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.

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.

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.

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.