Nostalgia for Emptiness

Even throughout the tumultuous spring of 1998 and the ambiguous summer that followed, Worcester still had a sense of possibility to it. There was potential for things to turn around in ways that Joe and myself would talk about, sat on the freezer of 136 London Road, stoned (probably), late with essays (always) and convinced that we would finish college and somehow end up being writers.
That winter though, Worcester lost something. I suppose everyone knew that university was coming to an end. Writing out dissertations ruled everything. 1999 came, and a certain kind of emptiness began to spread through those streets and roads that I had called home for over two years now. I like to think that even back then I knew that there would be nothing new here. I suppose on some levels I might have done - but I probably didn't - but the emptiness in the city - in myself - was quite striking. Everything clean and new and bright and robbed of all possibilities.
In some ways this was the calm before the storm. March came, and there was war in Europe again - NATO bombing Yugoslavia, Prstina Airport, Russian and NATO tanks in a face-off against each other. Spring turning to early summer, and somehow I managed to finish my dissertation (on the late Victorian / early Edwardian ghost story) and convinced myself that armageddon was about to begin and that everyone's translations of Nostradamus's prophecies had been right and there was going to be an apocalypse that summer.
By the time I came to leave Worcester - on the last day of June 1999 - and 4 days before armageddon was supposed to occur, I was in a state of heavy depression and anxiety, and prone to panic attacks. I was never able really to say goodbye to Worcester. I just left in such a state of crisis that I didn't have the time or energy to look back. I didn't say goodbye to the place. Dad had come to pick me and my stuff up in a van to take me to Cornwall where my parents were living at the time in St Columb Major. I had some vague plans of moving to Brighton that summer (I eventually did this in the winter of that year) but nothing beyond that.
I sometimes wonder if that's why Worcester - my time living there, and the place - haunts me much, because I never really got a sense of closure from the place, and on a deeper level, that because my perception over most of the time living there were so shadowy and darkened, that I never really got from my time there what I should have.
So now I'll sit at work and draw cartoons of her streets, and at night dream I return to my old house there, and when awake I'll daydream of her possibilities, but sometimes only feel her emptiness.

Late Night Gods

There is a space between things - in the shadows between traffic lights and windows, the darkness on the other side of the beach huts and that silent sea holding serpents and tides.
A road that slips beyond town, lit by double headed lamps, white bulbs, cold light, cuts through a field or wasteground - hard to tell at night.
I've lost the language - I've written this line years ago - an old notebook repeats its own stars - a constellation turned up from old afternoons and
rain against the windows. I did not worship sleep then as I do now. There are temples in that turn of things whose prayers are stained with gods left to the waves on pebbled shores.

Across the Fields (a fragment)

Looking down from a bridge, late summer. I'm not sure where I am exactly. It has the feel of the countryside just outside the last edges of town. The bridge curves over unseen water - and I imagine it is a canal, rather than a river. Slow moving echoes, silent reflections. The air is full of the dusty heat of August - the kind of heat you don't get any more. I'm looking at a field, and in the field that ringed by dark trees are two figures shimmering in the haze. Little more than silhouettes, but I can tell they are intensely talking, muted gestures, the ghost of words. They move quickly as if they have some destination in mind. The figures fill me with an odd sense of sadness, a sense of something being lost. I don't know why. I said before I'm not sure where I am, but it seems now that I am not sure when I am. This might feel like some memory, but it is not mine, and if it is a haunting, I'm not sure who is following or who is being followed.

Summer When I Was 18

Adulthood was a shock, as if I had not known it was coming. I finished my A-levels without any plan at all - didn't even think about what I wanted to do, and here I was - the first summer of my adult life about to begin.

I suppose most peoples lives extend when they leave school - pub, jobs, adventure - but mine somehow shrunk. I lost contact straight away with a lot of people I had known from school (the days before the internet and mobile phone) and my social life wasn't actually bursting with life anyway.

I was left with a handful friends, each of us misfits in our own way. We were a fractious group of people who met up only rarely as a group (usually on a Saturday). Most of the time when I met up with them it was with only one or two other people. We were all keen to move on with our lives - and some of us did, -though I wouldn't for another three years.

We weren't much into going to the pub. If we were then I imagine that the tensions of being lost and 18 might have dissipated somewhat. I don't know why we weren't that much into drinking as a group. I would have a beer or two every now and again, but it never appealed that much to me. I also had a morbid fear of vomiting (emetophobia), and after one apocalyptic hangover that year I was not keen to get drunk again.

