Forerunner of an Autumnal Power

Been for s short walk outside in the long, elongated twilights of July, a hangover from the giddiness of midsummer just a month ago.
Breeze is up, bringing voices tumbling along streets from other, unseen street corners. The sky is troubled with clouds - just visible in the quickly fading light - and in the darkness there is something of autumn, and if not of autumn, then the very end of summer, when the seasons shift, slip gears, begin to change. That bit of the year that starts to feel like coming home.
It's not autumn though, it's not the end of summer, it's not the of August. We're too early for that but whatever is out there, whatever has luxuriously deepened those shadows between the spectral light of lamp pools, might be seen as something like a premonition, some forerunner of a sterner power (to quote Emily Bronte) some reminder that autumn is on her way.

Overheard Things on Saturday Morning 9:15am

I hear:
Cars, slightly soporific.
The sounds of the cafe opening.
A seagull.
The grey of the sky (a low and brooding tone).
A clock ticking (a metaphorical clock)
A door opening or closing in the flat (I think by a breeze as opposed a person)
The shadows on the floor (the sound of a voice at midnight)
The sound of voices from the cafe.
The autumn, unknown.

This Ship begins to Move

I've handed my notice in at work. After a day and a half after my week off last week, I couldn't take any more of it. I was going anyway - at the end of September - and then on Monday night I decided I could afford the end of August, and by lunchtime yesterday, I knew I could not afford not to go. My levels of anxiety were rapidly increasing at a rate that was (and is) alarming. For peace of mind, I have to go as as soon as possible. Because of my holiday in Portland, Oregon, for my cousin James's wedding, this means that my last day at the call centre will be three weeks Tuesday just gone. I have less than 19 days until I leave. I'm in a kind of mild-shock now. I had talked about leaving for so long, and now I am, and I am pleased and scared, fearful and hopeful. Unsurprising emotions. I have no plans, but I will have time. This ship is freed from the Sargasso Sea of the last three years, and we're heading into the heart of the unknown again.

Prelude to the Hyper-Gallows

The Gallows are here.
The Gallows is that feeling you get as Sunday afternoon turns to evening, and you have work the next day. The weekend is over.It's getting dark outside. 5:00pm comes. 6:00pm comes. You start thinking; I have the length of a normal evening left now. The Gallows is that feeling you get back at school; Top 40 on the radio (or the equivalent if you're not 41...) homework undone, and your least favourite lessons with the worst bullies the next day. Gloomy rain, thick white skies, desolate dread...
It's only Saturday, and The Gallows have started early because I have had the week off work. I've spent the week productively - and actually finished the comic strip I've been working on, I've been to London, I've been for walks, and yet... The Gallows. The fucking Gallows.
This isn't really The Gallows, this is just a prelude. The Gallows will kick in tomorrow properly. I'll long for this moment. Not even midday on Saturday and I've got The Gallows already! I'll be going out tonight, I won't see anyone tomorrow, I'll be hungover. Won't just be The Gallows tomorrow, but the Hyper-Gallows... The kind of Gallows you'd get on the last day of the school holidays.
Time for a walk, time to try and forget about Monday morning, and the alarm, and answering phonecalls, and that long drag till the day ends, and, and, and...
Still, only a month and I'll be on a plane to America, so it's not all bad...

Come this Autumn we'll be Miles Away

Sat in the living room.
Empty flat - Andy is until next week, visiting family - and the closed door of his room hides that silence that all rooms have when their usual occupants are not there. A sense of dust and attics, lost things and time where nothing changes.
The heatwave continues, and seems to be entering a different phase - or perhaps it is the year, moving on, entering deep summer.
We've not had a true deep summer for three years now.
I return to work next week on Monday, and the thought of that falls heavy now, a shadow that almost has weight, a substance composed of that 7:00am alarm. I must leave that place. I will leave that place. Into the unknown, and a line from an old song echoes back come this autumn we'll be miles away.
That line comes from a song (by a band called 'Meanwhile Back in Communist Russia') that I would play over the summer of ten years ago. That was a heatwave summer too. I remember being stuck on a train coming back from York for hours and hours. Up the country and down again over the course of a day. I remember those last few weeks of living at Flo's place - that house of dust as I remember calling it. Why dust? I don't know. There was something dusty about that August.
Feels like I've stumbled onto a crossroads I can't see, got to take the right road, but I can't see the right road, let alone the crossroads. August has begun to rear up, some giant, unruly horse of a month, and beyond that September, and then October - the unknown, and the future all with a sense of potential and panic.
I often think about lost things, lost objects, lost times, lost loves, and underneath all these lost things that greater truth, and one that becomes more self-evident as I get older, that we're all lost really, and we spend our lives waiting to be found, waiting to remember where we are and where we should be or go.
I'm watching the beautiful and harrowing Never Let Me Go. Just reaching the end. Something pale and haunting about the film I can't quite narrow down. Something nostalgic, some memory it almost awakens but then slips away (rain in a deep English wood, the reflection of grey skies in pools of rain, afternoons sleeping in rickety rooms in countryside summers before wars)
Everything feels far away now.
Come this autumn we'll be miles away.
The film has now finished, the credits are rolling, and its 7:43pm, and it could be no time, no place, but I am here, on this Friday night in the July of my 42nd year.

Summer When I Was 21

(The above photograph was taken in the Uxbridge area, exact location forgotten, sometime over the summer of 1993)

A few days after my 21st birthday in March, I left home. My parents moved back up to the Midlands (eventually settling, for a couple of years in a village called Bretforton in Evesham) while I moved into a rented room in Uxbridge town centre. I had no previous contact with the residents of the house, most of whom were a few years older than me and all worked in a variety of uninspiring jobs.

Since leaving art college the year previously, I was mostly unemployed (working Saturdays and occasionally part-time at W.H.Smiths), I still had no idea what I wanted to do, and stayed in the area while my parents moved away because the few  friends I had were still here.

