The last morning of 2013. A grey year this one. I won't miss it. The kind of year that just wasn't fun, where I just felt lost and uninterested, where time didn't seem to be mine. Even when I had those two months between jobs, my time didn't seem to be mine - even if that was down to me worrying about the future. No real progression this year. Savings nearly gone thanks to those two months off, and the job I'm in now - though less stressful than my last one - is not ideal. I go back to work on January 2nd, and I've been dreading it for days. The gallows. I don't think I'll pass probation (comes to an end at the end of January, a months time). I didn't have this work dread when I worked at the petrol station or Telegen. I didn't have any money either, and I didn't like working all over the weekend when I was at the petrol station. I did get to go to America though, for my cousin James' wedding - and met my cousins for the first time - and other relatives I'd not seen for years. I've done a lot of artwork this year - more so than any other year I think. I set up my facebook art-page Witch Factory, which has been one of the best things I've done for a while - and I've met some interesting people through that (well, online).
Anyhow, goodbye 2013... I feel ambiguous about you. Even at this late stage.
Tuesday 31 December 2013
Sunday 29 December 2013
Nine Lines for a Grey Year
Hot sun, cold breeze. Not a cloud in the sky.
I'm down at the beach with Em, a cup of tea from
the seafront stalls. A week or two till she leaves for
Greece. This grey year stumbles to its end. I start
to lose the old call centre as a recent place. Old
work colleagues slip into memory. Nevermore
the cool sigh of those stairs. The future is certain,
but some things seem immutable. Some things
stay the same for too long.
Monday 23 December 2013
The Avoided Room
Bridge 39 is getting to be like a room in a large house you don't go to very often. Not avoid exactly, but when you do go there, you realise the room is cold and bare and almost haunted. I cannot imagine sleeping here now.
Saturday 14 December 2013
The Distance Sounds like Pylons
Sat alone in my parents living room at Cleobury Mortimer. Windy out there. I watch an odd leaf blown about - the last of autumn - look at the grey dreamy skies (dull sun dazed and electric behind clouds). Branches. A child's slide (for when my niece comes to visit). Then there is the sound of the distance. A sound you don't get in Brighton. It sounds like silence.
This isn't Worcestershire, but Staffordshire - though really we're just over the border. I can still feel the ghost of my twenties coming back though, the dark resonance of all that countryside. University days. Visiting my parents when they lived in Bretforton. I remember driving through the landscape in Ruth's car, a passenger watching the dusky pink lanes, a lost landscape even then. Poplars and copses and dark shadowy trees. Semi-industrial Midlands towns. Petrol stations with unfamiliar names. Picturesque villages and damp churches open to the public for a few hours on a Sunday.
I left Brighton early yesterday afternoon. Train to Victoria, tube to Paddington. Too-strong coffees from station stalls. The train to Worcester was busy and I was lucky to get a seat. I spent most of the few hours drawing. By the time I got to Worcester Shrub Hill, it was night.
Stepping out of the station to my parents waiting car. That old refrain; only Worcester is real. I can't believe I lived here, that this city was once home. Three years. Seemed so long when I was here.
The car clips the outskirts of Worcester, and before we know it, we're in the lampless countryside, passing by a sign that points to Whitley Court (a dilapidated manor house that was the basis for the And Also The Trees song 'House of the Heart'. The road takes us through deep woods (but really, what wood doesn't look deep at night?). Then here. Cleobury Mortimer. Where my parents have lived since leaving Perranporth last year.
I stay up after my parents have gone to bed, find myself reading about the Canadian Royal Cross Memorial Hospital in Taplow. I had been thinking about that place on the train ride up. I never got to go there back when I was at Langley College. I can't remember why. Everyone else went. It was like a rite of passage for everybody on that course. They came back with x-rays and bottles of dried plasma. I had some of those x-rays for years. Creepy things that made me a bit superstitious. The site was set up by a group of 'urban explorers' who had had a number of odd experiences there. The oddest of all being the way that the hospital has haunted them ever since. Melancholy and nostalgia. I am slightly perturbed to find that one of the people who set up the website was one of the people I went to college with back then. I was thinking about him the other day, wondered what had happened to him.
The website's about 10 years old, so I can still continue wondering really. I peer at his photograph, but don't recognise his features.
2:51pm.
The distance.
It sounds like pylons and lost lanes, grey afternoons in childhood falling to sleep in cool and comforting rooms, walking the dog in tangled fields. The sound of a small stream in a wood when you are the only one there.
The sound of being up late at night in a room surrounded by dark countryside.
You don't get it down in Brighton.
This isn't Worcestershire, but Staffordshire - though really we're just over the border. I can still feel the ghost of my twenties coming back though, the dark resonance of all that countryside. University days. Visiting my parents when they lived in Bretforton. I remember driving through the landscape in Ruth's car, a passenger watching the dusky pink lanes, a lost landscape even then. Poplars and copses and dark shadowy trees. Semi-industrial Midlands towns. Petrol stations with unfamiliar names. Picturesque villages and damp churches open to the public for a few hours on a Sunday.
