Thinking of Old Summers

The time-lapsed summer is back again. Felt it as soon as I stepped out of the house this morning; bright, hazy sunlight, the seagull cries, the foamy sea-taste on the air.
Remember as a child, the months leading up to summer. That sense of climax, of things leading somewhere. The summer holidays of course. Each one was different, had their own feelings and resonance and obsessions. The magical summer of 1982 (Scotland, ghost hunting and base building in woods) and 1986 (London, first kisses and thrash metal albums). Then the other summers, the isolation of summer 1987 (no friends living near me - best friend Leighton having moved away) and the apocalypse-tinged summer of 1990 (the heat, just finished school, the future a frightening unknown vortex). Actually, wasn't just the summer of childhoods that had their own identity, their own soul, but those summers of the 1990s, that long decade of colleges and universities. The deep English-fever of the summer of 1995 and 1996, the summer of 1997, living in the 200 year old house on London Road in Worcester. Then the last summer of 1999. In Cornwall, after finishing my degree - another apocalypse summer, Nostradamus and the eclipse. Too much imagination, heat and time...
And then you leave school, or university, or college, and you work instead, and summers don't seem to have their own identity any more. They just merge into one homogenous mass. But then there is that beautiful slipping down into the beginning of autumn during September.
That time never seems to lose its power.

Kind of Lost on A Kind of Hill

A thick spring day. The summer premonitions have been pushed back, and the sky is white. A hint of rain perhaps. No blue skies. No early August ghosts.
Walking to work this morning, I needed to call in at my doctors to drop a prescription off. I have been to the doctors numerous times over the years, but, somehow, managed to lose my way there this morning. I had gone a slightly unfamiliar way, one that I had walked before nonetheless, and maybe it was the way all the houses looked, well, not the same... but somehow, all jumbled. I mean, the architecture seemed a strange mixture of styles and resonances - for an English seaside town anyway. There seemed to be a prevalence of something fairly meditterenean going on. One building - immediately named the Observatory by me - looked oddly Italian - or maybe Maltese, a childhood echo (I lived there for a while when I was young). There seemed to be a kind of tower - the reason, I suppose, it got named the Observatory. That, and the fact that it is situated on top of a hill. Well, I call it a hill, but it is a hill situated down only one street. A lost hill I found while being (nearly) lost.
I found the doctors eventually though, handed in my prescription, and got to work ten minutes later than normal.

Virus Meadow

The second drawing in the Book of Deleriums.
Based on the song 'Virus Meadow' by And Also The Trees.

I did this drawing back in the last week of January, in the week leading up to seeing And Also The Trees in concert in London.
The song 'Virus Meadow' has fascinated me for years, and is inspired by the Worcestershire countryside where the band originally come from, and where I have lived at various points in my life.

The full lyrics are as follows:

Rattled chime, slow ringing echo, roll around in virus meadow
Suck enchanted nightshade twine, hear the bells beneath them chime
Sinking summer, priest-head murmers, holy words across the meadows
Kiss the plagues black rolling hand and from his lips the virus sang

And the rooks seemed to follow him wherever he goes, flapping in the flat sky,
shrieking in the spire, hanging from the lead sky, dangling from the sun
The rooks, they seemed to follow him, wherever he goes.

Nodding thistle, English sun dew, swansneck woman, child-bed meadow
Aching shoulders sink and groan, as the bells from ditches toll

And the smeared skin wrapped limbs of the night-brothers,
struggling, crawling, through the empty crack of morning,
are the night-brothers
are the night brothers
the night brothers
the night brothers...

The song can be found on the album 'Virus Meadow' released way way back in 1986...