Monday 8 December 2014

Pre-Midwinter Notes

Eventually leave Charlie's house at 8:00am, after a 'quick pint' the night before turns into the opposite. Luke and Ray head off one way, Ian and me another. One of those bright and chilly December days. Bright sun blazing, slightly sunset-coloured on Wild Park on the hill. Are we really this far up Lewes Road? I eventually make it home about 10am. I sleep for five hours. That night, at Al's, I only drink three beers, and am unsurprisingly subdued.
We won the pub quiz last night.
Monday now. I have a slight headache. A sore throat. The precursor of a cold. I sit here in bed, listening to the sound of a saw or something. Some back garden piece of machinery. There was a dog barking a minute ago. Sunlight on the houses across the gardens.
Everything is so deep in December and wintry.
I imagine this is the kind of day I might find a lost area of woodland in a place I pass every day, or a secret room in a house - perhaps this one - I have known for years.

Wednesday 3 December 2014

Winter Coming Down

Passed no pink childs' wellies on the way to work yesterday.
When I got to work (I work as a charity fundraiser) that I have been changed from a campaign I did OK on to one I do dreadfully on, and also that I hate. I don't connect with the campaign, the supporters. I find their ethos disturbing. I only agreed to work on the campaign at the time because I had not yet passed probation. I thought my chances of passing would be greater if I did agree to work for this religious charity (I am non-religious). This is in the last week of the campaign, when we are calling the 'dregs' of the campaign - the people who keep putting off taking the call (They say 'call me back another time!' instead of just saying 'I don't want to hear from you ever again!' and end up wasting everyones time). I didn't do well - of course - but it got me into worrying about my job again. It doesn't take much to worry me about my job and employment prospects. I have spent the last 13 months working where I am convinced that I am going to be led down the route of disciplinaries for not doing well, leading to me eventually being fired, and then having to work at some minimum wage job in a petrol station again. I spent the three years in my last job worrying about the same too.
Because I was in a different room, I did get to sit next to Aviva. I was telling her about my long, restless walks I do at the weekend. She said - quite without prompting - what was it I was looking for on these walks. This unnerved me as I had been doodling a comic strip about these long walks as I worked - the last panel (showing a younger me walking our old dog Bracken In what I presume might be Ickenham) had the words 'I spend the suburban evening searching for something I no longer believe exists'.
Not that I ever had any idea what it was anyway.

Tuesday 2 December 2014

Pink Wellies

I walk into town with Andy. Andy needs to go to work (via Santander) and I need to go to work to check my hours for the week. Wintry day. Actually feels cold, and the light is a mockery of itself. Lazy light, gray and still half asleep. No, not sleep. The light looks ill it is so weak.
As we pass the Jewish school down the road we look down. There is a single pink wellington on the floor. A child's welly. Andy points it out. We look at it. It strikes us both as vaguely sinister though we cannot say why. We continue walking.
Further into town, near the big Tesco's, we look down again. There is the other pink wellington, the other half of a now permanently lost and homeless pair. The series of events that have led up to one pink wellington being outside of a school, and the other one being outside of Tesco's will never be solved.
I wonder if I'll pass them on the way to work today.

Monday 1 December 2014

Tenebrous and Decembrous

On the last day of summer, August 31st, I took a long walk over the Downs to Lewes. It was a bright hot day, and getting out into the countyside was a clear and startling relief, and I'm still not sure why. Yesterday, November 30th, -the last day of autumn- I took a similarly long walk - though not to Lewes this time, and this walk was rather accidental. I left the house at 4:00pm and didn't get back till 8:00pm. I must have covered about 12 miles,
It was already twilight when I left the house. I headed down the seafront first of all, then headed up to Portslade, then up to the Old Shoreham Road. I took a road - a long uphill thing - that took me to the edge of town. Old houses - mock Tudor style - set back from the road. Beyond them I could see the dark mass of Three Cornered Copse. Wouldn't like to be there at night. I then sort of turned back on myself down Tongdean Lane. The road twisted round on itself. Here is a lonely place. Rich, newly built houses, set in the own patch of land away from each other. Between the sparse buildings and the trees, I could look down onto the east side of Brighton.
The place was beginning to unnerve me, and I was glad to pass by the old football ground at Withdean and found myself on familiar old London Road, where I walked down to Preston Manor, and took a right up that huge slope that leads to Dyke Road, and then back onto the Old Shoreham Road and home again.
Everything felt Decembrous. A made up word of course, but the endless landscape of cold and mysterious wintry houses is summed up in it. Decembrous, tenebrous. A few trees still cast the last of their leaves down. Feverish snow. Exiled from the houses and out in the darkness I felt some kind of melancholy, both familiar and comforting. 
Another month and we'll be halfway through this decade.

