11:11pm

Try to look for reasons why people think Mansfield Hospital is so scary, just come across people who have 'heard all the ghost stories'. People seem genuinely unnerved by the place though. I can't imagine getting into an abandoned hospital. I'm afraid my courage would fail me.

I remember drunk urban explorations with Joe, a house under construction, a bakery. the Sainsburys building site near New England House. We tried to get the security guard at the Brighton Pavilion to tell us ghost stories one night. 'Not that old thing!' he moaned (and quite rightly too).

Old rooms in old places. I'm in the spook-out zone again. My room is too messy for me to relax here.and I've got the overhead light on, gives everything the look of my room at Woodstock Drive in Ickenham. Well, my old room. I've not slept a night in there for twenty years, but I still dream of it though.

Damn, time is moving too quickly for me.

41, 41, 41.

It's October tomorrow.

Year ending, and soon, we're in the middle of this decade.

The Attics of Hospitals Walking down Motorways

I read about Mansfield Hospital, long since closed. Almost all urban explorers who have been in the place speak of its less than pleasant atmosphere. None really explain why. The photographs haunt those minutes as I am falling to sleep. Long, cold corridors, and rooms full of movement when there should be nothing.
I hear footsteps somewhere. No-one must ever be able to map this place.
I imagine these places grow at night; stairways and hallways and morgues, operating theatre, attic and...
Oh, imagine the attics of hospitals, of that one hospital that all urban explorers fear.
I hear Mansfield Hospital, half a country away, hear me.
Hear footsteps walking down the motorways as it sends someone dressed as a corridor into possible dreams.

Blue-Dark Gods

Summers. I remember summers. On the edge of a field, watching twilight come through red wine and cigarettes. Swallowing up the trees, and dawn would always be days away. At the edge of the fire, away from the coals, a coolness.
Trees would be like gods at night.

40 Watt Bulb Disasters

Twilight on the beach. I watch the joggers, watch the water wash over stones. Read 'The English Ghost' by Peter Ackroyd. Remember when I first got back from the states I would be reading 'Noctuary' by Thomas Ligotti. Summer bright stones, summer bright tides. Still too clammy but summer feels long gone now.
October tomorrow, that old month, and the breaking down of all mechanisms this month and a half continues. Dials pop, clogs grind to a halt, all rooms seem stuck in some halfway place. 40 watt bulb disaster in the nooks and crannies of this year.
Shall I ask for a shift at the power station, out amongst the cyclops light (some industrial, lighthouse) and all those empty galleys, and beyond that, outside, those quarries that can't be quarries because we're at the docks.
These are machine like gods, like crows. A scarecrow technology.
The beach is dark and I am home, and I still try to hear the waves on the stones.

C.V Hell

I turn my attentions to writing my CV. As I cannot access my old one, I must start from scratch. I have problems with the word processor (Abiword, my Microsoft Word Starter never worked properly). I become frustrated due to word processor problems, increasing disheartened at the amateurish of the finished product and not being at all convinced that I can find a way to print it or send it on to potential employers.
I'm not even sure that I've saved it correctly...

Voivod - Nothingface (Fragments of Reactions)

I remember 'Nothingface', Voivod's fifth album.
I bought it on cassette tape from Our Price in Uxbridge, autumn fading into winter 1989.
Cold days.
Remember playing it for the first time, but can't remember what I felt, apart from being surprised that the Pink Floyd cover 'Astronomy Domine' sounded very Voivod-ish, and that the opening part of 'Missing Sequences' was very exciting.
The album got into my spine.
Something polar about it all, crisp and clean, like a shiny new hospital from another dimension. Emptied out of people, made pure by the snow. I had got it into my head that the album was a concept album, and portrayed the Voivod creature's journey into his own mind.
'Missing Sequences' made me think of people waltzing in the ruins of a factory or some kind of reactor. 'Pre-Ignition' rumbled along with a sense of growing disaster while 'Into my Hypercube' successfully managed to combine the sounds of a Morricone-esque spaghetti western soundtrack with a suburban haunted house.
An unnerving album. It sounds haunted, even now, 25 years after it was released.

Imagine Being Here at Night

I wrote this last year. I have no idea why I decided to write everything in the 3rd person, nor why I decided to fictionalise all names. I also changed round some details of the murder that had happened. I'm superstitious that way. It was all about a creepy trip to Wild Park woods in Moulscoomb that Joe and me made in the autumn of 2006.