E. was the friend I saw the most that summer. We had been at school together, and he had no idea over what he wanted to do either. We would meet up from Monday to Thursday at a halfway point between where we lived (the public library in Hillingdon - a few miles from where we lived) at 10:30am. We wouldn't do much, wonder about the shops, watch Neighbours and Home and Away, play on the swings in the RAF owned playground up the road from me that I had always called The Twilight Zone. E's Dad would pick him up at 5:30pm every night and take him over to his girlfriend's house on the edge of Hayes where he also lived.

On Thursday's E. and myself would go to London, where we would haunt the second hand record shops, looking for anything 'cult' - a word we used to describe anything that was cool and / or nostalgic.

After an adolescence full of noisy thrash metal, things were branching out slowly - I was discovering the horror-punk delights of American band The Misfits. E. had decided that Toyah was a cult artist, and he would buy her albums second hand in the bargain bins at Notting Hill Gate. Over that summer I remember buying albums from bands such as Danzig, Darkness, Cryptic Slaughter, Realm, Sodom, English Dogs, Warfare...

On Saturdays, the 'Saturday gang' would sometimes meet - and sometimes not. Sometimes I would meet up with Julian, and we would have a jam session in our garage (he was always a far better guitarist than me). None of us knew what we wanted to do really - a couple of our friends were at university - another friend ended up being a priest - but he had moved on with his life by this time.

Something dark crept into that summer when I was 18. Isolation (those endless roads of suburban Ickenham) and heat, and that feeling of being totally lost combined into something else. Under those circumstances, imagination turns feral, and my imagination has always had a tendency to be somewhat overactive anyway. Edward and myself became obsessed with the idea of the apocalypse - and would talk ourselves into believing that armageddon had begun, We dragged in the Bible, Nostradamus, a poster that had been thrust into my hands in Uxbridge town centre a few months before, and bits of all those books on the occult and paranormal in my room. When Iraq invaded Kuwait that summer, we took this as another terrifying sign that some new world war (probably nuclear) was about to begin. If conscription was introduced, we reasoned that the best thing we could do was 'head for the Welsh hills' where we would, somehow, live wild.

In the April of that year, we had all had a terrifying night in the house where I lived in Ickenham. My parents had gone away for the week, and I had had various friends stay over. One night, there had been four of us staying and we had convinced ourselves that the place was haunted. Lights kept flickering on and off, I started shivering uncontrollably, and all of us were overcome with an awful feeling of malevolent evil. It was like we had all shared in some insanity - hypnotised ourself with some odd edge-of-adulthood hysteria,

E's personality had changed since then. When 1990 had begun he was  a happy-go-lucky character - a bit socially strange at times, but he had a sometimes-confidence that both mystified and made me jealous. He was now riven with uncertainty and superstition, and refused to watch any horror films, or indeed, anything he regarded as even vaguely 'scary' - this included Kate Bush videos which he found demonic and mad em turn off one night when we were watching them.

My personality had darkened since that night too - a predilection for melancholy and anxiety was turning into something darker. I say 'darker' but when I think back to the endless heat of that summer, I think of that darkness as being brighter - a scary, all consuming thing that threatened to blow everything up like that armageddon that haunted those months. When Edward and myself weren't discussing armageddon - when I was left alone in that house - I would start to convince myself that the house was (again) under attack by unseen, malevolent forces. I would scour everyday for omens and coincidence - prophecies and signs - and my mind would duly supply various interpretations to the most mundane of events in a way that was rarely comforting or benign.

E. had changed in other ways too. He had shown no aptitude for study while we were at school (none us did really), but now we had left he began reading Homer's The Odyssey and writing his own stories. His writing was wildly individualistic -not particularly good as such, but they were undeniably like nothing else I've read since. He began talking about wanting to be a writer. I was jealous of both his new reading habits and his prolific writing output. I tried writing myself that summer. The only one I remember writing was something called Flipside of the Coin where someone in a totalitarian future, leading a drugged-up totally controlled existence, preferred living like that to the uncertain freedom a band of rebel fighter offered him.