The first few months in the house were a nightmare. I was terrified of all the other residents - social anxiety now almost chronic - and I wondered if I had made a mistake moving here. I would avoid the living room and kitchen if there was anyone else in there, only making my meals late at night. I spent most of my days hanging out with David and John, occasionally seeing Simon, who was mostly at university across the other side of London.

It was not an ideal state of affairs, made even worse when David decided that he was no longer going to socialise as he wanted to 'work on his novel'. Anxiety turned into depression, and I spent a lot of time visiting my parents up in the Midlands. April turned to May, and John had a couple of weeks off work. Two weeks spent flying kites on Perivale Hill and sleeping over on his sofa (his parents were away). This made me feel slightly more at ease... even David came out a couple of times. I remember walking John's dog over an overgrown patch of parkland near where he lived in West Drayton, called The Closes Violet tinged evenings. Air full of seeds and electricity, a springtime optimism. 

Summer began in 1993 when Philip had dropped me off at my house. I was still avoiding everyone I lived with (aside from a few awkward encounters in hallway), but we had had someone new move in. I ran into him in the hallway (or he might have forgotten his key and I let him in). He introduced himself as Paul, and asked if I 'wanted a smoke' which I declined. 

Paul was 24, three years older than me, and I used to think of him as some cross between your typical lad and a hippy (the latter due no doubt to the copious amounts of cannabis he consumed). He was mostly unemployed though sometimes worked as a 'grouter' (some arcane building site job). He liked body building and looking good, was self-confident and outgoing, but he also liked painting (small water colours of geometrical landscapes) and said that he had been a child actor, and even had a credit in Omen 3 as a 'shoeshine boy'.

Paul was my entry into that summer and away from the gloomy confines of my sunless ground floor room. He always made sure that I joined him in the living room, and I began to tentatively join him for a 'smoke'. I liked being stoned - I felt relaxed and my imagination seemed sharper and stronger. My ability to daydream was much increased. Through Paul I met the other people in my house; Claire an Irish office worker who was 25, and Helen, also 25. It would be later that I would meet the other previous resident in the house, Pete. He was a year older than myself at 22, and also worked in an office, and because he was in such debt and had no money, spent all his time in his room with his best friend getting stoned.

Meeting the other residents happened gradually over a period of time, and even as late as late June that year, I was still questioning if I was going to stay. 

I had been up to see me parents in their new bungalow in Bretforton. As they didn't have a spare bed I was staying on the sofa in the living room, a situation which didn't seem too bad at the time. The music I was listening to at the time? It seemed I was listening to a lot of punk / hardcore stuff; Bad Brains, Instigators,Thrust, SNFU. I remember buying Obituary's 'World Demise' album in a second hand record shop in Worcester, and a punk compilation album (quite rare too) from some market in nearby Evesham.

I spent my days in my parents garage - I had some kind of fantastic karaoke machine which meant that I could record songs in some kind of listenable quality. I played guitar and tried to sing, and used my sister's old keyboard to provide some kind of backing beat. I would sometimes double-track the voice and guitars. The kind of music I was playing was an odd mixture of punk, metal with an increasing influence of gothic rock. How I remember that huge, hot garage, everything tasting of dust and languor, and sweating in the heat, spending hours working on songs such as 'Revenge' and 'Hey Brother'.

For some reason, and I can't remember why now, this weekend, which I always referred to as 'The Last Days of June' as if it were some great historical epoch, seemed to mark the end of that period of great uncertainty which marked those months moving of first moving out of home.

I had also decided to go back to college.

Despite my failure two years ago to finish my art and design foundation course, I had decided to do another one. This decision was due in part to a couple of weeks the last autumn where, unemployed and lonely, I had discovered something akin to a passion for art - a real passion, as opposed to something I did because I was 'good at it' and couldn't think of anything else to do. I went for an interview at the Langley site of East Berkshire and was offered a place on the spot.

For the first time, probably since school, I felt my life was beginning to go somewhere.

In early July (while heading out to buy Sapphire and Steel assignment 6 on video) I was stopped in the street by a girl looking for a guitar shop. She needed to buy plectrums or strings. Usually I would have pointed her in the right direction, and left it at that, but because I was happy, and was unsure that my directions were being understood (she was French and her English wasn't great) I walked her to the guitar shop, before she asked to meet the next day.

The summer of 1993 had begun.

I was working part-time most days at Smiths, and in the afternoons I would meet up with Anne-Sophie, and we would play guitar in various Uxbridge parks (Paul had given me an acoustic guitar he had and never got around to playing). Sometimes we would go for a drink or just get stoned.

When Paul wasn't working I would hang around with him. One day, bored, (I say bored, but I don't really mean bored, I don't remember being bored at all that summer) we started throwing pears in the tangled back garden. Never good at throwing, I overshot (we had set up some kind of target in the old shed) and my pear sailed out of the back garden and with a horrifying smashing sound, realised that I had smashed someone's window, or greenhouse. In horror, we both ran back into the house. I became convinced that the police might be called and I would be taken to jail, sentenced for my 'garden crime'. I thought the best thing to do was to find the person whose window I had smashed and apologise. I set off on my quest. I ran into an old man on the way, who saw how concerned I was, and kindly advised that the best thing for me to do was to think 'it was just one of those things' and go home and forget it... which I did.

It was a sweltering summer - the heat sank into everything. 

Fragments, echoes. 

Walking back with Paul from a nearby friends house, talking about the prophecies of Nostradamus, and Paul noticing I had gone 'very pale'. Reading, or trying to read 'The Juvenalia of Charlotte Bronte' in the kitchen, and discovering the delights of Donna Tartt's 'The Secret History' (recommended by Duncan at work, the department manager of the books section as 'that book everyone is talking about). Working my way slowly through a thick book of E.F.Benson's Collected Ghost Stories. I still have a copy of that book now, on the shelf of my bookcase. Music was supplied by Type'O'Negative's 'Bloody Kisses', Voivod's 'The Outer Limits', Brujeria's 'Matando Gueros' and a blue vinyl edition of Manilla Road's 'Crystal Logic'.