The more he thought of his 35th autumn, the less it seemed that autumn had begun on that hot afternoon on the beach. He remembered - suddenly- (or perhaps not, this suddenly was stretched over a number of days) something that had occurred in October of that year. This day had the taste of something blue and wrong, a too big moon, wrongly reflecting, something bitter in the water. A light poison perhaps, too thin to poison anyone. It hadn't been very much really, nothing at all, not even an event, hardly worth remembering.
He remembered James' mouth, sober and thin lipped, and the dark cast of his eyes, remembered him rolling a cigarette as they stood at the base of the woods near the edge of town. 'There's not much of a fort there - not really a fort at all - just a wall really'. The last point been a lie too. The 'iron age fort' that the maps of North Lane Station had promised was only a few stones on top of a hill in a large circle. He had been before and was inevitably disappointed.
He couldn't remember why he had wanted James to come so much to the woods that day. It had been a Saturday in October - one of those nondescript days where the sun seemed cool and the air refreshing. Perhaps it had even been grey. Town had bored them, and the usual ritual of cafes and bookshops and charity shops had soon paled. 'It's not far' (another lie) 'just up Abbotsbury Road'.
When he had first moved to North Lane Station, he had lived in one of the dismal Sunday estates on the edge of town, right at the end of Abbotsbury Road. Liminal roads of houses, rumours of bored teenage gangs looking for trouble that he never seemed to see. The days before night-buses. Endless post-pub walks down the long parallels of Abbotsbury Road. Sometimes in the small hours, he thought to himself that he seemed to have been walking forever.
It had taken them about an hour to reach the base of the woods - the entrance just behind some kind of small industrial estate full of squat buildings without name. They first had to ascend a small slope to reach the trees - dewy grass, and the occasional empty beer of can (this made him nervous for some reason - a place for drunks and not for families - empty cartons of orange juice might have made him feel better) and all this amid sinisterly hidden piles of stinking dog shit. They looked up at the woods, at the trees above them. They weren't impressive trees - didn't really get impressive trees down here on the south coast - but in their thick and tangled nature there was something a little oppressive about them. As they moved up through the wood - and the trees were too close together - they tasted the darkness of the air and the dank breaths taken in of a place that people rarely came to.
James knew about the murder, though he can't remember if he had told him that day, or previously. A child found dead here in the 1980s (the late summer of 1986 to be precise). A man arrested whose name he had forgotten, charged and probably still alive in some prison somewhere. 1986. He had been 14 at the time. The same age. They stopped for a while, smoked roll-ups and wrote poems, sat on the edge of a fallen trunk whose underside was rich with the forbidding white of mushrooms. He couldn't remember any of his poem, but remembered a line from James; why would anyone want to come here? The place was unnerving, but was this place itself or the knowledge of what had happened? '
This is real corner-of-the-eye stuff' James had said, 'imagine being here at night'.
Their creepy glee had become laced through with something else.
Imagine being here at night.
They moved up further into the wood. The ground levelled out slightly. There were trees felled here, and over the stumps someone had lain a track of planks, a waist high ramshackle rollercoaster, made from bits of roughly nailed wood. Cobbled fences. Stolen bonfire fuel probably going back years of autumn. It was quite impressive. They had discussed who had built this - this makeshift course for riding BMX bikes over. It displayed a certain level of ingenuity, but this deep in the woods (they were only ten minutes up from the road) it was a little unnerving.
Why would anyone want to come here?
Disquiet turned to a small panic when they heard voices - and a flash of teenager-bright shirt through the trees. The people who had built the tracks no doubt, or people who were using them. Through silent agreement both him and James moved silently and quickly away. Leave this place behind. He presumed they came eventually to the disappointing stones of the fort, but he didn't remember that at all

For the Love of Old Hospitals

I long for an abandoned hospital to explore.
I'm not sure I'd have the courage to do any kind of urban exploration though - I'm far too easily freaked out. I pore through other peoples photographs though - plaster strewn stares, abandoned chairs, old beds are particularly creepy...
Imagine sleeping in such a place!
A bed up on a ward on the third or fourth floor, listening to the night-sounds of the hospital; a door banging in a breeze, pipes clanging, floorboards settling at night...
It wouldn't be ghost stories that would unnerve me (at least not in an unpleasant way) but less welcome visitors; security guards, tramps, psychos... With that kind of fear, I'd never be able to enjoy it.
Endless corridors, rooms full of rusting equipment whose purpose is long lost, always locked rooms somewhere, attics, attics in hospitals...
I long for these places, to stay until twilight, make my way out when the street lamps come on in a cooling autumn day outside.

Night Falls Quickly

My shoelaces look like snakes. The poisonous patterns of caterpillars.
I'm up in Lewes by the river. I remember being here in summer. I'm with Al and Claire again. It's claggy and humid and cooler. The long grass looks like it might hide twilight dog shit. Muddy field edge. Watch the cows across the other side of the water. There are people blackberry picking. I want to tell them they might disappear but I do not.
On the train to Lewes we are doing impressions of someone we used to know. The train pulls into Moulscoomb station. The man we are doing impressions of is at the station getting on with his girlfriend. We see him at Lewes. He is going for a walk in the country too. He tells us of another friend we all fell out with years ago is getting married next week in Devon.
There is no sun in Lewes.
We get back to Brighton and go for a drink at the Evening Star.
When we leave I take a slow walk back along the promenade. Watch the still sea, and by the time I get back here it is full dark.
I am surprised by how quickly night falls.

Walking along Western Road last Night

Walking back from the Evening Star last night, down Western Road. Was about midnight, maybe a bit later.
Couple of guys. Looked young. Looked like they had rich parents. One of them walks out in front of me, about to say something. I cut him off, shaking my head; 'nah' and walk on.
I don't see them again, but my reaction seems to puzzle them. I hear one of them repeat 'nah', and then say 'hair cut?' and the other say 'big issue?'.
Trying to sound hard but they end up sounding sad and puzzled.

Saturday Silence

I watch an old DVD of the television series 'The IT Crowd' last night. This lifts my spirits a little. I sleep deeply, and remember very little in the way of dreams (a subterranean chamber, wondering whether or not to watch a Dr Who DVD on the huge flat screen). I hear Andy leave for work as I lay in bed - it  must be later than I think - but I get up and discover that it is only 11:00am.
Saturday silence.
Em is away for the weekend. I have not spoken to anyone but her since Wednesday afternoon when I saw Andy briefly - well, not counting people in shops (ordering endless instant coffees to takeaway). It was strange last night, being outside from midday until it was dark, There is something portentous and beautiful about watching the night fall outside. I was down by the beach so this was unleavened by street light. Just watched the sea darken, the sky turn red, and finally the lamps on the promenade came on behind me.
It shall soon turn colder, and I will no longer be able to do that.
October next week.
(and October is a moon in a blue-dark sky above a wild fluster of branches).
I can hear nothing - not even the coffee shop across the passage.
There may well have been a disaster that has wiped out the world.
Or it might just be a quiet Saturday.