Over August I went for an interview for a job at a hospital - working in the stock room, or cleaning medical equipment (I can't really remember now). I had decided by this point (thanks to talking to Julian) to take my art A-level in one year at nearby Uxbridge College. They offered me the job at the hospital and I didn't take it, and got a part time job working at WHSmiths in Uxbridge instead, The day before I started there, I think it was the first week in September, I had gone to London with E. I remember buying Kate Bush's The Hounds of Love, and that album marked the end of that summer somehow. On the way back from Ickenham tube station we walked through Swakeleys Park. I remember sitting on one of the rotting wooden benches near the tennis courts. The late afternoon sky was grey and cloudy. There was something cooler in the air. 

I was eager for the autumn to begin.

Weekends Alone at Belmont Road

Sometimes there were weekends where nothing happened, and I saw no-one. As these weekends were not that often, I did not mind - or told myself I did not mind - and they passed by quickly enough anyway. This was in the first half of 1994 - I was doing a foundation course in art and design at nearby (ish) Langley - a bus-ride away.
Most of my friends during that period lived in Reading and far flung villages in rural Berkshire. On most Saturday nights during that period I would catch the train to Reading, spend the night drinking in a place called The Purple Turtle, one of those indie-themed bar / clubs you don't seem to get any more.
A couple of us would usually find one Reading resident's floor to 'crash on', and on Sundays, hungover and dazed, we might go for a walk in some nameless local wood, and I would then catch the train back to Uxbridge at evening. This would often be a long train ride that necessitated an extended wait for a connecting train at Slough station, where I would smoke the last of my battered cigarettes. Oh, the relief of getting home on Sunday night.
Though, as I said, there were some weekends where nobody met up in Reading and nothing happened and I stayed alone in Uxbridge. I was living in a rented room in a house on Belmont Road, near the town centre. I knew no-one there any more. A lot of my friends had moved away (to London, to become a bus driver, to become a priest (eventually), some to just disappear) and those friends who remained I myself had moved away from. I knew (or hoped) that come autumn that I would move away too (and I did, to Southampton to do a two year course in illustration). I had lived in the area since I was 13 - when I had moved down from Scotland over summer 1985. The place where I had spent all of my adolescence and early adulthood was coming to an end and I couldn't wait to leave. I knew that Uxbridge had had it's time, and there was an air of stillness about living there, of living too much in a hollowed out space with too many echoes of the past. Even the house I was living in, where I had lived since leaving home shortly after my 21st birthday, was emptied out of the people I had come to know as almost-friends. The rooms were rented out to people who kept to themselves, foreign students, financial workers, an odd, odd office worker called Jeremy or Geoffrey. The living room was abandoned and people avoided each other as they tried to make dinner in the tiny kitchen out the back.
On the Fridays of these weekends spent alone, I would come back late from college. Friday night bus ride, and a dark room waiting. I would smoke cigarettes in my dark room, get stoned if I had any hash, listen to records, watch TV, read comics. Midnight would creep up into the small hours. Strange times of 1:00am and 2:00am, timeless hours. Seemed I would have been in that room for years, something both cosy and claustrophobic. Cups of tea and more cigarettes. Silent kitchen, boiling kettle.
Saturdays I would wake, and might walk into town, buy an album at Our Price, or if I had any money, might catch the tube to Harrow-on-the-Hill where I would go to the comic shop and buy reprints of old horror comics, and then to Jamming with Edwards, a second hand music shop, where I bought old punk singles.
Back home and Saturday evening and more cigarettes, and I might have worked on artwork, or read some bad horror novel, or re-read The Secret History again. As for those Sundays... I don't remember much about Sundays in that house. If there was any day when i would get on with artwork, I suppose it was then. Dragged out days listening to Joy Division's 'Closer' and Skyclad's 'Prince of the Poverty Line' - later on, toward the June-hot end of the course it might be X-mal Deutschland's 'Viva' or Kristin Hersh's 'Hips and Shakers'. I imagine there was relief when darkness fell and I could prepare things for college the next day, and though I told myself I didn't mind those weekends where nothing happened, I much preferred college which seemed a world away from a rented room on the ground floor of a house where everyone avoided each other.
I wish I could remember more about those weekends now, but as nothing much happened, it's not surprising I don't really.

Summer When I Was 17

Stepped out of the flat today and into summer. It wasn't just 'warm' (we have had warm days this year - some anyway) but more that the texture of the air itself had changed; thick, heavy and almost liquid. Not quite the sunburnt taste of July-summer air, and nor the metallic no-taste of August, but something inherently early summer.
And as soon as I took in that first taste of true summer air, the inevitable remembering came.