Ann-Sophie was over for the summer and was working as an au-pair in nearby Gerrards Cross. We met up most days, and despite having some attraction to her, never really considered the possibility of anything happening between us. She was the same age as me, but her background was very different, impossibly glamourous and slightly dangerous. She would tell me how she used to smuggle drugs across Europe by swallowing them in a condom, of how she really came to England to look for her brother. Her brother had disappeared after committing some kind of robbery with a shotgun in France. Ann-Sophie had traced the rumours to England, but there the trail had run cold. I don't know whether she ever found him.

One night I went over to see her at Gerrards Cross. I caught a taxi to West Drayton station, and told the taxi driver I was going to see my girlfriend. We drank whisky in one of the parks, where gangs of friendly local teenagers attempted to speak French with her. I met her friend Elizabeth, also a French au-pair. I remember Gerrards Cross being full of woods, dark trees and crossroads made of footpaths, lit by dim lamps. Somehow we ended up at some kind of night-fete. They had a bunking bronco machine there, which Ann-Sophie rode on... for about ten seconds before being flung off, much to her delight and the delight of the crowd. I have some vague memory of being at Gerrards Cross train station at midnight... vaguely alarmed at the non appearance of the train. The thought of spending a night out in the open didn't seem that concerning at the time... but the train came anyway.

I had work the next day, and I somehow managed to haul my whiskey-haunted body through work, but by the time I got home the hangover had kicked in. I remember sitting in the living room with everyone else, and Claire making me a strawberry jam sandwich to make me feel better.

It was a good summer.

It was with a shock that I realised (and wrote in my diary) that 'I hadn't seen any of my old friends for over a month'.

Growing apart, moving away.

There seemed to be so much time that summer - life was entirely without the awful rushed quality that defines it now. So much seemed to happen, but there was also so much time for daydreaming and languor too. I remember one long night reading the Secret History in the living room, that section when the main narrator Richard, elects to stay alone in Hampden Town over winter while all his friends are away. The section affected me deeply, all those images of wintry days and snow and isolation. As his winter progressed, his isolation started to turn 'into a kind of mania' - he began to hear voices in the snow, and was beholden to strange superstitions (having to drop a stone into the frozen river as some kind of propitiation of a river-god). The cold infected his dreams, and 'lost Arctic expeditions' is a phrase which still haunts me now. I remember reading this in the living room, as hypnotised and unnerved as if it were a ghost story.

I remember being in London with Ann-Sophie and Elizabeth, being at Speakers Corner as a gathering of anti-English supporters began to become vociferous (Neither Ann-Sophie or Elizabeth, both olive-skinned looked particularly English).

I remember Paul having a friend who vanished, neglecting to pay some small debt to him. He had probably gone home to Liverpool, but after opening an old suitcase of his, found in the garden (he had been staying over) and discovering letters relating to computer programming, we had decided something much more sinister was afoot. Over an evening of getting stoned and listening to early Black Sabbath, we had turned his friend into some government agent, some career criminal, some mastermind of deception. A great time was had by all.

No-one was much into washing up in the house. One day Paul, so annoyed by this, put all the pans out into the back garden. I remember the everyone's horror when, the next day, the pans were crawling with slugs. Paul was delighted by this - his hippy side coming to the fore - and said something along the lines of 'nature taking care of its own'. The next day, all the pans were back inside again, mixed with all the clean cutlery. Paul denied all knowledge of this, and no-one cooked anything for a long time.

I went away for a weeks holiday with my parents -a canal holiday along the Shropshire Union canal. As I sat on the boat reading (I think it was 'A Time of Omens' by Katherine Deverry) a leaf landed on the page I was at. It was a perfect autumnal  leaf, the colour  of cooling, dreaming days, of childhood and early nights, street lamps coming on and dark breezy mornings. 

The first sign that this summer had an end.

When I got back I rang Ann-Sophie once, but she wasn't in, and I didn't try again. I'm not sure why. I re-established contact with David. I began to buy records from the new wave of black metal - Burzum's first album being among them. David disliked the smell of my hallway. I listened to albums by Nosferatu and Asylum A day or two before I was due to start college (college began on September 13th that year) I received a letter. It was from Ann-Sophie. She was very upset with me, wondered why I hadn't called her, and if she had done anything wrong. She wanted me to call her, but if I didn't then she understood, and wished me well and to 'have good guitar'. She ended with the words 'life is strange'.

The letter saddened me - I don't know why I hadn't called her, not really - but more than that I have no idea why I didn't call her then, why this casual, unmeant cruelty.

It's a question that still haunts me now, 20 years later.

I started college, and after the best summer of my life, the next year at college was to continue this positive trend. It was still hot when I started college - still like summer - and I'm not sure when it started to feel like autumn, but whenever it did, it was to be one of my favourite autumns ever.

That autumn was also to mark my last year of living in the Uxbridge area. 

It would be a good year.

8:35pm

... eight hours of drawing later, my arms hurts quite a lot.

12:04am

...and one three hour walk later (when to town, down St James Street, and right to where I used to live at Flo's) I'm home again. I've got a load of reference material ready, I'm going to make a cup of tea, and then on with some artwork...
(but I still feel that existential push of time ebbing away on my week off, that dread of the alarm next Monday morning)
...anyhow, on with drawing gangsters, devils and crossroads in the desert!

Heatwave Ennui Postscript (7:35am - Not at Work)

...and guess what, it's 7:35am, and I did get up when the alarm went off at 7:00am, and I will leave the house at 8:00am, as if I am going to work, but won't because I've got the week off, and it's still summer outside (I can hear the sound of roadworks vehicles) and its time for a cup of tea...