Wandering Downwards

I try to access my CV, saved to my e-mail, but am unable to because I do not have Microsoft Office. I leave the house instead - it is midday - and wonder down to the beach. I drink a can of Diet Coke and look at the waves. It is somehow too warm and cold at the same time.
I meet Em at Hove library, and we wander back down the beach. Tea at Mrs Bumbles. Sit back on the stones, and feel the sick anxiety I cannot shake begin to grow, again. Em leaves for work and I wander into town. Waterstones, Trafalgar Street Records, a couple of bookshops down the North Laine. I don't buy anything and end up at the beach again.
I get a cup of tea and sit on the stones. Watch the sea again. I try and do some drawing, but feel a little bit nauseous. I continue reading Phil Rickman's The Secret of Pan, and after I have finished my coffee begin to fall into a fitful sleep. The jagged shards of dreams just beginning.
After a while I wander up the promenade, end up buying another coffee at the petrol station by the swimming pool. This is a couple of hours since I first hit the beach. I find a bench on the seafront and watch it get dark. A bloated beautiful sun like some pregnant horror comic icon hanging over the distant power station. The Shoreham industrial zone seems swathed in mystery. When the sun has gone, I continue walking, the red lights on the chimney, the street lights of even further distant Worthing. I walk slowly. I am in no hurry to get anywhere.

Waiting for Em

I meet Em at Hove train station last night. She comes back at about 10:20am. I glance into the Station pub as I pass by. I had never though of it as a particularly unpleasant pub, but Andy had been in there on Saturday night, where a drunk man had offered to 'take him outside'. I find a copy of The Metro and read this while leant against the closed newsagent kiosk. People pass by from other trains. A woman sits down on a bench on the other side of the ticket barriers. Em's train comes on time, and I walk her home. I then walk back home and am asleep by midnight.
My sleep is full of vivid dreams.

4:27pm

I got up at about 2:00pm this afternoon. I didn't go to sleep till 6:00am. Lay there reading threads on urban exploration forums about the creepiest things that had happened to people while in abandoned buildings. I got into the spook-out zone, so even the dawn against the curtains began to creep me out. I started thinking about ideas for a novel (which I never intend to write of course) where an old homeless guy spends years squatting in an abandoned hospital. The hospital is haunted (or in his head, he's an alcoholic) and the book would be about the effect of living in such a place would have on him, how he would become to be infected by such a toxic environment.
I got up after Andy had left for work. I've flicked through graphic novels (The Marvel ones that will eventually form a set of 60, that I've been getting for a year and a half now). I've drank one cup of tea, and listened to the sound of the workshops below.
I deactivated my facebook account yesterday. I'm not sure why, but it seemed like some kind of good idea. I suppose I was wasting too much time on it, being maudlin and looking at old photographs.
I might go for a walk down the beach or something. I went down the beach yesterday, but felt too hot and panicky and came back. Summer is beginning to seem a long time ago now, even though it doesn't really feel like autumn. I can't imagine doing any artwork. I feel like I'm just waiting around until I get the motivation and courage (or desperation) to get a job (some menial, petrol station type of thing, or maybe some call centre, at least for a few months). Even when I handed in my notice at the old call centre, I had a feeling that this would happen... this lethargy. I told everyone that I was going to 'concentrate on my art', but now I have the time to concentrate on my art, I feel little in the way of motivation for it. With facebook now out of the way, I don't have an audience for it (I would post photographs of any pieces up there).
Maybe it's good to do nothing for a while.
Funny. A year ago I was in Kinloss with Emily - though by now we were probably back in Forres, about to catch the train back to Inverness. I was happier then, or if not happier, at least less disquieted.
There's no weather out there today.
I can see a splash, a smudge, of blue sky.

3:03am

It could be any time, but surely the morning is a lie. There is silence here, interrupted only by footsteps on the landing. I do not feel tired. I feel other 3:00am. I remember the cafe at Tescos 10 hours ago. I feel the autumn stretching out to winter. I want it to remain 3:00am for hours.

1:35am (Black Bridge and Broken Years)

The beach was drowned in fog. A tropical heat. I began to feel sick and headed up into town to escape the gloom, and buy too much chocolate.
I got home about 5:00pm, and nauseous lay down on my mattress to try and sleep. Em ran and I joined her at Tescos for a cup of tea. Early darkness and rain that didn't break the tension.
She went to work and I went for a long walk - down Cromwell Road, and up onto Wilbury Crescent (angles of my old room, I was happy living here). I pass by the petrol station - closed as there was a tanker delivery - and cut down Sackville Road, under the Black Bridge (my name for the railway that cuts over the road). Called in at Sainsburys - ignored our next door neighbour - came home.
Spent all evening lying on the mattress. Try to spend all night awake so I can sleep the day.
God, I can see why people drink now. This is a broken year.

Panic and Despair (All Hail the God of Anxieties and Phobia!)

Job centre went okay. Hot day. Endless sun. Feverish summer echoes. Walked to town afterwards to hand in the documents at the housing benefit office. Turns out that my contract is an 'old' contract. What they want is a letter from the landlord saying how much rent I pay, when it is due, if I am in arrears etc. As I would rather shoot myself in the head than ask my landlord for this (all hail the God of Anxieties and Phobia!) I am not getting housing benefit. For the first time since leaving my job, a real sense of panic and despair is beginning to coil. I really think I might have fucked things up leaving that job that was slowly killing me.

Job Centre Dread

That familiar pointless job centre dread. Why do these places inculcate in me such a sense of despair? I have an interview there this afternoon. It's not for the money (I left my job voluntarily so as far as I know I won't get any money) but to make my housing benefit application easier. Despite this, an air of anxiety hangs over the whole thing, as if I might give the wrong answers and get myself into some unspecified form of trouble.

Overripe Summer

The papers predict a tropical heatwave , only about 20' but the humidity will make it feel 10' hotter.
I always imagine jungles to be steamy and shadowy, overgrown tangles of alarming insects and toxic plants.
Imagine if the tropical heatwave has this effect on Brighton.
Autumn has slipped away again, and it feels now like an old, old overripe summer.