Sunday 30 November 2014

Memories of 1984

It has bothered me somewhat of late that I can remember very little of what happened in 1984. I can remember things which might have happened in 1984 - but could have been 1983 or early 1985. I know what I was doing in 1984, but as to actual events. My autobiographical memory is usually very good - excellent even - but this year seems to escape me for little reason. Just as an exercise, I thought I would write down what I can actually remember happening that year - hopefully that might bring up other memories.
Background: I turned 12 in 1984, thus beginning the last year of what I consider to be my childhood. I was still living in Scotland, in Forres, and was in the first year of Forres Academy.
1) Nan's funeral. This was held a few days into the new year. Cold white light in Stone graveyard. My aunt Violet being understandably upset.
...and connected to this is something my sister said about my other aunt, Linda, who said that she could hear 'footsteps at night'. This was something overheard and naturally terrified my sister and me. We thought the house was haunted anyway. Waking up in the morning there and hearing the sound of builders, then realizing it was still night and there couldn't be builders, and being afraid of ghosts, and then suddenly it was morning and all was alright again.
2) 2000ad. I'd been reading comics for as long as I could remember, and under mt friend Coll's tutelage, was introduced to 2000ad, which I was then allowed to collect every week. This would have been early in the year. I remember later on, when it was warmer, sat out in the garden reading the latest issue. This I remember because my parents had a very minor TV celebrity staying over - the 'Cooking Canon' who had been giving a talk somewhere my parents were involved with.
3) Martin leaving. This was probably a big one. Martin was my best friend and left in ir around the easter of 1984. We had been friends for years, and with Craig (who left in 1982) had formed a ghost hunting group, whose antics had defined my childhood. I had known Martin was leaving for a year or so (our fathers were all in the RAF and would be posted every few years). I remember a great deal of dread accompanying this. Being in the woods at Kinloss with my Mum, and feeling suddenly sorrowful that my best friend would no longer be there. A windy blowy day. Mum picking up sticks or branches to use in something. I remember the day Martin left. Or rather I remember those final moments of Martin's leaving. This was at his house in Kinloss. My parents had come to pick me up, and this was it, our final goodbye... Martin stayed in the kitchen sharpening a pencil with a knife, and that was it... I remember he didn't come out to say goodbye. I remember white street lamps in a rainy dark distance.
4) Collecting a new comic called Scream, a horror comic for boys. I got all 13 issues before it stopped.
5) After Martin left I decided I needed a new best friend. I thought at first a boy called Mark might fill the spot, but he didn't seem interested in ghost hunting, so the spot was filled by John Kelly, whom I had known - vaguely - for a few years.
...the summer of 1984 is a blank... there are things which might have happened, but might not, so will have to be left empty...
6) Hallowe'en. John and me spent Hallowe'en trick or treating around Southside - the housing estate in Kinloss where he lived (and where I lived too from 1978 - 1981).
7) Mum was involved in some kind of church group - raising funds etc. I'm not really sure. Part of this involved organizing a jumble sale, to be held in some kind of hall in Forres. This meant that we would regularly get boxes of things delivered to our house. I remember that lots of these boxes had old Star Trek books - novelizations of the original TV series. I also bought newly published Star Trek books too - the same novelizations of the original series, but with new covers. It was always exciting when a new box was delivered.
8) We spent Christmas at my Grandad's that year. I remember taking only 3 Star Wars figures to play with. I suppose it was my last full year of being a child, before adolescence kicked in. I remember playing with Greedo in the long dark space behind the settee.
Not a huge amount of memories for one year, even if that year is 32 years ago. There are other vague memories as well, but I'm not sure for certain that they belong to that year or a generic 1983 - 1985 time.

Thursday 27 November 2014

Tales From Bridge 39 - The First Five Years

I have been writing here these Tales From Bridge 39 for five years now.
Half a decade! I have just read the first entry I wrote while at work, two jobs ago. I wrote of how I was staying at Andy's flat until I got my bedsit sorted, of a dream I had when I ws five, about the empty office at work, and of how I was looking forward to the walk home through rainy twilight. I mentioned how later that night I was going out for a friend's birthday and helping at her exhibition the coming Sunday.
Five years later and I'm working in a call centre not unlike the one I was in back then. I am going out for the same friends birthday tomorrow night. I am trying to organize my own exhibition.
I start to regret the scarcity of entries this year. I'm not sure why... I just got bored of writing them I suppose. The same old thing every day, but that was meant to be the whole point of Bridge 39 - that it was meant to be the same old thing... The mysteries in everyday existence. Perhaps I should start writing more regularly again.

Tuesday 25 November 2014

Feels Like Winter

It really does feel like winter now. It's not su much the temperature - which is relatively mild for this time of year, but some other almost intangible shift of something. Perhaps it is the light, grey and stifled, and these few short hours of daylight seem unbearably muted - or maybe it is the sky that casts this light. A thick band of white cloud covers everything - actually not true - at least not yesterday. Yesterday was sunny - but cold, and there was a beautiful sunset over the sea, but it still felt like winter.
Actually it feels like a specific winter - or a specific late autumn / early winter - namely this time of year in 2011. Em and myself were still seeing each other. I ahd a week off work and went to London twice. Kate Bush's album '50 Words For Snow' formed the soundtrack. A strange week off that was - for no real reason really. I remember counting the days till I got back to work. I'm glad I'm not working at my old job any more.

