 'what about apartment seven?'. Am I in apartment seven? Or apartment eight? Because they have shouted in English, I imagine being murdered by English assassins. The sound of the voices in the stairwell makes the stairwell itself seem sharp. I watch the skylights darken into rectangles of dirty night. It is hot, but I do not turn on the air-conditioning. I hear someone play the trumpet, come drifting in through the night. A mournful sound, oddly plaintive but also comforting. I imagine the trumpet will be played long after I - after we all - have gone.
I am glad when everyone else comes back.
I sleep deeply again.
We catch the train to the airport in the brightness of morning. Alistair does handstands at the train station. We arrive early, and sit in the sun drinking coffee. Ordering coffee was difficult. The boy behind the counter seemed more interested in licking his ice-cream. We eat bread and cheese we bought the night before.
It seems impossible to think that we shall soon be back in England, but a few hours later we are, and it then seems impossible we were in Poland at all.
Travel is always the same I suppose, making an impossibility of either the place you have just left, or the one you are yet to arrive at.