Coil

We're past the autumnal equinox now, beginning that long slope down into winter. It is still too hot to be autumn, though the heat is of a tired, clammy variety, far from the bright optimism of the heatwave back in July. Autumn lies coiled like a spring. I can almost hear the tension - a low, humming, electricity substation songs, a pylon crackle.
I keep my curtains firmly closed when I sleep now (over summer, I left a gap in the curtains so I could wake with the dawn). I sleep deeply and do not remember my dreams as well as I used to. When I wake I can feel the fluid air of autumn.
Childhood landscapes, lost days when I was 12.

Facing the Sea

Sat on the pebbles and the silent, still sea is a mystery. Boats hover in the light sea mist, white apocalypse eating up horizons. Waiting for something, a seagull shiver, watching the beach. In the distance to my right the power station chimney rises like some monarch. I think of the labyrinth there, the port-machines, displaced quarry claws, scrubby grass fenced off and desolately attractive.

The air is clammy; too hot and like a sleep that might claim you for days.

Tropical Saturday Night

A night that looks like autumn, but feels like some memory of a tropical jungle. By the time I get to the Evening Star I am dripping with sweat. It seems to take an age to get served. After a pint there we head to the Black Lion. Lancs' leaving do. He is going travelling around the world in December and does not intend to come back; 'return tickets are not part of the plan'. There is a DJ tent set up out the back. The beat overlays everything. I never go to places like this any more. Echoes of ten years ago. Everyone looks shiny and sharp. On the way out I accidentally nudge an empty glass from the table that shatters all over the floor. No-one notices. Keep walking. Don't look back.
We end up back at the Star. It's still too hot. The manager tells us how he sometimes dreams of the twins that used to live there, siamese twins  Daisy and Violet Hilton who appeared in notorious 1932 horror film Freaks. Doctor Occult joins us at some point. He orders a pint of cider and has a glass of ice 'on the side'. He is wearing a beautiful scarf, silk with some kind of pattern influenced by some late pre-Raphaelite furniture designer. He worries that the scarf is 'too ostentatious'. Claire reminds him that he has been known to come out in a purple suit including a very purple trilby hat.
When I get home I go straight to sleep.
I am woken with a start sometime in the night by a crash of books from One of the towers of books has fallen over.
I go back to sleep.

Secret Toilets in Hove

There is a secret public toilet opposite Hove Town Hall. It is located in the basement of a building whose purpose is uncertain, but I suspect may be connected to the coucil, and the aforementioned town hall. To enter the toilets one must walk down a sloping corridor, and enter into a labyrinthine room that holds many doors, to many toilets and toilet facilities. The frosted glass of the windows is scratched by the bushy-leaves growing outside, a cool shadowy atmosphere that inexplicably smells of childhood (to be precise, of Burnside, where I lived in 1981 / 1982). No-one is ever in these toilets, hence they are secret and somehow slightly sinister. There are rumours, among those who know of these toilets, that they are closed during the week, but no-one knows for sure.

Saturday Morning, a Quarter Way through September

Autumnal white skies are very different from the desolate depression of springtime white skies. White skies in September (or October) deepen the air, the flat-light makes something unreal about the streets; breathe in ghost-stories, churchyard days and brooding alley...
I think it's the stillness, the feeling that things are waiting for something else.
The last autumn in Ickenham, 1992.
I was signing on, working part-time at W.H.Smiths. Days were spent doing art, or writing, or recording music, walking the dogs during the evening. Because I had all that time to myself, I had that leisure to watch that autumn change from summer and deepen slowly to winter.
A dog barks somewhere, the washing machine turns in the kitchen, someone moves down in the Mews.
Can't hear anything else.
No, wait! A heavy parcel has just thumped through the letter box. Got to go. It must be the Best American Comics volume 9 I ordered last week.
Got to go!

Washing Line

Washing on a line at night.
Dancing like all the summery breezes you have ever known.
You could sleep there, in the darkness beyond
the washing line.
Under the trees in the wood.

Same old Chords, Still can't Sing

...i'll meet you there across the fields,
where the light grows dim
upon our churchyard skin.

(lyrics from a song I've been trying to write for 14 years, still no nearer to finishing)

Nine Lines on Sunny Autumn Day

My back to the window.
A sunny day.
I wish I could remember what autumn this reminds me of
(a bridge at night over a dark stream,
lights of a village,
the taste of damp nightfall)
The air is altered though.
A coolness
makes me think of playgrounds.

The Luxury of 1:30am

I'm getting to know this time of night so well. I love the quiet here, the silence that my typing makes, the way that, if I lay me head back whilst lying reading on my bed, there is almost the breath of some other time, some almost memory.
I lay on bed earlier, and watched the closed curtains, and easily imagined that beyond them was not the back gardens of Hove, but the night-black countryside of somewhere in Worcestershire in December, Whitbourne or Stone perhaps. I could imagine lampless lanes, and the dead silhouettes of sleeping houses, breathing the milky silver of stars. Without street lamps, being outside is almost an exercise in a benevolent cosmic panic.
I don't have a job (and after five weeks of not having a job, am still not bored) and don't have to get up early in the morning. The small hours are addictive though. It becomes an effort to go to sleep. I could stay awake and watch 4:00am come, 5:00am... and I am afraid of that because it might be that I might watch dawn come, and there is nothing more terrifying than watching daybreak merely because you've been awake all night.
It's only just 1:30am though.
I might stay awake an hour or two longer.
Oh, the luxury of it all...

White Rain

White rain.
A very specific kind of rain. Daydreamy and headachy and nostalgic all at once. Maths at school staring out of the window at the 2:00pm gloom, watching the fields in November, the clicky-clacky woods.
Light spilling from kitchen windows onto pavements. Coming home from college. Slick pavements, and the hallways of each house I pass a conduit no-one knows. No-one lingers long in hallways.
Afternoons slip into evening. Night holds itself here, knows it's time is coming. Winter is it's dominion.
Summer - the past - is seeming a long time away now.