Heatwave Ennui

July tumbles on and I have a week off work.
The heatwave continues. We haven't had heat like this - not for this amount of time - for at least four years. The last time we had a sustained amount of heat, it was the summer of 2009. Today, I strolled into town, went to Dave's Comics, the headed back along the beach; the melancholy smell of barbecues, people trying to balance in the waves, that feverish tinge on the skin of afternoon drinkers. Sunburn-nostalgia, holiday pressure.
I got back about 5:00pm, and spent the next five or six hours working in the 'Malcolm at the Crossroads' comic strip, which I hope to finish this week. These five or six hours were spent measuring, drawing panels, lettering, inking the panel-edges and the lettering. Boring stuff but necessary. I'm still not sure why it takes so long to do.
Resonances from heat like this include:
Looking down Long Lane in Hillingdon. Scarred old trees and the Ruislip 98 bus. Still-metal taste of London suburbia. Blue skies like steel. No seas. No tide. I was writing the other day about a specific summer memory (1992) associated with Long Lane which is why it seems to have come back so strongly today.
Worcester. Obviously. I tend to think of Worcester as an autumnal place, but I sometimes forget (well, not really, I rarely forget anything) that I spent two summers. Today has reminded me of that first summer, 1997; 136 London Road, Al, Paul and myself tumbling (like this July) about that cool shadowed four storey early, early, early Victorian house. That long slow curve of London Road into the city centre, and at the base of the hill, thinking about The Strawberry Thief or The Strawberry Thieves, and playing with the words thinking I might use them for something, a story or a song, but not knowing they had already been used for something.
Malta. I think it was walking down by the beach today that bought up Malta. I was five when I lived there. 1977. However. Some kind of pool. It was an outdoors pool, and it was shadowed. Cool water. Slippery tiles. I remember playing with an older boy around some kind of tap. Turning on the tap. Turning off the tap. This was fun. The smell of tar (slow turn of black barely-liquid) being laid on the road. A roadworks smell. I remember a butterfly in the desert caught on the tarmac, and I tried to free it and only pulled the wings off.
You know what I should do tomorrow?
I should get up as I would do if I was at work, leave the house at the same time I would normally, pass by the same people I pass by every day, but instead of going to work, I'll do all those things I usually long to do when I go to work but can't; sit for hours in a coffee shop (ah, the smell of coffee shops in the morning!), walk to the woods at Stanmer and sleep on the edges of the trees and listen to the wind in the leaves, or catch the train to London, further, maybe even back to Ickenham, or North, to Worcester, or maybe even further, to Scotland, to Kinloss and Forres.
But what will probably happen is that I'll ignore the alarm and go back to sleep.

Summer When I Was 20

(The above picture shows me in the lobby of the Marhaba Palace Hotel in Tunisia, July 1992)


Nothing much happened over the summer when I was 20. It just didn’t seem to have much an identity, a bit bland, not too bad, not too good, just a bit… nothing.

The previous autumn I had begun an art and design foundation course at Harrow college. I had enjoyed the first term, and had got along with my course mates. After Christmas when we had to specialise (I chose fine art) I hadn't fared so well. Very few people I had been with over the previous term chose to do fine art (most doing graphic design), and I suddenly found myself in a very large class full of strangers. A social anxiety began to grip me, and I was unable to connect with many (any really) people in my class. I had a disastrous meeting with my tutors, and after Easter I decided to leave college. It was about a month before the course was due to finish, but I was convinced that I wasn’t going to pass. I didn't tell anyone - not even the tutors - I was leaving, and one day just never went back.

I had lost contact with Geoffrey and Colin over the past year too. I’m not sure what had happened to Colin. Since leaving school he had worked in a bookshop in town – Had he got a new job? Moved away? I am uncertain now. I would run into him a couple of times in the future, but it wasn’t until the era of Facebook that we renewed contact.

As for Geoffrey, he was eager to distance himself from us – to such an extent that David and myself – in a remarkable display of maturity – began to refer to him as the ‘traitor-general’. I think we ran into him once over the next year or so, a vaguely uncomfortable meeting.

I still continued working Saturdays at W.H.Smiths and occasionally worked extra shifts there too. As spring crept into summer (and that summer there was nothing to mark its beginnings) I spent my days just hanging out with David. There was a certain place we liked to go, an overgrown patch of countryside that lay on the other side of Ickenham golf course. Here there were man-made lakes (some used for fishing, some for boating), some kind of industrial quarry, farmland, and stretches of thickly clustered woodland. On the other side of this – or really, running through this, was the Grand Union Canal which led eventually to Uxbridge town centre. No-one really came to this hidden patch of countryside.

That summer all centred around the Holiday to Tunisia. This had been planned (and paid for by parents) over the last year. David, his girlfriend Mary, John and myself were going to spend two weeks in a 4* hotel on the coast. We were going to go mid-July – and those weeks leading up to it required a great deal of preparation. I remember we all had to get shots at the doctors before we went – I remember nearly feinting when I had mine (always been a bit squeamish).

I spent the early part of that summer trying to get into death metal. I had never really got the hang of death metal – which had surprised me, given my teenage love for fast, heavy thrash metal. Death metal was faster and nastier, and thrash had lost its way since the beginning of the decade. Too many bands, emboldened by the success of Metallica and Anthrax, had started to slow down, record ballads, and adopt a more commercial sound in the pursuit of record sales. Thrash metal's venture into realms of commercial acceptability was a total creative failure. Death metal had more in common with the thrash metal I had loved over my teenage years – the lyrics, the imagery, the speed… but something was missing. There seemed to be a lack of adrenalin bursting intensity, some vital x-factor I couldn’t quite connect with.

I made it my mission to ‘get into’ death metal. All this was sparked off by a cheap compilation I had bought at Our Price one Saturday lunchtime. I found that there was some songs I actually enjoyed – from bands like Vader, Unleashed and Immolation. London trips provided further records – Convulse, Sentenced, Deceased – and I was able to pick up the occasional one (Therion's second album) from Our Price. I would listen to these records deep into the night whilst playing the computer game ‘Elite’ on my Amstrad CPC 464.. Long hours were spent hunched over the grey keyboard, trying desperately to increase my rating from ‘competent’ to ‘dangerous’, trying even more desperately to convince myself that death metal was the way forward. At some point David and myself went to see Guns’n’Roses at Wembley Arena. I was annoyed that my death metal listening was interrupted by this gig. Guns’n’Roses weren’t very good. The highlight was a cover version of the Misfits’ ‘Attitude’. We left before the concert finished.

