Waiting for the Water to Heat up

When I was a teenager - right up until the age of 22 when I left Uxbridge - I used to go to London a lot. Ostensibly this was to buy records (in the 1980s from Shades 'the heavy metal specialists' down a small alley in Soho) but really there was something else I liked about going to London.

There was a certain feeling of freedom and vastness I craved, and also a sense of oldness and secrecy. It always amazed me quite how old and labyrinthine some of the buildings in London seemed. The underground system seemed impossibly deep, and the rattling carriages would lull me into a headache-y reverie.

I remember one night - coming back from a gig with Edward (The Undead? Danzig? Shonen Knife?) and we got stuck at a tube station for a while. The place was deserted, and all I could hear was the humming of the escalators. It must have been getting close to midnight, but I had never heard the Jam song so wasn't that bothered. 

I have no idea why I'm thinking about all this at 7:30am.

Time for a shower anyway.

The Time Traveller on Brighton Beach

On the beach yesterday with Al and Claire. There is a man silhouetted on the horizon, talking with one or two other people. They seem a quite normal group of middle aged people. The silhouetted man is saying that he has 'been here before of course, about a 150 years ago'. This is said in a quite reasonable tone of voice. So reasonable in fact that I strain to listen to more of the Brighton beach time traveller; 'I've got some photographs. It was very different then'. I wish I had gone over and asked to see the photographs, but I suppose he didn't have them with him. Maybe he left them behind in 1862.

Dream of Hyper-Worcester

I dreamt of hyper-Worcester last night, that dream-city that looks so unlike it's waling counterpart, but is still somehow Worcester, very different and yet the same place that I went to university in.
Raining. I had gotten off at some train station near the town centre, possibly at the base of London Road hill. One of a group of threatening teenagers asked if I had any 'transformers' to give him, referring to the shape changing robot toys that were popular when I was a kid. He asked in an intimidating fashion. I said that I hadn't and walked on. It was about here that I ran into Joe Bird - perhaps my trip to Worcester was to meet him. It felt like late evening - possibly in autumn - in the dream. There looked like many people going home from work.
A shop. Through the window there is a display showing grandfather clocks. The interior of the shop cannot be seen. Behind the shop is a dark cluster of twilight trees. We enter the shop at some basement level and take a set of stairs to the shop level. The shop does not sell grandfather clocks, but masks that are used in occult ceremonies. The proprietor, a middle aged hippy, is closing up for the day. He does seem annoyed we are there (though Joe Bird has vanished by now). I talk to him for a while, and he gestures towards the range of 'teas' he also sells behind the counter. |These unnerve me for they are hallucinogenic teas also used in occult ceremonies.