Strange Meeting

Yesterday evening.
I was coming back home from the beach where I had spent a happy hour doodling in my notebook. Walking up one of the roads from the seafront that led me to New Church Road, I noticed a man stood in front of one of the front gardens. His attitude suggested he was a resident of of the house behind him. I was listening to my headphones, and stopped when I realised he wanted my attention. He was drinking from a can of beer, but didn't seem drunk though. I'd estimate his age to be in his mid-40s. As soon as I saw him, I had the feeling that he was the kind of person to be wary of. He looked like a heroin user, a street drinker, a mugger, a thief. Like everyone you ever want to avoid.
'What music you listening to mate?'
I wasn't expecting this.
'A band called Reigns' I replied.
'What are they, a rock band?'
Reigns aren't an easy band to describe at the best of times. The album I was listening to 'House on the Causeway' is a concept album about a phantasmal house appearing on a mysterious promontory. There are no names for the members of the band, merely 'operative a' and 'operative b'. Their last album, The Widow Blades, was about an old woman who disappeared in a snow storm.
I didn't explain this to him, and agreed that they were a 'rock band'.
He then told me the bands he liked; 'U2, Madonna, Tracey Chapman, Kate Bush...'
I had no idea where this was leading, but it was obvious he wanted something from me now.
'Yeah, I like Kate Bush too...'
I began to wonder where this was all leading, and what I could do to get out of this situation. I was beginning to feel very uncomfortable.
'Do you have any of her albums?'
'Yeah, a few...'
'Tell you what, if I gave you some computer discs could you burn some for me..?'
Here was my get-out clause.
'Sorry mate, my computer's fucked'.
'Oh...'
He looked disappointed, not that he wasn't getting any Kate Bush albums, but that his ruse (whatever it was for) wasn't working.
'Anyway' I continued 'Nice talking to you mate'.
I headed off up the street, eminently puzzled by the whole experience. Maybe he just wanted some Kate Bush albums... Maybe he was going to invite me into his house 'just to get the discs' and then murder me.
I suppose I'll never know. Just as well really.

1:13am

I went down the sea and watched the waves, drifted off to a coffee I bought from Cafe Nero. Cool sobriety in September air. Watched people at the waterside. Drew in my notebook.
Walked home into the sun, and the sun was bright and hid the power station chimney. The power station chimney  reminds me of childhood summers.
I bought two bars of chocolate at Sainsburys - but this was later. I thought I would have a nap this evening, but I didn't.

Heartbreak, end of 1996

I remember the dark hollows of that heartbreak, the empty skies of those following days, white with rain and not-rain, and summers gone. Long afternoons faded away. I smoked cigarettes, and knew that beauty is experienced harshly, at it's deepest when it slips away. Rainwater down drains.
There was a pylon that in the darkness looked like a ferris wheel, and when I nearly forgot heartbreak, that ferris wheel would call it back. There was the bridge that I would walk over only to attend evening lectures where I talked to no-one.
December was like something gone wrong. Great icicles outside the window, epic fits of insomnia - 4:00am was a familiar friend, and I would have to set the alarm to wake up any time before mid-afternoon. I thought I was happy then, but I was not, and now I realise I was and long for it back.

Nostalgia for Autumnal Cigarettes

Mild illness has turned into a racking cough, but at least the debilitating headache of the last few days is gone, and I was able to sleep quite well last night.
It rained almost all day yesterday, which suited my mood, a poisonous desolate melancholy, and I got soaked walking into town and back. Whilst in W.H.Smith flicking through 2000ad, I ran into someone who I used to work with, who filled me in on all the latest people leaving the company. It seems that things haven't improved there at all.
Back to being sunny today - at least what I see through the gap in the curtains. I should go out there and make the most of it before the winter comes, which is always soon enough. Autumn never lasts long enough.
I feel nostalgic for cigarettes this morning, which doesn't mean I want them. There were certain autumnal cigarettes I long for. These were cigarettes smoked on certain, well, autumnal days, bright and at the beginning of the season. Silk-cut fug filling lungs, taste of mornings and odd romantic optimism, first breath of cold in the air.
No cigarettes for me though, autumnal or otherwise.
I am listening to Warfare's just downloaded 'Metal Anarchy' album. The one thing I can't remember though is whether or not I used to have this on vinyl.
No idea at all.
Still, I remember the Warfare album, a compilation 'The New Age of Total Warfare', I ordered from Amazon last year. The first time I listened to it was making my way home after a works do (I think it was the Values Awards at the Hilton Metropole on the seafront). December night - I can't remember if it was cold, but the air had that crispy feel of coming up to Christmas - and I was a bit drunk but pleased with how the night had gone.
Feels like a long time ago now.

00:35am

Because I read a comic called 'signs of spring' now I am thinking about spring. I start to look forward to spring even though it is barely autumn, and autumn is my favourite season.

10:04pm

It feels like the sea has gone mad and drowned the town, and I move about the streets as if everything is normal, only emptier.

See Nothing

I write these notes to document this sinking.
They are encrypted in metaphors that
only mean something to myself
because
I want no-one else to understand what I
am documenting.
An anti-drama, an infinite regression, and
if this was a landscape, I imagine
it would be a mire.
Black mud
and days like headaches. Poetry hides
mundane self obsession
but doesn't make me proud.
I didn't sleep well last night, and I dreamt
of a petrol station that was dark,
where I once worked, and I
was working again.
The aisles were empty, and the till
was hidden in a corner where I could

see nothing.

Nine Lines in the Small Hours

2:21am.
There has only ever been this time,
but the night is passing too quickly

and I do not wish to see the morning.
I can imagine nothing
not even sleep

except perhaps waking,
and I would like to sleep
for days.