A few weeks before we were due to go on holiday to Tunisia, David and myself had gone on a trip to some local woods – a little bit further than we would normally travel to. In the days and weeks following David complained that the walk had left him ‘knackered’ and was unable to come out. I remember this state of affairs lasted until Tunisia.

It was obvious looking back at it from a distance of over 20 years that he was trying to avoid me, trying to put some distance between us. Though he had no job, he had a girlfriend, and wanted to spend more time working on his writing. He had got a number of rejections for his short stories, some of which were quite promising and encouraged him to send the stories elsewhere and to try again. I was probably quite annoying company; insecure and irritating in equal measures. After the previous summer I was terrified of being isolated in the house I lived in – a place I began to associate with depression and a certain kind of desolate, haunted despair.

And what was Tunisia like? I’ve not really thought about that two week holiday for a long time now. It was hot, and the sky had that constant dreamlike haze about it. I shared a room with John, and Mary and David shared a room. The beach was busy with people trying to sell us things. We went down the Marina and bought drink (glass bottles of coke) from there, and a bad leather hat from the hotel shop, not to mention a cassette tape of Tunisian folk music I never listened to after that summer (perhaps not surprisingly). We went for a weekend trip into the Sahara desert, where I didn’t go for a camel ride (only John did - I stayed in the coach with David and Mary).

Us being us, we didn’t drink much, we didn’t stay up late, or spend our days sunbathing on the beach. We spent a lot of time in our hotel rooms watching pornographic Italian game shows and trying to work out what was happening on the news. I was greatly worried over images of Saddam Hussain giving some kind of speech. It didn’t take much for my apocalyptic fears to make their way to the surface. Was there to be a new Gulf War? Had Saddam Hussain got some kind of super weapon he was aiming at the West? In-between these apocalyptic concerns we watched MTV; Ministry and Fields of the Nephilim. Home seemed a long time away.

Part of the problem with the holiday was that I had somewhat more than platonic feelings for Mary. I always had done, right from the time I had first met her – in the first year of my A-levels, way back in the autumn of 1988. I had thought for a time that she might feel the same, but it transpired that she had feelings for David. They had been together since the Christmas of that year, a not inconsiderable time for any relationship, let alone one started when he had been 16 and she had been 17.

I suppose, looking back on it, that my less than platonic feelings had been picked up on – certainly by David (Back in the 6^th form he had confided to a friend that we ‘clashed over Mary’). I'm sure that Mary had suspected too. Over the holiday – in such close quarters with each other, there was a certain level of tension that spilled over in any number of ways. At one point during one hot African afternoon John had fallen asleep on his bed and had had a dream that he had died. He had said that in the dream he could see his coffin being loaded onto the plane, then his funeral, the mourners at the funeral. This terrified David and myself, seeing this as a premonition not only of John’s death, but ours too. John had had a dream a few months before the holiday where he had been in a dark room and had been confronted with four coffins, each bearing all our names. David started crying while we tried to comfort him. I remember him holding Mary’s hand and wailing ‘you don’t believe, you can’t understand, you don’t believe’… Away from the more rational John and Mary, David and myself discussed the possibility of returning to England early.

In the event we stayed, and on the last day of the holiday, we had somehow managed to find our way to the roof of the hotel. I remember peering through the vast stone letters that adorned the roof of the hotel, spelling out its name ‘Marharba Hotel’. We had finally begun to relax, and Edward even commented how typical it was that we ‘had begun to enjoy ourselves on the last day’.

We arrived back in the early hours of August the 2^nd. I remember getting home in the early hours (I don’t remember how though, whether one of our parents picked us up, or if it was by taxi) and Mum commented on my lack of a tan. I thought strangely guiltily of all those hours in our hotel room away from the sun… only we could go away on holiday to the Sahara and not get a suntan.

England seemed incredibly autumnal after the hyper-summer air of Tunisia, shadowy and cooled – though this was only in contrast to North Africa and the Sahara. It was one of those endlessly hot summers that seemed to come every year in the early nineties. Of those first few weeks back I remember very little. I remember watching a Sapphire and Steel story (Assignment 3) with Simon that I had just bought. The story was long, stretching over three hours. Time travellers from the future were studying the present in an invisible penthouse on top of a block of modern day flats. The sentient piece of meat, bred in future world laboratories, that they had used to travel in time had begun to experiment on the travellers, and to threaten the earth itself. Sapphire and Steel were called to sort the problem out. I found watching this story quite disturbing – I’m not sure why – I’m not even sure if it was connected to what was happening on the screen, but a sense of sick foreboding crept over me. Even if I watch Assignment 3 now, I can feel that same dark-adrenalin rush in my stomach, a nauseous mixture of nerves and dread.

Another image I remember is of having been to Harrow-on-the-Hill – possibly with David – and getting off the bus down Clifton Gardens, where my old school, Abbotsfield Comprehensive was located. I had bought the All About Eve album ‘Touched by the Hand of Jesus’ and maybe the first self-titled Bathory album. Sweat-shadowy air, an autumnal-August, summers-end coming closer. Why had I got off the bus there? Why had I even caught the bus? Had Edward caught the bus with me up to a certain point and then got off, returned to his girlfriend’s house that was near there and I had walked the 40 minute walk home alone? I’m not sure why this image seems somehow to sum up that August between the end of that unremarkable summer and the holiday in Tunisia… but it seems resonant with, well, something. The mysteries of why I was there, or how I got there are forever lost to the summer of 1992.

Toward the end of that summer, my sister had a friend, Karen stay over. They were both waiting for their A-level results which were due out the next day. I had always liked – fancied – Karen, even though she was two years younger than me. I didn’t see her that often, but we got on well when we did. I remember my parents being away, and my sister, myself and Karen spent our time in the living room watching Red Dwarf videos. I remember at one point looking at Karen, and with her blonde, almost white hair, she suddenly looked like an old, old woman, and I thought, with sudden clarity, that there was something of tragedy about her, or something of tragedy about her in the far, far future. The hallucination – or shift in perception- only lasted for a few seconds, and felt like some warning or premonition.