1989.
Seventeen years old, and in the first year of my A-levels. On Saturdays I would walk where I lived in Ickenham into Uxbridge where I would meet my friends (The Saturday Gang) at a bookstall where two of them worked. I had a crush on one of the girls who worked there. For once this was probably returned, but I was too shy to make a move, and beyond slightly un-platonic hand holding, things progressed no further. That unconsummated desire flavoured those days of early summer 1989. Those days were soundtracked by the music I was listening to as well (cassettes bought from Our Price on Uxbridge High Street) - Kreator's Pleasure to Kill, Forbidden's Forbidden Evil, Deathrow's Deception Ignored... A steely early summer for 1989, full of sun and bright blue skies, suburbia everywhere, magical and claustrophobic, things always on the verge of opening up into something else.
Some mystery that never quite revealed itself.
The Saturday Gang as our parents referred to us would gather at one of our friends houses on Saturday night, where we would eat chicken drumsticks in the kitchen and watch Saturday night television, (it was all rock'n'roll and wildness for us. We must have been a parents dream). Sometimes we would catch the tube to London to see a film, or go to the opera (I saw nothing strange in going to the opera and listening to Napalm Death on the way home).
More than anything, that first taste of summer air this morning made me think of the Middlesex Fields. The Middlesex Fields were a ragtaggle collection of half wild fields boarded by Western Avenue and Ickenham, Hillingdon and Uxbridge. They held the Middlesex show there each year, and there was also a dry ski-slope and a swimming pool. Beyond these Metroland treats the fields got wilder and deeper - the Metropolitan line cut through them. There was a river and fenced off woods. Clumps of trees and places you could lose yourself in.
As I passed by the Middlesex Fields on the way to the bookshop to meet the Saturday Gang (and as I think of it now, another member of the Saturday Gang worked in another book shop in town) the fields I glimpsed over the hedges (cow-parsley ditches crammed full of weeds) seemed like some wild and slightly dangerous countryside, the locus of a mystery that never quite revealed itself.
One morning at dawn - one of my friends had stayed the night at my house (we were retaking our maths GCSE at the local college) I remember neither of us could sleep, and we left the house and ended up in the fields. Ghostly place in the white light of summer dawn, slightly forbidden as if we were in some taboo-land - or more accurately a taboo-time. We watched the marquees for the upcoming Middlesex Show half-empty deep in the fields, discussed the possibility of security guards and if there was anyone there. I had made a decision that night to 'ask out' the girl I liked. We walked back across the footbridge over Western Avenue and through the woods to the side of Vyners School. There was a certain section of the woods we didn't like. There was an uneasy tangled atmosphere  - summer gone mad with shadows and weeds and trees - and we called this section The Place of Oppressiveness - in a remarkable and enviable turn of originality and poetic phrasing, (There was a place deep in the woods that was a channel of green stucky mud and discarded rusting metal, this was called The Place of Disgustingness).
On the other side of the woods we played on the rope swing above the River Pinn, and we were back home before my parents had got up and they never knew we left the house.
Lessons that day were a nightmare to get through - I remember falling asleep during both Sociology and English. I was never so pleased to get home that evening.
I never asked that girl out by the way. Things that seem so certain and definite at dawn (that most numinous of times) seem quite different in the mundane suburbia of mid-afternoon.
Anyhow, that's the memories that came onto me as I left the flat this morning.
Then I got to work and spent eight hours answering calls about financial products for children and adults, and looking out of the window at the summer holiday sea, and wondering what my seventeen year old self would make of it all.

Lost in the Hyper-Past

Reading true ghost stories before bed disturbed my sleep. I was quite pleased as I had fallen asleep worrying that I could no longer spook myself out. Less pleased to wake up to the sound of something moving in my room (something falling somewhere) and a red eye looking at me. Cyclops-shuck, a black dog stare. Still dreaming.
Day of feeling strange. Midsummer panic that lasted seconds, and the air heavy with autumn - at least until the evening when it felt like summer again - even if summer from different times. I'm always in the wrong time, but at least sometimes the right place. Sometimes feel I'll get swallowed up by childhood bedrooms, adolescent afternoons and summers in my early twenties.
There is a film of the past overlaid onto everything. Writing this now and I can see Southside in Kinloss, late 70s / early 80s or the road at the back of our house in Forres few years later (cool shadow, overhanging trees) and then the autumn of 1985, writing a poem called 'Invaders' about it getting dark, and so on and so on...
I am fascinated by stories of people vanishing. When people vanish in folk tales and ghost stories I can only imagine them getting lost in their own past - or perhaps some kind of hyper-past, an antiquity that underlies each place, a deeper tide, that cold current, like a drug, like falling asleep, like being haunted.