Old Ghosts III

Inside a vast cathedral.
The space between and inside walls.
Gods recognise gods.

I recognise the reorganisation
of illusions
to make this some other air.

Breathe again 2001
or 2006, say, and know
you breathe these older than you were.

Only time has gone somewhere.
You're still here.

Old Ghosts II

Shadows and old ghosts.
Corrupted twilight.
Sleeping in a city of murdered men.
Seagulls.
Sundays.
5'o'clock Roads.
Old days are gone.

Still Ill

Still ill.
Headache.
Didn't sleep well last night.
Constant images of a blonde, tattooed woman.
Feels like an old sunny autumn out there.

Mildly Ill (11:15pm)

Mildly ill.
Cold and hot at the same time.
Headache.
Slight nausea.
Slight cough.
Day-dreaminess.
Nostalgia.

Sunday Afternoon 1:20pm

I say goodbye to my friends stood outside the door to the flat. Long corridors with surprisingly few doors. What used to be dumb waiters set into the walls. 'These used to be the sevants quarters'.
Outside there has been a deepening of the air again, and a darkening of the darkness; it is autumn. It is still not quite cool enough to be classed as truly autumnal though. However, there is that subterranean feel about the night, those unseen stars (I never think about the stars in summer) and somewhere, I swear, are the ghosts of rain.
I quickly fall into sleep when I get back home. I have a mild illness - not really a cold, a slight sore throat, a slight temperature, a slight nausea. I wake up shivering in the middle of the night, go to the toilet, then get back into bed. Pulling the covers over myself is heaven. I would not mind having a period of mild, unserious illness (a week with a common cold say). I may actually be able to relax for a little. I am constantly on edge these days, and think that any time I do relax, I should be doing something else (looking for a job, preparing my CV, doing something (that old line) with my artwork. With a cold though; the luxuries of Nurofen and DVDs during the day, slipping into afternoon sleep, and baths like heaven, and a trip to the local shopto get some coke becomes some great and glorious quest.
I got up at around midday.
Grey skies outside. Feels like autumn. The light that falls into the room is soft, almost crepuscilar, though to describe light as 'crepuscular' is, of course, an impossibility. Andy is out at work, and the flat is silent, and I am only slightly disturbed by the sound of a door opening and closing somewhere (perhaps the wind, perhaps next door).
I cannot imagine a voice, I cannot imagine speaking.
It is almost peaceful here.

Witch Factory

A facebook page for my artwork can be found here.
Welcome to the Witch Factory.

Old Ghosts Rise

Old ghosts rise that I thought had long been lain.
The skies are white, the colour of nothing.
I have a mild headache.
This at least may be laid to rest by paracetemol.

I walked slowly walk back from town.
My footsteps felt broken.

Langley College, 20 Years Ago Today

Twenty years ago today.

I can't remember what the weather was like, though remember it being grey and warm (much like now). I caught the yellow 458 bus from Uxbridge Station to Langley. I remember vague fragments of the journey. There was a girl on the bus who was really loud and annoying. I remember one of the other passengers saying that 'she was like this every morning!' Soon enough I was at my destination, Langley College, where I was to spend the next year (well nine months really) doing a foundation course in art and design.

I was 21, and the three years since I had left school had not exactly been successful. I had taken my art A-level in a year at Uxbridge College (and failed), then went to a college in Harrow to do my first foundation course, but left a couple of months before I finished it. I had spent the year previous to starting Langley College being unemployed and working part-time at W.H.Smiths. 

I remember asking someone where the room I needed to be was. So delighted was I that somebody knew the answer. So delighted was I that somebody knew the answer that I didn't listen to the directions at all. I found the room I needed, somewhere up on the first or second floor. It was a long room where and my fellow students all sat around a long rectangle of tables.

I remember one girl saying that she was only 16, and it transpired that she was in the wrong room, and should have been elsewhere - probably on some two year BTEC course elsewhere. I remember the people around me. I remember Owen saying that his favourite band was Voivod. I remember going down the park at lunchtime and buying cans of beer. I remember Claude, whom I had sat next to, expressing some kind of concern about this, as if we were on the slippery slope to some kind of street drinking delinquency.

I can't say for sure what else happened on that day (Was it the first day that everybody showed their summer projects, which I hadn't done because I had never received the brief? Was it the first day that we all drew still-life (still-lives?) from objects bought from home?). I have vague memories of waiting for the bus home, being slightly uncomfortable for some reason - was it raining? Was the post uncomfortable? I remember watching the shops across the road which I would come to know so well over the next three quarters if a year ("10 Silk Cut please!").

I have no memories of the journey home, nor of that evening.

After I had finished Langley College, I went to Southampton to study illustration for two years. Because of the people I met at Southampton, I ended up (after doing an English degree at Worcester for three years afterwards) moving to Brighton where I am now. In it's own way, my year at Langley College, had a very profound effect on my future, and there are certainly still things from an artistic point of view, that I still remember and use now (Negative space! Intensity of mark making!).

I'd love to go back two decades and do the whole thing again.

Walk

I left the house at 8:00 this morning and walked along the beach to the Marina. Sharpness in the air. Autumn always feels like coming home. The sun soon came out though, made it feel (almost) like summer again. Footsteps on the stones. Watch people throwing balls to their dogs. Walk on, walk on.
The Marina is always a less than inspiring place. Overshadowed by the cliffs, and the grubby architecture, it feels like a Wolverhampton shopping centre in the 1970s. I bought canvas and paints and headed back along the beach again.
Met Em for a cup of tea, then headed home. Another cup of tea then fell asleep on me bed almost immediately. 6:45pm, and it's twilight. This day - these days - have fled by. It is a month since I left work.
Might go out into the twilight.
Walk on, walk on.
Walk by.
Walk away.