At some point my sister left the room , leaving Karen and myself alone. We lay next to each other on cushions on the floor, and at one point I looked at her, and she looked back at me and held that gaze. That moment of certainty. That charged air. We might have kissed then, but I bottled it. A sudden terror came over me. I needed to be out of there. It was enough that I knew that she was attracted to me. It wasn’t of course. It wasn’t enough. When I lay in my bed that night, washes of regret came over me. I regretted that moment of fear for years afterwards. Funny, until writing this, I’ve not thought about that non-moment for years.

My sister passed her A-levels and left to study nursing in Bristol. I sent a story off to Interzone, about a piece of alien technology creating monsters in the desert.

Summer ended at some point. Autumn began. I don't really remember. I had no job, no plans, not even any ideas.

My life would be very different at the end of next summer.



(All names, needless to say, have been changed)

Summer When I Was 19

I remember the precise moment when the summer of 1991 started. I was sat in the canteen of Uxbridge college with Julian and two girls, neither of whom I liked and who felt the same about me. I had actually finished my art A-level (taken in a year) over the previous weeks. Julian and myself were hanging around the college because we really had nothing else to do.

My first year outside of school had been ambiguous; I had managed to secure a place for myself that autumn at a college in Harrow to do a foundation course in art and design – but I hadn’t actually excelled artistically during my art A-level. Neither had I overcome a sometimes crippling shyness that had blighted my sixth form years – particularly around the opposite sex. I had made some friends at Uxbridge College, but none that were to last beyond that day when I left.

That first year after school also marked my first ‘proper’ job (i.e a job that wasn’t a paper round basically) – working part-time (or sometimes just Saturdays) at the local W H Smiths on Uxbridge High Street. I made some friends at work – but didn’t really fit in at all – and never socialised with the people I worked with.

Anyway, that summer of 1991 began when I was sat in the college canteen. I had decided that I had had enough of the two girls, whom no-else really liked either, and walked out. I had said some parting shot to them both, nothing particularly witty, but which had silenced them both. I could hear Julian sniggering as I left.

I never went back into that college again.

It was a hot day – sunny and metallic – I passed by the Middlesex fields on the short walk home – and the green there was already turning to yellow, even though it was surely no later than early June. I remember I got back home and lay on my bed in my room, and put on some record – it was some death metal artist whose name slips me now. There was a certain sense of triumph as I lay there on that hot afternoon, aged 19, another summer just begun, and a song called ‘Necronomicon’ playing on the stereo (I wish I could remember the name of the band though).

I don’t remember much about the first part of the summer – I probably met up with Edward, Simon and Philip (the few friends I had were all from school). I saw less and less of Julian. He had managed to find a group of friends at college to hang about with and he began to drift away. I was envious of his new social group. They got stoned and went to pubs, had jam sessions at local rehearsal halls. They were young in a way that I’ve never been able to be. Things were changing – people were moving on – but I had the increasing feeling that I had was of being left behind.

Ickenham – where I lived – was a labyrinth of houses and neat gardens – suburbia in excelsis – I remember on those first summery nights, wondering this maze of near identical homes, the street lamps on red, and that feeling of life happening elsewhere. Edward – whom I saw most of – shared these feelings too – he was unemployed since leaving school the previous year – but as he had a girlfriend and I didn’t (and whom I had liked before him back when we were both 16), I didn’t quite believe him and felt he just wanted to join in on my late teenage melancholy.

At some point Edward and Julian had decided to go inter-railing around Europe. I had the opportunity to go but decided not to – I can’t remember why now. This was over August, and the summer had settled into some kind of claustrophobic suburban rhythm; work on Saturdays, London over the week, usually Thursdays, to buy albums from the second hand shops down Notting Hill Gate and Soho. I would have a driving lesson every week as well – my driving test (my fourth) was set for later that summer. I wasn’t confident of passing.

With both Edward and Julian gone, that creeping sense of isolation tightened about me. A vague kind of troubled melancholy managed to turn itself into a moderate depression. Everything felt too hot and exhausted, shot through with either a resignation or creeping despair. Those trips to London provided some escape from it all, and also from the constant stress-headache that plagued those August days.

Another friend – C – worked in a second hand bookshop in Uxbridge. One day he showed me a box full of old horror comics. He gave me a very good deal on them, and I bought them all. They were mostly from the late 1960s / early 1970s – magazines such as ‘Creepy’ and ‘Eerie’ – as well as a few lesser known titles such as ‘Chilling Tales of Horror’ and ‘Dracula’. I was nearly very pleased, but he had told me that there had been more  horror comics – and had nearly rang me to tell me about them, but hadn’t got around to it. Even now, 22 years after that summer, I wonder what other comics might have been there.

I think it was also from that bookshop (though I can’t really remember) that I procured a load of old Doctor Who novelizations for a very cheap price. Long hours were spent in my room reading through them all – short night turning into too-hot dawns. I remember finishing the last of the Dr Who novels ‘The Sea Devils’ as another feverish sunrise crept about my spider-infested room. Another of the novels ‘Fury From the Deep’ I spilled tea all over. The pages smelled of tea-bags, and were stained a deep autumnal brown.

In early August we spent a week or so at both grandparents houses in the Midlands – my Nan lived in Wolverhampton, and my Granddad in a small village called Stone just outside of Kidderminster. We split our time between the two houses. On the Monday (the 12^th of August to be exact) Metallica released their famous ‘black album’ (as most people refer to it). I remember being in the cramped spare room listening to future single ‘The Unforgiven’, finding too many parallels to my own life – or to this summer anyway. Then there was first single ‘Sandman’, I remember being at the bottom of Nan’s garden with Dad and my sister, watching the glowing remnants of a bonfire, and the words echoing through my head ‘exit light, enter night…’ On the other side of the garden was an inner city park, a long stretch of woodland where we would play ball when I was a kid, and where the nostalgia-song of wood pigeons could always be heard.

