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.

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...

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.

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.