Wednesday 19 November 2014

Quotidian Sounds

The sound of a saw from the workshops below.
The absence of a conversation just finished.
The sound of a door closing.
To the left of the church spire, the sun attempting to break through clouds.
Five pots of the windowsill, two of them are cacti.
8 books of reprinted horror comics on the bookshelf.
A half finished cup of tea.
My washing in the machine. I need to take it out.
The sound of some vehicle on the road.

Saturday 8 November 2014

Increasing Undertow

Lost landscapes.
As I get older, these 'lost landscapes' begin to grow in their pull over my imagination. An undertow in the sea, dragging you down, not to drown, but to almost remember something.
A thicket of trees, bony and clanky, found on bright cold January days. Somewhere on the edges of town.
These lost landscapes are so often the province of trees; spinneys, copses, coverts, thickets. Even small clusters of trees, a conspiracy of branches and boughs and little more. Accessed by moving sideways through the quotidian environs of suburbia. A place always there, but you've never noticed till now.
A seafront cafe at night. Light spilling out onto the breezy boulevard.
Alone in the nothing-ness of a seaside town out of season. Why is it open so late? Why are so many people here? Am I merely confusing this lost landscape with the Meeting Place cafe on the actual seafront?
A summer holiday, a path across crop fields to - yes - another thicket of trees.
When I was on holiday in Wales this year, I became half-convinced that if I did indeed just cross a number of fields I might find this place I dream of.
A dripping forest, tropical, marshy ground. Looking at a distance of great plants...
And this seems to emerge from childhood... Some television programme perhaps? An illustratuion in a book?
I suppose the point is I'll never know - as soon as these landscapes are 'found', they'll lose whatever mystery it is that keeps them alive.

Tuesday 28 October 2014

24 Years Later


(Two weeks ago yesterday)
Here I am with Steve and Craig, the first time we've been together for 24 years. I meet them at Uxbridge tube station at 1:00pm. Lunch in The Three Tuns pub. The U2 bus to Clifton gardens. As we step off the bus, there is a noise. A motorcyclist has come off his bike and lies prone on the road where I used to catch the bus home from school.
Walk up and see Abbotsfield, our old school, glowering under cosy autumnal skies. Getting on for twilight now. Gates open. We slip into the old metalwork / woodwork block, rumoured to once have been a mortuary when we were at school. Same old green walls. Same tiles on the floor. Get caught by the caretaker. Craig shows him his dog-collar (he's now a priest) and he allows us to look around the playground unmolested.
Shifting into the past. The playground looks larger than expected. Same old horror comic vibe that always accompanies these returns to where I spent my adolescence.
Bus back to Uxbridge. Back to the pub.
It was a good day.

Wednesday 8 October 2014

Remembering the Night Before

Walk back from work last night with Millie and Maria. Quick walk; scooting up the hill, under the viaduct, over Seven Dials then along Cromwell Road. Everything is orange and black, and deep with this sudden autumn. Pause outside Millie's house. She disappears into the darkness of the passage by the side of her house - she lives in the garden flat. After a while the light switches on, and she disappears now into the light.
Cross the lights with Maria. Wave goodbye (she lives around the corner from Millie) and head on home, The Co-op down Blatchington Road, cross Sackville Road onto vast expanse of Portland Road. Look down the road to Portslade, those double headed lamps headed out, like a line of sentinels headed not toward Portslade but some other, equally everyday town I have never known, but catch glimpses of on mornings like this while I'm remembering the night before.

Sunday 5 October 2014

Autumn almost Triumphant

(Yesterday)
Watching the call-centre sky from a morning shift at work. Too hot in the morning, as always. Still too hot to wear a jacket! Gathering clouds. Love that phrase. A sense of conspiracy in the sky. gather for rain if course. Why else would they gather?
Finish work at 1:30pm. Raining. Oh yes. This is it. This feels like autumn. I wander into Waterstones where I buy a paperback copy of 'The Conspiracy Against The Human Race' by Thomas Ligotti. Light rain. Autumnal relief. Tescos. Dinner. Vacuum and tidy up. Deposit clothes away from the flor and into the clothes bin. Sleep (for a bit).
Wake up. An hour so till I leave for the pub. Twilight room. Happy in the evening. Cosy-comfy. Could drift on the bed and not go out. Flick through books and comics. Listen to unlistened to albums. I download Savage Republic's 'Ceremonial' album.
Go out.
Step into that cool evening air. Wait for the bus.
It doesn't feel like summer any more.