Consolatory Skies

12:44pm.

Sat in my room. There is a light rain outside. I am hoping it will end because I want to go for a walk into town. The light is soft and reminds me of childhood in Scotland - or certain childhood days anyway - of sleepy headaches and old comic daydreams. In the rain there is a silence, and in this room, shadows of remembered attics stay in the corners. No. Not remembered attics - but attics that may be dreamt of. The shadows in this room are the shadows of attics with windows, and, apart from Wilbury Crescent, I have known no other attics with windows. I did know a cellar with a window once - my first house in Worcester, and a cellar without a window - my second house in Worcester. The latter memory has a nightmare-ish tinge to it. I had been living in the house for a few months before we found out there was a cellar, a great black room, empty and waiting for murders.

I use too much cross-hatching in my drawings. I need to minimise. I might get more comic strips done. 

Rain at Dawn

Around dawn, I got up to go to the toilet. The toilet window was open, and I noticed it was raining hard. I couldn't hear it from my room - my windows shut. I went back to my room, and in the blue-nowhere light of dawn I went back to sleep and remembered no dreams.

Quarter past Midnight

The sea offered recompense again. Autumn in the foamy-waves, in the breeze. October is coming, winter is coming. Time moves fast, but it seems forever since I got back from America. Town was full of panic and sadness, and the future looking too blank and shadowy, full of old refrains I didn't think I'd hear again.
Came home, slept for an hour or two, watched television.
Try to stay awake as long as I can so I can sleep the day.
This wasn't quite what I had in mind when I left work, nearly a month ago now.

Curtain Gap

Drank the last of the vodka from the bottle I won at the work raffle a few months ago. Fell asleep fully clothed on my bed. Kept being awoken by the wind banging doors somewhere in the house. I kept trying to get up to investigate but fell back to sleep again. Now I am awake and the gap in the curtains tells me that it might be summer or autumn out there. The sun makes me think of summer, the blue in the sky is autumnal.

An Autumn Lost Somewhere

I walked with Em to Brighton Station, and then I went down the beach. I sat on the stones, drinking a cup of coffee from the Meeting Place. Foamy waves. Deep blue sky. A few wispy-white clouds. After the rain of earlier, it had cleared up, the sun came out and became warmer. It didn't -doesn't- feel like summer though.
A cold breeze blew from the sea. I wrapped my jacket around me. That sea looks autumnal I thought. I'm not sure what it was, something about the light striking the spindrift, the colour of that light.
Shadows on the waves, autumn on the breeze.
I've longed thought that there has been a lost autumn - an autumn that should have happened, but, for whatever reason, didn't. I'm not sure what should have happened in this lost autumn, something romantic and mysterious no doubt. Certain autumns have come close - 1993 and 1997 to name a couple - perhaps even as late as 2002.
I feel the absence of this lost autumn in my life though, a place somewhere where something should have happened but never did.
I watched the sea, read Thomas Ligotti's short story The Medusa and consoled myself with the fantasy that this lost autumn might be looking for me.
When it got too uncomfortable (shadows growing too long) to stay on the beach, I walked home along the boulevard, and despite the bright sun (dropping quickly) that blinded me, I could not be fooled into thinking it was a summer sun any more.

Splinter

3:06pm.
Sun out again, and it feels more like summer, albeit a less feverish one than yesterday. Watch the shadow of the chimney fall across the roof of the houses below them, beyond the chimney, the church, some vast factory claiming the sky. There is the sound of the workshops; saws, drills, planks of wood moving about.

Rain Day

The first morning that feels like autumn.
The rain started at some point during the night, and is still raining now. Between the gap in my curtains the sky is a heavy grey, the kind of grey that does not look transient. The light that falls through the gap is wet and soft and old, and makes me think of empty streets and alleyways and abandoned parks.
My bedside lamp is still on (the curtains aren't fully open), and my room seems full of corners, themselves full of shadows, albeit of a consolatory rather than a threatening variety.

Five Minutes in the Afternoon

3:13pm.

Met Em at 11:00am, and after walking with her for a while headed off into town. Unbelievable heat - humid, nostalgic and slightly feverish, like all those summers you can't quite remember, but feel you should (building card houses in the bright gardens of afternoons that precede storms). So many people about, and not one sign of September anywhere. Wandered down the North Laine, bought a couple of copies of Comics Journal and proceeded to the Pavilion Gardens where I flicked through them, and Thomas Ligotti's Noctuary. Instant coffee finished, I headed up through town, the dry heat of Western Road, dusty light like the summer of 2001, bought vegetables and pineapple juice from Tescos. Summer of 1995, walking through those endless fields outside of Bretforton, walking to the next village to buy cigarettes, listening to Crash-Landing Chemistry by The Dry Halleys. No breeze and time stretched out forever.

My room is cool and always shadowy. The gap in the curtains shows a bright fragment of these, surely, last of summer days.

3:18pm

Blame it on the Humidity

After walking Em home last night, I realise the streets back are awash with cats. They slouch on walls, and sit in the shadows of parked cars. They watch me with that cliche-cat disinterest. Sneak out of hedges, watch jealously from windows. Why are there so many cats about?
Perhaps it is the heat. The heatwave was hotter than this, but there is a draining humidity everywhere. The air feels heavy. Even the simplest things leave you exhausted. Until I walked Em home last night, I hadn't left the house all day - and woke up an 1:35pm.
Empty days, but I can't relax. I want to be making the most of this time not working, and by god, I'm glad not to be working at that dreadful call centre any more, but I seem to be spending most of my time worrying about the future.
Blame it on the humidity.

Tiger Fear

The small hours. Heat.
The landing is eternal.
I hear a door open and close.

Watch the reflection of the lamp
in the television screen.
I'm 41

and time passes.
The tiger's loose.
I hope it's miles away.