My grandfather lived out in the middle of the Worcestershire countryside. I remember over that holiday we all took a walk deep into the woodland where my Mum would play when she was a kid. To get there you had to walk down a long narrow country lane that seemed to last forever. There was a section actually inside the wood – near a wide and shallow stream – that Mum called ‘the spinney’. There was some kind of humming electricity box deep in the trees, too small to be a substation, too deep in the trees, but I can’t imagine what else it would have been for. It all seemed incredibly mysterious, and even now, when I’m falling asleep (perhaps on another hot summer afternoon, (like this one, a summer when I’m 41) that I imagine walking, alone, down that long narrow lane, deep into the woods, looking for that lost spinney.

After that week away, we returned to Ickenham, and summer in London suburbia continued. I failed my driving test for the 4^th time – much to the surprise of my driving instructor. I remember his disappointed face, and his determination when he said to me that I could drive perfectly well, and that he would now give me free lessons until I passed – fortunately on my next attempt. I also discovered that I had failed my art A-level. On the one hand I wasn’t too bothered by this, as I already had a place at college that autumn, but there was something else about it that troubled me. A bad grade I could deal with, but to actually fail..? Particularly as I hadn’t thought the stuff I had done was that bad at all…

I saw a lot of Philip that summer. Philip was a bus driver, and another friend from school – though we hadn’t really got on that well until we had left. That summer he had a couple of new routes to learn, and I remember long hours in his car tracing the new routes through unfamiliar fragments of London suburbia; Eastcote, Rayners Lane, Pinner… Those trips in the car became intense and feverish. If he had air conditioning it didn’t work very well, and even with the windows open, the sweltering heat didn’t lessen. The evening sunlight sparked glass shards off of cars, and the taste of melting tarmac became ubiquitous. As the long days dragged themselves to evening, the bloated sun would hang like some omen in the sky, a deep and hypnotic red. Fragments - shimmery haze – late summer deeps – dark maps full of old factories and violence. I remember one of the routes we drove took us into some tower block industrial estate. In the dead ground between the blocks, a no-man’s land of yellowing grass and playgrounds, a number of children played noisily. Surlier teenagers stood round the outskirts in clustered groups of adolescent conspiracy and concern. This looked like a bad place to be. Directly in front of the car there was a figure. Not really a child or a teenager, but something in-between. He had an oversized head, and something not quite right about his darkly hooded eyes that regarded us with a mixture of suspicion and mute malevolence. He began to run, back towards the tower blocks in the near distance, where he presumably lived. Philip quickly reversed the car and we noisily escaped this suddenly sinister dead end.

The growing sense of desperation and despair that accompanied the heat faded –slightly- as summer grew to an end. Edward and Julian had come back from their travels, and though I was glad they were back I was also felt left out and distanced from the both. I had a project to do for college that was about the idea of ‘place’ and I chose the back garden, because I didn’t have to go very far. This took up most of my days, and though I was nervous of starting a new college I would be glad when the summer was over. I spent the evening in the gentle late-summer blue dusks drawing the willow tree, the shed, the leaves on the apple tree, and the brick work of the house I had always believed to be disquietingly haunted.

This late summer swan song was accompanied by a new raft of records – bought not from second hand shops in London, but from Our Price in Uxbridge. They were getting rid of most of their records to make room for the then new format of compact discs. There were cheap treasures to be had here!  -A double Diamanda Galas album, ‘The Plague Mass’ a special coloured vinyl edition of the Swans ‘Filth’ album, a white vinyl Newtown Neurotics compilation, also solo albums from ex-Husker Du singer Bob Mould and others too I’ve long since forgotten.

As I knew exactly when that summer began, I also know the exact moment where it ended. It was the Sunday before I started at college and I had gone record shopping in London – I remember some of the albums I bought that day; Husker Du’s ‘Everything Falls Apart’, the first Anti-Nowhere League album, and ‘Defiance’ by Dead Moon who were to become one of my favourite bands. I remember I got back in the last of the light at Hillingdon tube station. That tube station was demolished a couple of years later and a bright shiny new one erected, but I liked the old one. It was small and ramshackle, and slightly mysterious. By the time I had walked down Swakeleys Drive and had just embarked on the upward slope of Woodstock Drive where I lived, the streetlights had come on; deep red hues watching the empty streets. There was a certain exciting coolness in the air, and a sober breeze had started up, stirring the shadows between the lamps, between the houses and under still heavy summer trees to deepen in ways that no longer belonged to the summer. This was the point where autumn was to begin. I had a new college to start the next day, and new records to listen to.

I was glad that the summer was over.

Dani Filth down West Street

I was walking up West Street on the hot Saturday afternoon after I had finished work. I noticed someone peering at my t-shirt coming the opposite way, trying to work out what it was (It was an And Also The Trees shirt). The person looked vaguely familiar before clicking into focus - it was the lead singer from Cradle of Filth.
He was dressed all in black too. I wonder if he likes And Also The Trees?

Summer-Slow Day

Walking back from a friend's last night, a little drunk due to afternoon drinking (lager, cider, ale) and in the sudden evening (the last hour of true daylight) everything is deep in summer. Oh, here we are at last, summer, and not the summers of recent years, pale insubstantial things, but those old and nostalgic summers full of distance-shimmer, violet twilight sky and the taste of the air all sunburnt and unreal.
Up the steep streets and onto the Old Shoreham Road, pass by the petrol station, and try to catch a glimpse of a ghost of myself working there. I can't ever imagine having worked there now, let alone for half a decade.
By the time I get home it is barely dark. I pour myself a pint of water, put on an album, and immediately fall asleep.
I wake this morning with the curtains still open, and the sky a bright and unimpeachable blue. Breathe in the air through the windows left open all night, and yes, this is summer again. I check the time; 7:26am. I get up. I make a cup of tea. I feel bright and alive and it's not even 8:00am.
I spend the morning pottering of the internet, reading (A Book of Silence by Sara Maitland) and listening to music. I have a shower and forget to do washing. At midday I leave the house.
The heats swamps me as soon as I close the door - I was expecting it to be warm - but this hot? The beach is crowded. I run into Genevieve and Kate at The View on the seafront. I join them for a coke, and they ask me why I bought my leather jacket with me. I have no answer to this. The hottest day since May last year, and I am afraid that it might get a bit chilly.
I head on into town, and veer left away from the seafront to go up to Western Road. I run into James and Lee from work. Drink more coke and a cheap energy drink and try to forget we all have work the next day. After I leave I go and get a coffee from one of the numerous coffee shops along Western Road (as if I haven't had enough caffeine already). I take my coffee up to St Anne's Well Park and in the sun which is so strong I begin to fear for sunburn (I've only ever had sunburn once in my life, over the heatwave of 2005).
I'm quite happy in the park, finishing off a picture I started on Friday night, a head shot of Joe as an imagined detective. As usual I get lost in it, and everything around me fades and yet becomes somehow heightened - an impossible and pleasant state of things, and when it is time to go, everything is sharper and clearer, more itself somehow. I taste the heat coming off the tarmac, and the brightness of the sunlight on the cars is sharp as sudden childhood memories.
6:00pm now, and through the gap in the curtains, I watch the shadow of a chimney fall on the roof of the house. Somewhere I hear a plane - a light aircraft, and there is, below all this, the sound of birds, low and insistent on this slow summer evening.