Monday 29 September 2014

Employed by the Quine Organization

...and tomorrow the new regime at work begins.
 What has happened is this:
The company I work for - a charity telephone fundraising company, we shall call Icy Association, went into administration for about 45 minutes back in August. We were taken over by a company I shall call the Quine Organsition. The Quine Organisation had previously taken over another charity telephone fundraising company I shall call Hale and Hearty. Many things have been restructured at work. Most of the current management have been made redundant. All the employees of Hale and Hearty have now come over to our site (a crumbling cross between a crumbling factory and an abandoned hospital that had best be called Old Scotland House). The employees of Hale and Hearty all work in a room where IT used to be. Though we are working in the same building - in fact the same floor - the two companies are very separate.
The management of the Quine Organisation are a sinister faceless lot. They prowl the corridors looking like the Sontarans from Doctor Who. They have gone out of their way to be unnapproachable and unfriendly. Thanks to the ministrations of our staff reps we have, at least, managed to keep our wages as they are. Not that this will do us much good in the long run. New starters are going to be paid the minimum wage (and I think any company that pays their staff the minimum wage deserve all contempt and disgust that can be heaped upon them). This means that, I imagine, they will be eager to get rid of the old staff (on £9 plus an hour) as soon as possible. It will become a lot stricter, there will be a greater emphasis on statistics. It is through these, we all think, that they will find reasons to put us on disciplinaries (breaks too long! not enough pledges!) and eventually fire us. Tomorrow is when we shall adhere to the new ways of working - shorter breaks and longer shifts, and when the new management style begins to take hold on our already weary, haunted hearts.
All this makes me think of my last job where something similar happened, and within six months, a tolerable job turned into something hellish and I had to leave.
I really hope the same isn't going to happen again.

Sunday 28 September 2014

Melancholy Bus Ride Home

Finish work at 5:00pm. Head to the North Laine pub with work colleagues. Drink numerous Jack Daniels and coke. Melancholy bus ride home. Asleep by midnight. Sunday morning quiet. Half open curtains. Table lamp on. Reminds me of December when we need a light on all day. Cosy and depressing. I would like a winter twilight now though.

Friday 26 September 2014

Viaduct

My days are haunted by viaducts. I watch them from the windows at work, I walk underneath them when I walk home. I imagine rooms in the brick, where through hidden windows, one could watch the late summer trees turn to autumn.
Sleeping on a mattress, brick-room lit by a lantern and listening to the wind outside.
Sound of cold roads and dark hills and deep sleep.

Tuesday 23 September 2014

8:13am

8:13am.
Sat on my bed. I slept with the windows open last night. Pleasant shock of cold air on my face. I can hear the outside now - busy, but drifty morning sounds of passing cars, a childs voice, and other sounds I can't quite make out.
The first morning that feels properly autumnal.

Monday 22 September 2014

This Blog is Deep with the Luxuries of Autumnal Suburbia

Sat on my bed. Still not dressed yet. Sore throat and temperature - both mild, but I feel ill enough to take the day off work.
Can hear an aeroplane, the sound of voices in the passage outside the flat. Everything very quiet. Twilight-dark of my room, curtains still unopened. Everything is very quiet here. A hush. An autumnal hush, and, finally, the humid heat of the elongated summer seems to be broken.

Hope work goes okay. We've been taken over by another company - this happened back in August. our pay rates are staying the same, though we will be working longer shifts, and it seems that everything will be stricter, more micro-managed. I don't do startlingly well (neither do I do startlingly badly) but I hope I will not be managed out. This is the happiest I have been at work since the halcyon age of Telegen, when I was first on the inbound campaign (January - June 2008). A couple of artists at work too. Hoping to do an exhibition with them sometime next year. Should be interesting.

Drifty-dreamy day. Suddenly feel like I might be being watched. Start thinking about windy roads, lost in afternoons and December table-lamps, switched on in the 3:00pm twilight.
Remember that? 3:00pm is the eeriest part of a winters day...? Wrote that in one of my first entries here. Can't believe this blog is almost five years old.
Seems a lifetime ago and only yesterday.

Right, going to call the absence line at work now.

Sunday 14 September 2014

Solitary Walks

Well, here we are two weeks into my 43rd autumn. A quiet Sunday afternoon - Em, who has been visiting the weekend is at work - as is Andy. There is a pleasing autumnal quietness to everything (though I am still craving that true autumnal chill) - I can hear the fridge in the kitchen humming away, low voices on the street, but these sounds are drowned out by the sound of my typing. Footsteps on the keyboard.

Two weeks ago - the last day of August - I arose from my Sunday malaise and decided to go for a walk. I often go for walks of course, but mostly around the urban environs of Brighton or the seafront. I decided that I would go for a walk across the Sussex Downs to Lewes, I had done this walk before with Em, but a number of years ago, and my memory was a bit sketchy as to details.
I took the bus to town, and then walked to the base of Bear Road. Dear lord, this hill is steep and unpleasant - particularly in the blazing sun. At the top of Bear Road, there is a small path that runs behind the houses of Woodingdean. On the left are the Downs.
Oh, the relief.
It was like suddenly realizing how thirsty you are when someone gives you a drink of water (or more likely in my case a can of diet coke or lucozade). It was the relief of being away from people, away from the city and its desert of straight lines and angles. No-one here but silence.
I walked over the Downs, slightly disappointed there were also other people enjoying the walk too, but despite this there was that overwhelming feeling of relief at being alone in the countryside. The walk to Lewes was too short and I caught the train back and was home by early evening.
I went for another solitary walk last week too, up Bear Road again, and then across the Downs to Rottingdean, then back along the seafront home. This walk wasn't quite as enjoyable as last weeks - the actual amount of time spent in the countryside alone was less than the walk to Lewes - but nonetheless had its moments; finding a burnt out van near that creepy blackberry picking place, eating my lunch on a stile by the entrance into the Uncanny Valley.
I need to do these walks regularly - solitary jaunts into the countryside - I seem to find some kind of peace out there - and it is a kind of peace, a recharging of the imaginative batteries, that seem to last into the week too.