Seven Line List

9:41pm/
Birds singing.
Ribbon of blue light in the sky.
Roofs and chimney silhoettes.
Midsummer week.
Used to be that autumn was the haunted time of year, but I feel there are more ghost stories now when the nights are shortest.

40 Hours a Week

I dread the alarm in the mornings. I feel like I'm walking on thin ice thats starting to crack - has cracked - and I'm about to slip into those tides beneath. I don't want to be doing this any more, this constant exhaustion of working 40 hours a week, sometimes six days a week, and all these months and years passing away when I could be doing something far more interesting instead.

Nothing Much Happened Today

Nothing much happened today.
The sky was grey and it rained. Not heavy rain. A friend of mine pointed out that Brighton smelt like a wet dog. It was a day that discouraged further investigation. From my seat at work, from the break room window, by the coffee machine that frequently breaks, I watched the leaden skies, the colour of headaches and wasted Sundays.
I went into Waterstones at lunchtime, and caught the bus home. I cooked some pork chops for dinner and did some drawing, while I watched stuff on TV. I ended up being pretty unsettled by my inability to draw hands in proportion.
I made a cup of tea, came to my room, and wrote this.
Nothing much happened today.

Premonitions and Tea Bags

Restless wind tonight. Cut through the summery evening like some premonition. Felt like late summer and there was a storm coming. Went to Sainsburys and bought tea bags, came home and fell asleep exhausted on the sofa. Signals get fractured and fall apart. Try not to think about omens too much.

Wood-Pigeons Siren Song

Keep thinking about those wood-pigeons.
I hear them as I lay in bed this morning. A late night last night, but I still woke up early. I had slept with my window and curtains open, so the sunlight (sunlight!) woke me as I lay on the mattress. I could hear the wood-pigeons already, ever more insistent and nostalgic. Lulled back into a kind of sleep, I start to remember what they remind me so much of.
They remind me of the Black Woods in Forres (really called Cluny Woods) at the back of the house I lived in when I was 11 or 12. We never got far into the woods (too deep, too dark, too spooky) but lingered about the edges of the woods, just inside the thick and tangled trees. There's something oddly sticky about these memories, as if the air was heavy and thick, too much ice-cream in the air, and the ever deepening green of the woods seemed to make the woods even larger. As I said, we never got that far in (except for once) but on those first summery evenings, when the wood-pigeons were as loud and ever-present as they seem to be this year, the depths of those unmapped trees seemed both sinister and alluring. Some fairy tale mystery - that path through the woods you know you shouldn't walk, but still feel drawn too, A siren song from the trees, drawing us on, perhaps to that glade deep in the trees that caused such an inexplicable panic when I went there with my sister.
Is it that though? As I sit here (in the living room watching Come Dine With Me) I start thinking about other wood-pigeon echoes, maybe they remind me of Swakeleys Park in Ickenham, when I was a teenager, or perhaps that party in Worcester, walking back in the grey light of a May dawn with Joe along the banks of the river Severn.
The songs of wood-pigeons seem to thin time, and when they sing, memories become sharper, more resonant, more evocative.
It's all academic now anyway.
A few minutes ago, all I could hear was a seagull.

First of Autumn

Windows open in my room.
Sunlight.
Birdsong.
First of June.
Should feel like summer - there is even the sound of a light aircraft out there somewhere (and what could sound more like summer than a light aircraft when heard in the tangle of a summery field?) - but there is something that reminds me of autumn. Not deep autumn, but those first days of autumn - those first few moments. There is something fluid about the sun, something wet, like it has been raining (which surprisingly it hasn't been). Out of my window, at the passage between the Mews and the coffee shop, the shadows there are deeper than in summer, richer and somehow more alive.
That birdsong sounds like summer though, and a sudden thought occurs to me - where are all the seagulls this year? I see them about but they seem to be strangely silent. I imagine them planning something - some seagull crime - in some dark and hidden bird-nook of Brighton.