Aldrington Halt

Hushed streets after a day of unsummery gloom. A breath of something in the night, not necessarily of watchfulness, but more some kind of wariness. Things open up when things get too still. The light of the lamps is lurid, casts uncertain shadows on the leaves of bushes, of trees, on the brick walls of houses.
Pause at the entrance to Aldrington Station - well, not exactly the entrance, as there really isn't an entrance. There's no ticket office, just long sloping paths leading up to the platform. Not even called a station, but a halt.
I glance down the tunnel that leads underneath the tracks, well-lit and shorter than I was expecting. That subway always seem so long when I am not here.
There is still mist about the street light halos, and the sharp-coolness reminds me of the lost autumn that I've been looking for all these years.

Maps of Old Mexico

Water necessitates gazing.
We stand on opposite sides of the river and indulge this cliché. Can't see much of the water, a narrow thing, silvery-grey, and obscured by weeds and grasses growing from the steep embankments.
I could leap across the river and join her on the other side, or she could join me, but we let the river cut through us instead. These are countries of silence, and even when she does talk, her words will be as silence, and the spaces between those words will speak of far more than anything she says.
Behind her, a few fields back, a dark smudge of woodland is still - bony branches under leaden skies - beyond that, rainy hills, and between the bony-branched woods and the rainy hills are rumours of a dark town where she must have come from. Sloping roofs of shallow houses. A spire that might belong to a church or a factory.
She tells me that the river we stand above is nameless, though feeds, eventually, into the Noxis-Nibris. Dark hair falls across her face. She stares down at the needle-thin river. Even as she finishes speaking, I realise I cannot remember her voice, but I am right in the fact that the spaces between her words say far more than what she says. Those spaces bring up things that might be memories - or dreams - but are probably neither. They are too splintered to be called fragments, though they do resemble fragments - fragments of interiors - the wooden steps of a remote stairway, the unloved corner of a dim bulb-lit attic, the spare room of a house rented out to people who do not stay for long, and never come to this room.
I do not need to ask her, as she tells me anyway, and again I listen to the spaces between her words more than what she says.
She tells me that the Noxis-Nibris is a river that runs through the spaces that all things cast aside - the very spaces that the spaces between her words remind me of. It is not a metaphorical river, she explains (or doesn't as the case may be) but the flow of the water (or rather shadows) that flow through there can only be accessed awkwardly. This last part she chooses not to explain, and the dark spaces between her words throw no light on this. The Noxis-Nibris can be seen in maps of Old Mexico ( and she says this like it is a country itself) and then only by the light of 40 watt bulbs in windowless attics between the hours of 2:00 - 4:00am. Her words begin to echo those spaces between her words. Something coming up from those attics that that impossible rive runs underneath.
If this needle-thin river below us that flows like the depression of Sundays in autumnal days when recovering from a protracted illness does flow into the Noxis-Nibris, and must therefore be a part of that impossible river that must exist, then this place we are in must be a space cast by another thing - another place- too. She smiles at this but does not look up.
Where are we then, under this leaden sky that does not move, standing above a fragment of an impossible river, where in the distance a dark town hides behind dark woods under rainy hills? Who is the thin girl who stands staring down into the river, whose voice is forgotten but throws up spaces will be remembered (like a song you can't get rid of, like a name you can't quite recall).
She does not speak, and I cannot see her face at all now - her hair covers her face. No breeze has moved her hair to cover her face, no hands have reached up to move the hair to cover her face. She sways slightly in the no-breeze.
In this silence is, if not truth, then something that might lie beyond it all, perhaps the course of an infinite river in a country called Old Mexico.
Or the spaces that country might throw off.
She turns and walks away. Does not say anything, but whistles a tune, something bright and cheerful and terrifying, an advertising jingle, or the theme tune to a sitcom barely remembered from lost adolescent days.
I watch her walk toward the trees, across the fields, and her hands are in the pockets of her coat, and she walks in an oddly jagged fashion, as if the ground is uncertain (spongy grasses hiding muddy patches) and she is determined not to stumble.
I do not see her reach the woods, and can only imagine the rented room in that dark town she must surely return to.
As for myself, I turn back to whatever space I have come from, and to whatever fragment of a fragment awaits me when I get there.

Angry Work Rant

Words cannot express how much how I hate my job. Every day I dread getting up, dread coming into work. The effect it is having on me is starting to worry me. I feel, every day, my mental health disintegrating a bit further. Being at work is an excruciating mixture of soul-destroying tedium and stress like someone is jamming a pickaxe through your brain.
I met up with Em after work, and we went for a cup of tea in one of the coffee shops down Western Road, and everything was too loud - the waitress moving chairs, the cars on the road, people talking. Everything felt like it was screaming.
And I sat there with Em, and it struck me how much of myself that work has taken. Just a shadow of the person I was before I started working there. So much of me that was there before working there is now so much more lessened. It begins to frighten me how much more of myself will be taken by that place before I can leave.