Friday 29 August 2014

The Wanted Autumn of Ghosts

Well, here we are, the end of another summer.
The days vacillitate from being autumnal to being summery (kind of), and end up feeling like neither. When I leave work at 9:00pm now, it is dark. The air is still humid though - though nothing like the heatwave days - but the shadows have a softer look about them, and the leaves on the trees have that washed out quality to them. Walking to work yesterday, I noticed a few of the first autumnal leaves on the ground.
There's a chill in the air this morning though - not unpleasant - and I am able to forget - temporarily - that I am working 48 hours next week - to make the most of the current wages before they plummet thanks to the company I work for being bought out.
It's still August, it's still summer, just, but I'm headed toward the wanted autumn of ghosts I feel wending it's way here.

Sunday 10 August 2014

Blowy Day

Blowy day.
Something autumnal in the sunlight.
The company I work for has been taken over by another company, and we all head for a wage decraese to the minimum wage, and longer hours, and...
It's a year next Tuesday that I left Family Investments, and went to America for my cousin James' wedding.
I could sleep now, but I am restless, and do not feel I will sleep ever again.

Friday 1 August 2014

Another August is Here

Another August is here.
I'm sat on me bed in my room listening to Husker Du's 'New Day Rising' whilst drinking a bottle of ale. I'm due to go out in about an hour because Becky is having leaving drinks.
I'm waiting for the washing machine to finish.
It's funny, as soon as you hit August, it seems you shift quickly into the second half of the year. Autumn is just a few steps, and even Christmas doesn't seem like the mythical beast it did yesterday.
Clouds. Skies. Humidity.

Monday 28 July 2014

Dark at 9:00pm (We'll never see Midsummer 2014 again)

When I left work tonight at 9:00pm, it was just about dark. There was a fading band of red on the horizon, but that was all. The nights are drawing in. Fragments of autumn leaking backwards.

Thursday 24 July 2014

The Summer Deeps

These are the summer deeps.
The summer deeps are different from deep summer, which refers specifically to a stretch of time (the end of July to the end of August). The summer deeps really refer to a 'classic' summer - days and days of blazing heat, of waking up in the morning and tasting that metallic air, glimpsing the blue sky between the curtains from (as in my case) the mattress on the floor.
There are other symptoms of the summer deeps though - notable a feeling of tropical darkness. This is a rather vague symptom, and really can only be felt truly at night (though the air of some tangled jungle may well last through the day). As night falls one can almost see huge trees outlined against the sunsetty sky, hear the calls of monstrous insects from carnivorous undergrowth. One could get lost here. Welcome to the summer deeps.
One thing the summer deeps  have in common with deep summer is that feeling that no other season could possible exist. Spring and autumn seem a lifetime away, and winter might as well be a fairy-tale, (though as I get older the thought of winter comes with a shiver of concern - another year gone, another year wasted, another year closer to death).
Em is down for the weekend. She sits next to me on the sofa. I can hear the sound of workmen in the mews below, and the sky (seen over the roofs of the flats opposite) is indeed a pale, cloudless blue.
A classic sky of the summer deeps.

Wednesday 16 July 2014

The Eye on the Power Station Chimney

Mornings sat waiting to go to work. Heat. Sun.
Watch the breeze blowing through trees from the 7th floor window of the call centre.
Viaduct trains.
Walk back along the beach.
Cool twilights both full of summer and autumnal premonitions.
The eye on the power station chimney.
A cyclops god in a land of locks, factories, lost quarries, docks and floodlights.

Wednesday 4 June 2014

Just June and There's Something Autumnal Here

Yesterday, mid-afternoon.
Walk toward Portslade, then cut up onto the Old Shoreham Road. Walk past the graveyard - the old midsummer paths. Here, where I used to spend a few hours after signing on over the summer of 2010. Em and me had just started seeing each other then. Pine cones and energy drinks. Listening to the Swans in the heatwave months... Then in 2012 (Em and me had split up by then) I would walk along here at twilight. Reddened sky behind the trees. Always odd and quiet and one night so panicky I never walked along here at midsummer twilights again.
School children. Teenage children always make me nervous. Mistimed my walk, and I walk past dozens of children heading home. I think school finished earlier these days. It was only about 3:00pm. wend my way down Sackville Road, pass by the model shop, dark under the shadow of the bridge. I see a man inside. Sometimes I think I would like to work in a place like this, in a secret day-dreamy job with few customers and little in the way of status. A job you can forget life in.
End up down at Hove beach. Cup of tea from the stall. No-one on my section of beach. Down by the wall that provides a little shelter from the wind. Drift and dream. Flick through the prog rock magazine I bought from Smiths. Begin to shift toward sleep. Something autumnal here, some September shift in the skies, where it's still summer, but there's that cooler thread of something. Light gets deeper, shadows more velvety. Something like that. 
In Brighton, it's only in the sky that you can tell autumn's here.
Even if it is only just June.