Gloucester Ghost

I am sat in the North Laines pub with three people I used to work with. I look around the pub that used to be the nightclub The Gloucester. It is very different - and yet, the same. The most striking difference is that the Gloucester used to be a windowless hole, and now it is the North Laine, has a series of large windows looking out onto the street. It feels very much like being in a dream place (I had a dream about Gloucester last night, and it had windows! - you know the kind of thing). The clientèle are very different too. The Gloucester used to be full of alternative university students, ageing metallers and goths, teenage emo kids... The North Laines is full of people who have just finished days at the office - lots of shirt and ties.

I used to come here a lot with Joe about ten years ago. There was a night we would go to on tuesday night called Sindrome, which was their metal / alternative night. Pints were only 69p, as were shots. We would stay till 2:00am, trying to approach women (I was always too scared too), trying to dance (I dread to think) and often, trying to ignore the fact that I had work the next day (often starting at 6:30am).

If I didn;t have work the next day, me and Joe would have what we called 'urban adventures' which would mean that we would find ourselves in some place we were never meant to be - a night-bakery, a house under construction, a building site, an overgrown patch of railway wasteground.

Joe is now teaching English in Poland, and I am here in Brighton - currently unemployed - going to places which are now unrecognisable from the days when Joe was here.

Anatomy of Dark, Breezy Mornings

7:28am.
Sat on my bed with a cup of tea. The windows are open - the muted sound of a car, and of cars in the distance, though on reflection this might also be the sea. My fingers tapping on the keys.
The air is cool and autumnal - though given this is September, this would be a given. I remember a phrase a friend of mind, an Anglican priest, used about autumn; 'dark, breezy mornings'. What a brilliantly evocative phrase, redolent of radios turned down low to the news, of peaceful yellow light in a kitchen busy with things (if not people) and narrow windows showing the blue and mysterious light of school day dawns.
The view outside my window (in fact nor this room) is not anything similar to that image, but undeniably I can feel that mythical kitchen here.
The blue of the sky, behind the clouds, is deeper than summer, and the light in this room (or maybe the shadows) has a softened quality to it, like falling asleep or daydreaming.

The Winning Table

At the pub quiz last night there was a group of people next to us, one woman and three men. It was obvious that the three men all quite liked the one woman they were with. They all had that intense, claustrophobic air of men who are helpless in their own helpless desires. I'm pretty sure that neither three had any chance with the woman. I'm also pretty sure that all three men, that though thinking this about the other two, probably thought that they themselves would be in with a chance. I also had a feeling that at some point, the woman might have been involved, if only briefly, with one of the men. The woman herself did not seem to be interested in any of the three men. She was obviously the dominant person at the table. The three men kept their heads down toward her at all times. She looked like she was drowning in men who had helpless crushes on her. She seemed slightly bored by them. The men looked liked they were crushing her.
Maybe I'm jealous. After all, their group won the pub quiz.
We came only 6th.

Five Years Ago

'Premonition'

acrylic on A4 canvas

end of summer 2008

I wrote the following five years ago today. I found it on Facebook, under the 'notes' section that no-one ever uses any more. At the time I was 36, sharing a flat with Joe and some odious prick called Nick. I was then just over a year into my first call centre job at Telegen. I titled it 'Autumn #37 begins'

The small hours. Sat cross legged in the living room. A cup of tea. About to roll a cigarette. Can hear the wind outside through the trees in the garden. A comforting chill. The windows are open.

Summer is gone. No matter how warm September is, I can never see any day in this month as being summer. Autumn is always my favourite season for a variety of reasons, though it is always preferable when followed by an unbearably hot summer, which we, of course, haven't had this year. Autumn is always the time of beginnings; school of course, and back in my twenties when I spent six years in higher education, the start of a new university year. I miss the rhythm of those days, the sense of welcome change, of life progressing.
No matter, it is still autumn, and there is still that clear light to enjoy, the odd way that the horizon seems to get clearer. There is still the sharpness in the taste of the air in the mornings. Even the nights drawing in (I love that phrase) bring with them an odd comfort; lazing in the house during those long evenings, listening to the wind in the darkness outside. Perhaps the rain. The rain is hypnotic in autumn. Tides run deep here.

Always this time of year brings memories, as if stitched tight into the deepening of the skies. Most of all the September of 1997. The autumn of that year is a pivotal point in my life. The second year of my English degree, living in London Road, Worcester. A tumultuous relationship with a girl I still wonder about now. Not that I hold any flame for her. I spent a lot of my time that autumn mostly unhappy, but I had never -and have never since- felt so alive. It isn't her, or the relationship, I remember at this time of year, but that time before -before she even returned from Norway where she had been spending that summer. I remember those days and weeks before we met up again (we had met a few times in the first year as friends only) with a clarity as sharp as these autumn mornings. I remember the blue of the skies - a more thoughtful blue than the bright vacancy of summer skies, and the sunlight softer, more welcoming, but most of all I remember a certain feeling - a kind of premonitory sense that imbues my memories of those days. I remember a phrase I had read somewhere of how beautiful the summer before a war is. Of course, this is only felt in hindsight - and those few September weeks before she came are imbued with a sense of both warning and nostalgia. At the time, of course, I felt nothing of this. We only know these things in hindsight only. I hope this autumn I feel as alive as I did that autumn (though hopefully without the attendant unhappiness). I doubt it though, but I still hope anyway.

As an aside, the painting 'Premonition', a photo of which can be found in the album 'Paintings 2008', is about the feelings of that September, of that sense of nostakgia, of that aura of premonition which can only be ever felt in hindsight.

It's 1:41am now. I suppose I should get some sleep, but I think that sleep might escape me tonight. I think I might lie listening to the wind, and the odd night-gull. I wonder if seagulls remember things? Ah, I'm rambling now. My cup of tea grows cooler as autumn #37 begins to stumble through it's infant hours.

Goodnight.