I left Brighton early yesterday afternoon. Train to Victoria, tube to Paddington. Too-strong coffees from station stalls. The train to Worcester was busy and I was lucky to get a seat. I spent most of the few hours drawing. By the time I got to Worcester Shrub Hill, it was night.
Stepping out of the station to my parents waiting car. That old refrain; only Worcester is real. I can't believe I lived here, that this city was once home. Three years. Seemed so long when I was here.
The car clips the outskirts of Worcester, and before we know it, we're in the lampless countryside, passing by a sign that points to Whitley Court (a dilapidated manor house that was the basis for the And Also The Trees song 'House of the Heart'. The road takes us through deep woods (but really, what wood doesn't look deep at night?). Then here. Cleobury Mortimer. Where my parents have lived since leaving Perranporth last year.
I stay up after my parents have gone to bed, find myself reading about the Canadian Royal Cross Memorial Hospital in Taplow. I had been thinking about that place on the train ride up. I never got to go there back when I was at Langley College. I can't remember why. Everyone else went. It was like a rite of passage for everybody on that course. They came back with x-rays and bottles of dried plasma. I had some of those x-rays for years. Creepy things that made me a bit superstitious. The site was set up by a group of 'urban explorers' who had had a number of odd experiences there. The oddest of all being the way that the hospital has haunted them ever since. Melancholy and nostalgia. I am slightly perturbed to find that one of the people who set up the website was one of the people I went to college with back then. I was thinking about him the other day, wondered what had happened to him.
The website's about 10 years old, so I can still continue wondering really. I peer at his photograph, but don't recognise his features.
2:51pm.
The distance.
It sounds like pylons and lost lanes, grey afternoons in childhood falling to sleep in cool and comforting rooms, walking the dog in tangled fields. The sound of a small stream in a wood when you are the only one there.
The sound of being up late at night in a room surrounded by dark countryside.
You don't get it down in Brighton.
Sunday 8 December 2013
Maudlinmorn
Stumbling towards the end of the year.
I walked to Portslade this morning, doubled back past the cemetery on the Old Shoreham Road. Used to sit in here over the unemployment summer of 2010, thinking about Em who I had just started seeing. I can't believe that was nearly four years ago now (well, three and a half as we speak). Life was different - better - then, though I have nothing to complain about now. Things just seemed full of more possibility. I didn't feel as old then (38) as I do now at 41.
42 next year!
Life passes us by in a blink. That old cliche. Never thought I'd be (still) struggling to work in a call centre at this age, with very little to show for my life apart from a lot of drawings. As I said - nothing to complain about, plenty to be happy about, but... I suppose there's some kind of perceptual shift that happens what happens now happens forever. Not true of course, but I have the fear that this is it. Working in low paid, unfulfilling jobs for the next 25 years, afraid to break out and do something for no good reason, then a state pension and a cold and lonely old age. Bedsit death, a sacrifice to the four bar gods of wall heater and electricity meter...
Oh lets forget this maudlin-ness, I'm not feeling very melancholy at all actually, I'm quite cheery this morning. Time to head out to meet a friend for coffee.
Bedsit deaths can wait for at least another 40 years.
Touch wood of course.
I walked to Portslade this morning, doubled back past the cemetery on the Old Shoreham Road. Used to sit in here over the unemployment summer of 2010, thinking about Em who I had just started seeing. I can't believe that was nearly four years ago now (well, three and a half as we speak). Life was different - better - then, though I have nothing to complain about now. Things just seemed full of more possibility. I didn't feel as old then (38) as I do now at 41.
42 next year!
Life passes us by in a blink. That old cliche. Never thought I'd be (still) struggling to work in a call centre at this age, with very little to show for my life apart from a lot of drawings. As I said - nothing to complain about, plenty to be happy about, but... I suppose there's some kind of perceptual shift that happens what happens now happens forever. Not true of course, but I have the fear that this is it. Working in low paid, unfulfilling jobs for the next 25 years, afraid to break out and do something for no good reason, then a state pension and a cold and lonely old age. Bedsit death, a sacrifice to the four bar gods of wall heater and electricity meter...
Oh lets forget this maudlin-ness, I'm not feeling very melancholy at all actually, I'm quite cheery this morning. Time to head out to meet a friend for coffee.
Bedsit deaths can wait for at least another 40 years.
Touch wood of course.
Monday 2 December 2013
Wintry Nostalgia, Cold Hangover
Three nights of drinking, excellent nights each, and here I am, Monday evening, my week about to begin tomorrow, lost in a cold wintry nostalgia, and the feeling of someone having just left a metaphorical room. Oh, I'm missing something, but I don't know what - some gap, some absence, some lost thing or lost time...
At The Geekest Link pub quiz last night, out of eight teams, my team came seventh... oh, the shame.
At The Geekest Link pub quiz last night, out of eight teams, my team came seventh... oh, the shame.
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