Tuesday 3 June 2014

Followed by a Ghost Dog

A day off work yesterday. Another day today.
Summery day again yesterday. When I finally got to leaving the house, I went to George Street, to Asdas, then came back home. Fell asleep on my mattress listening to Porcupine Tree's 'Metanoia'. Continual suspicion over the improvement in my mood since Saturday nadir of gloom (which bizarrely, and for no apparent reason, improved at dusk, and has remained fairly high since).
Saw the Swans at Concorde 2.
Andy and me walked back along the beach - about an hours walk. The wind was up - a cold wind too, but oddly pleasant because of it. Something about walking along the beach at night when there's a breeze. After we passed the swimming pool, the nature of the beach changed. Something desolate and sinister. Not a place I'd liked to be alone. 'When you're on the beach at night and it's windy, it always feels like you're being followed'. Andy says his eyes are so bad that he always sees things flickering in the distance. One of those umbrella-things (closed) over a pub table (or maybe it was a flag) flutters and jars. I keep seeing things too. Shadowy implications of movement further up the promenade. 'This section of the beach is haunted by a white dog following lonely walkers'.
Home. Sleep. Wake. Call in sick.
Not summer today but autumn. Grey skies cover everything, lending this room hazy, dream-like feel. Al texts me about walking to Portslade through the rain listening to Current 93.
The idea appeals.

Monday 2 June 2014

So Light So Late

Yesterday.
Summery-ness continues. I only leave the house once in the afternoon - to go to Sainsburys. Not one trace of spring left now, and I cannot believe that it is still winter. One of those things about growing older - the more you appreciate time, the less of it there seems to be.
Pub quiz last night; Mark, Pete, Andy. We come second out of six teams. Cosy dark Caroline of Brunswixk. Same cramped toilet full of goth-graffitti and pseudo-Latin black metal incantations. Light when we go in. So light so late these days. Heading toward midsummer.
Lift there and back from Mark.
Almost straight to sleep.
Don't remember dreaming.

Sunday 1 June 2014

First Afternoon of Summer

I met Sarah for a coffee after yesterday's entry. Warm summery air. Costa in the North Laine full of too much noise; clanking caffeine machines and squealy pre-teens. Slow talk with Sarah, stretched over an hour or so.
Headed down Pavilion Gardens afterwards with the Guardian. Sat and flicked through the Review (a not very good article on Donna Tartt) and pondered whether to join Sarah / Caution / Anwen in the pub that afternoon. Sudden swirl of anxiety. Couldn't imagine entering the pub. Decided to go home, feeling somewhat melancholy.
Tried to catch the bus home. Bus driver didn't have change for a £5:00 note (a single fare is £2:40). Took my £5 back and decided to walk home instead.
Afternoon runs on. Melancholy deepens to something darker. Finish a book I'm reading on notorious Gloucester serial killers Fred and Rose West. Find an old diary from 1999. Last desperate days in Worcester, then that summer that followed, full of apocalypse and depression and absence. Too many parallels to be drawn with now. 27 them, 42 now, and still some things seem to stay the same.
Summery twilight, wood pigeons, and, again, I'm walking through someone else's carnival. Mood lifts as night fall - always the same with depression. Talk about this with Andy when he gets home from work - heard this from other sources too. Wonder why, but certainly true. Depression is worse during daylight hours.
Talk to Emily.
Spend a good few hours working on a comic strip memoir of my time in Worcester. Have two pages done now. Go to sleep at about 2:30am. Wake up this morning at 9:00am.
First afternoon of summer now.

Friday 30 May 2014

White Fields under White Skies

Grey skies. Hours of white cloud. 
The sun was out yesterday afternoon, but from the seventh floor of the call centre, I could see it's effects (making the trees about the viaduct bridge seem hyper-real) but not see it. White humid skies... When I leave at 9:00am it is still light.
I remember the phrase 'walking through someone else's carnival' from that final spring in Worcester, 1999. Walking into town and everything feeling electric and full of potential, kinetic energy spring-coiled, snake ready, and thinking it felt like a fairground was here, and the fairground was somewhere near and I couldn't get to it. Uninvited, all I could do was walk through the ghosts, walk through the echoes leaking from the fairground a few sideways streets away.
White fields under white skies.
This becomes a city of absence, a city of Echoes. Brighton is full of lost things and lost times. The curve of a street in 2002, the Magpie Tree in the autumn of 2008. The summer dawns and it doesn't feel like summer.
The floor of my room is full of clothes. I must open the curtains to my room and get ready for work.
I dreamt last night I was being swallowed by a rainbow coloured snake.

Tuesday 27 May 2014

Autumnal Morning

Something distinctly autumnal today. Sat on my bed - 9:37am - after a good night's sleep. The light coming through the curtains half-obscured by curtains is grey with something that reminds me of rain (it is not raining). Reminds me of those first cooler, gloomier days in September - first days of darkness, those words 'dark breezy mornings' conjured by an old school friend, now a priest. It's not breezy, not raining though. One of those autumnal days where I might wander up by those roads when I lived at Flo's house, 2001 - 2003. The only autumnal part of Brighton there, drift and dream; cafes, the marina, writing poems with Joe in just-bought notebooks, salmon and bread on the Undercliff walk. the other side of the Marina...


Monday 26 May 2014

Missing Worcester

The train-ride matched my mood.
Drizzly rain, the dreamy mystery of Worcestershire (a brilliant but too quick weekend spent there seeing Joe B and Emily) slowly giving way to Oxford, then change at Reading, train to Gatwick, then the train back to Brighton.
I haven't less felt like leaving Worcester. This morning sat in the cathedral gardens with Emily - sunny there - last night (and the night before) at the Cardinals Hat. Then there is the light, deep and rich, and the shadows - velvety and with the texture of nostalgia. Walks through the countryside by the slow moving Severn, noting the blueness of the sky, the clouds which look nothing like Brighton clouds. Thick undergrowth and woods that seem like woods. Countryside that isn't as scrubby and empty as that in Sussex. 'Everything is more dream-like in Worcester' Joe Walmsley said years ago.
Now I'm back in Brighton, writing this in the living room. Back to work tomorrow, in a job which is tolerable at best - and the air seems grey and tight and closed in...
Still gloomy outside.
Wish I was back in Worcester.

Thursday 1 May 2014

Splinter

10:20am.
Sat by the window in my room, hunched up on the ragged sofa I found in the fog four years ago. White skies. Pigeons on the roofs of the house across the way. A crane over in Portland Road. Listening to 'The Best of Delerium'.
Remember:
Worcester, 1998. The grey stretch of the Severn. The emptiness of HMV. Flicking through CDs and hearing that song by Cerys Matthews. That duet she did with..? Worcester was always awful in the rain. That spring was heavy with it's own emptiness but I still miss it.

Monday 28 April 2014

Perfunctory Measure

White skies. Sunny yesterday. Was it though? Can't remember. Oh yes. A walk to the shops and that was all - cold wind. Cold air.
Couldn't sleep last night. Dreams kept me awake. Can't remember any now.

Monday 10 March 2014

Farewell to Bridge 39

I think the end might be approaching for Bridge 39 - though I have said this before of course (or at least thought it - see this time over 2011).
It's hard to explain why, but every time I come here, or think about coming here to write something (rare these days) it is with a sense of superstitious dread. It feels as if the blog has become haunted. Apt really, for a blog concerned mostly with ghosts (of both the literal and metaphoric kind). There is also a sense of everything here belonging too much to the past somehow. Bridge 39 belongs to the me that was 37 - 41. I'm 42 this month.
Time passes.
A bright sunny day outside. The first warm / hot days of this year. I hear the banging from the workshops below. Em, now back from Greece, is sitting at the table eating toast.
The sunlight reminds me of Joe Bird's house in Worcester, over that May weekend in 2010 when I got made redundant. I remember the dusty, dreamy smell of the dining room, I remember the velvety nights somehow more infinite and older than those in Brighton, I remember the overgrowth of plants, cow parsley, weeds, as we passed by one of those buildings near the Commandery.
Yes, I think this may be the end for Bridge 39, and if not forever, then at least for a considerable period of time.
We shall see.

Sunday 19 January 2014

October Rust

I bought Type 'O' Negative's album 'October Rust' right back in early September 1996, just before I started Worcester University. I liked some some songs but never really got into it. I kept trying every now and again to 'get into it' properly, and always fail... But I keep thinking I will get into it properly. I'm listening to it now, still trying to get into it. As it has, this year, been 18 years since I first bought the album, you really would think I would have learned my lesson.
Apparently not.

Wednesday 15 January 2014

Weather Report

The sun was out yesterday when I walked into work, and it was quite warm. The tides of doom receded for a while. By the time I left work it was raining again, so I caught the bus home, and the tides of doom were back.
I drank the last of the wine and fell to sleep.

Tuesday 14 January 2014

Mid-January Already

I spent yesterday painting, only leaving the house as night fell, about 4:00pm. The outside was not encouraging; grey gloomy drizzle, everything robbed of colour. Not even twilight could make something compensatory out of it all.
I came back home, tried to watch television after dinner (nothing on) - and eventually got my scanner working for the first time. This is a remarkable step forward for me considering just how lost I am with computers most of the time. Now I shall be able to scan in artwork instead of  photographing it. Means also that if I ever get back into writing I'll be able to print out what I've written. For something to exist I think you need to have a hard copy of it.
I continued painting throughout the evening - it now has a title 'The Great Migration', and should be finished this week. The sense of impending doom and hopelessness that has been following me around since new years day continued to tighten it's grip around me, forcing me to take solace in a bottle of wine.
I went to sleep about 1:00am.

Monday 13 January 2014

Monday Morning is Silent

Dreams of an abandoned hospital in which Cybermen are hiding. They only become active at night, but what am I doing in the hospital anyway? The Cybermen are harvesting limbs and organs to replicate themselves. We are having to gather weapons together - made out of silver - chain swords - to stop this threat. There is a feeling of impending doom.
I wake throughout the night. Anxious awakenings. Lie there, twist and wait to fall back to sleep again.
11:33am now. Got up out of bed half an hour ago. Sat on the sofa in my room. Grey skies, thick with rain, but there is sunlight somewhere. The houses across the gardens are all lit up.
Monday morning is silent.

Sunday 12 January 2014

Cold and Empty Days

Cold and empty days.
I walk to town to meet friends for coffee. The day struggles to get out of twilight. Before that I wake hungover and restless. I kept waking throughout the night. Recurring images of worst case scenarios that are hardly life-shattering but bother me deeply anyway.
Good night at the Evening Star last night, hence the hangover. New year ales and friendly old dogs. An old labrador took a friendly liking to my hand. Caught the bus down and the taxi back Fell into sleep almost immediately. Sleep is recompense, but not the waking, not the dreams.
How long will these cold and empty days last for? Till spring? It feels like they are here to stay forever, everything dark and immutable.
Three weeks till I find out whether or not I have passed probation at work. I think not. Back into the job market again, looking for a job I can tolerate, and these days pass by, and these years pass. Nothing thaws. everything grows more entrenched.
Anyway, I've got to do the washing up now.

Friday 10 January 2014

Entropy and Inertia

At the heart of all these days, that building I work in, a cross between an abandoned hospital and a once-factory. It's actually a call centre. A cold centre. Wide empty corridors, hospital white walls, creaky lift that opens onto other floors. Wide stretches of emptiness, and almost a wind blowing through it all.
Inertia and entropy.
I remember the train doors closing, and waving goodbye, and the city streets now even more defined by absence. A coldness here, a coldness there. Her voice lingers, another room, another country. She knows the sun and I know this; the anatomy of concrete, the lethal witnesses of alarm call driven mornings.
The mirror.
Signs of ageing. Entropy. Something I've been ignoring too long.
I hide my smile. I wait for these January days to pass.

Tuesday 7 January 2014

The Storms Won't Last Forever

I think I dreamt last night, I'm not sure. I've been dreaming a lot recently about paintings and in particular the artist Kay Sage, whose surrealist works are proving quite an inspiration to me of late. An article I read on some blog somewhere says that her life, though not unhappy, was threaded through with melancholy. I dream I am in her paintings. I dream of the photograph of her when she was young.
I dream of Southside and Kinloss, as always, and Woodstock Drive in Ickenham, and of course, London Road in Worcester, all these psychic generators made up of my own past. The dreams and myths I have concocted of these places somehow supersede their real life counterparts, their waking reflections. Almost anyway. When I go back to these places - Worcester most often - I find vague traces of myself as I was there. Haunting my own past. Haunted by houses. I would love to enter into an old house in which I lived.
The wind is constant now, rattling the house,s ending the lamps spun across the mews in a seasick rhythm that mocks the sea I've not yet seen. I should go down to the beach and watch that spindrift-mad ocean. Its been flinging pebbles up onto the boulevard, drowning benches, destroying huts. The storms won't last forever, and before we know it grey February will have started her reign.
After midnight now. Time to lie down and dream myself back into the past that only ever seems a fracturing of thin ice away.

Sunday 5 January 2014

First Sunday of the Year

Returned to work on Thursday afternoon. I spent the morning before painting, the only thing that could take my mind off the feeling of impending doom that was gathering about me. It didn't quite work, but at least I got some painting done, at the moment a dark landscape under a stormy sky. Work itself wasn't too bad, though seemed to take an age to pass by. It's always the waiting that is worse. I suppose I'm just a bit sick of working in call centres now, though this job is a lot less stressful than my last. Only a month left now (less!) till I found out whether or not I pass probation. Judging by how badly I did yesterday at work, this looks increasingly unlikely. A long stretched out day that too forever to end.
Claire's birthday last night - traditionally the end of the Christmas period. Dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant, and then to the Craft pub. Don't want to think how much I spent.
Slightly hungover today.
Em has now left Brighton. I saw her off this morning (her parents came down for the rest of her stuff). She'll be back on Wednesday night, and then off to Greece on Thursday morning. Brighton will be strange without her.
January is often a bleak month.
Ah well, The Geekest Link pub quiz tonight, then tomorrow off, and back to work on Tuesday.

Wednesday 1 January 2014

Gloomy New Years Day

Got of bed at 12:30pm. Checked e-mail. A message from our landlady headed 'water-rates' which I was unable to open. Sinister. More money needed probably. Gloomy afternoon in the day long twilight of January 1st. Couldn't settle to anything, but ended up doing a 9 panel comic strip about how gloomy today felt. Andy got up some time in the evening. Em came round for a cup of tea after she finished work (finished work for the last time - I still can't believe she'll be leaving Brighton next week!). Rained all day. House rattled in the wind. Headachey hangover kicked in about 6:00pm. Watched a bit more of 'Blood on Satans Claw'. Walked Em home. Rainy cold - the antithesis of anything cosy / comfy. Worried about money, about not passing my probation, about growing older. Dreading work tomorrow. 10:45pm. About to start another painting.
Lets hope 2014 has some nicer moments than the grey gloom of the past couple of years.