Somewhere between Mordor and Fairyland

The light is failing as I begin the trudge to Essex. The tipping point in a grey afternoon when cars lose the definitions of marque and colour, become nothing but white headlight glare. I move too slowly through the Piccadilly, the neon dream of now obscuring its secret Masonic history. It is near dark as I traverse the ghost zone of Bell Yard.

Stuttering through the streets, I feel a surge of crossroad power at Ludgate Circus. The next mile becomes an imaginary ley as I brush by the sacred sites of Saint Bride’s, Saint Paul’s and the London Stone. I mainline on occulted history till I hit the skulls of Saint Olave Hart Street.

For the next 45 minutes I have to sit cross-legged on the floor of a train. I see nothing but a crowded thicket of legs. Having made the journey so many times in a previous life, I do not need to watch the landscape fall away outside the window to know where I am when. I let the subtle sensation of moving backwards pull my mind towards ideaspace. In reverie, the severed heads once spiked on London Bridge speak old secrets. Tales spat from rotting tongues only silenced by arrival at Leigh-on-Sea.

I climb the hill; look out across the dark blanks in the landscape that memory fills in as fields. Night graces even the blight which is Canvey Island a certain magic. The constant flare of the refinery and the sodium orange glow of the thousands of streetlights give it an aspect somewhere between Mordor and fairyland. Essex is no longer my home, but at least tonight it contains not ghosts, but the prospect of friends and laughter.

Back on the Farm

This morning the rain was constant. I woke to Gatling gun staccato on the water and ripple interference patterns than even Bridget Riley could not match. It was cold as lawyer’s blood and the sun was a wheezing, invalid grey. We seem to have fast-forwarded through the joys of autumn to the first harsh edges of winter.

With just about enough light to recognise my own face in the mirror, I shave. Pull on a black Italian suit, blue and white-striped shirt burgundy silk tie and the Chelsea boots. I look like a Tory until the rain forces me to take the leather trench coat from its hanger.

At 10am I make my way down a Little Lebanon too early to be fully awake, too wet for the usual shisha huddles. Weaving into what estate agents and others pompously label ‘Connaught Village’, I nod to the policemen armed with Heckler and Koch MP5s like I am an old friend. No one challenges me. It is a trick I learnt from watching Doctor Who and used countless times as a journalist: act as if you own the place and half the time those on the gates do not even bothers to ask for ID.

Within an hour, hands are shaken and papers are signed. I feel the shudder of collapsing parallel dimensions as I meet and move forward from this nexus point. I am back in the game, back on the farm.

Later in the day I close forever the door on my grandparent’s council flat – the place they called home for 40 years of their 78-year long marriage. A frequent and reliable refuge, a place where I could always find love no matter how crushed and crumpled my life was, is now lost to me. Returning from Essex, tears escape on the train as I try and update my internal map.

The sunset I watch from the carriage window is a nursery scheme of pink and blue. The industrial spires and refinery flames across the estuary look like a science fiction backdrop from the 1960s. I find I am my eyes are still damp when the sky has become dark and the shimmering pyramid atop Canary Wharf signals that the end of the line is nigh.

Essexmania

I am slowly becoming divorced from Essex. My family dead or increasingly lost to me. No property, no legitimate business to take me there. Each trip I take back only serves to further disentangle me from the county of my birth. Knowing this makes every journey a blackened pilgrimage to the past. The tubes and trains that carry me cut lines ever eastwards till they hit the edge of England, the edge of definition and memory.

I am that rare thing, an Essex boy with all the Essex being taken out of him.

Friday afternoon and I am trying to surf ahead of the commuter wave, battling the curse of Edgware Road. The slow clock of the Circle Line – Farringdon, Barbican, Moorgate – counts down the stations to Tower Hill. Stepping out of the yellow ritual marking, turning my back to the White Mound and Bran’s Head, I feel myself losing all of London’s protective magic. It is no surprise when the pain of pure remembrance crashes into me as the engine drags me backwards through Limehouse.

By the time the train hits escape velocity and is propelled under the M25, out of London’s last magic circle, the sky is apposite for my mood. Sullen grey and wearing bruised clouds, it lends the landscape additional dull menace. The capital ends and Essexmania begins. Forced by the track into repetition of views I know too well, there is no deviation in trajectory. No escape from the hurt of travelling through paces swollen with you own history.

Above Essex Nowhere

I hate cliché. Hate writing it, hate living it. This morning I walk out at 8am through London drab. A tired grey sky makes it seasonless. No rumour of summer. Cool drizzle beads on my face. By the time I turn off of Oxford Street 40 minutes later I am damp and rheumatic.

I work for three hours. Basement publishing. More cliché. Wrestling with an index; trying to impose order surrounded by dunes of dust, forgotten books and dozens of broken Apple Macs. A dripping track soundtrack only broken by the feet clacking over the skylight.

At 12, two lines into ‘T’, I down my pencil, straighten my manuscript and make my way back to Oxford Street. The 23 I catch crawls towards its destination. Iain Sinclair to cushion the passage along painful places of The Strand, the Law Courts and Bell Yard.

Even when London is left, the grey continues. It bleeds into the aborted futurism of Stansted airport. A back of the lorry fake Antonio Sant’Elia design, blighted by Essex weather, has become a temple of dull paranoia. The two hour security lines and machine gun police create concentrated fear. The same instructions to comply are broadcast over and over in assorted languages including German. Close your eyes and you are in a parallel universe where the Nazis won the war.

It is raining by the time I walk across the tarmac to climb the steps to the plane. The wind, buoyant from the easy journey across Essex flatlands, whoops in my face like ugly football supporter from a rival team high on victory. The grey sky keeps everything in low definition. Cold, wet and oppressive, I am living the line by Luke Haines that helped name this blog.

Sitting between strangers, my aircraft terror begins to coalesce. The black hole in my brain – the injury from my last flight with Anne-Marie – exerts an awful gravity. Fears are sucked from the chasms of memory, ghosts ripped from slumber. The old language of dread reasserts itself. The smoothed down acronym TIA regrows its teeth, glorying in power regained as transient ischaemic attack. Ryanair roulette. Every time I fly, I know it could happen again.

Noise builds. The thumping, expectant power you feel building as you taxi becomes a purposeful, concentrated roar. A sudden skip in the stomach and then flight. Above Essex nowhere. A flattened quilt of fields in dark greens, browns and colours so tired they have given up and become exhausted shades of yellow are stitched by hedgerows, trimmed with ribbons of black tarmac.

For a few seconds it all goes white. When detail returns, we are cruising above a landscape straight out of the adventures of Rupert the Bear as drawn by Roger Dean. Mountain ranges of atmospheric water vapour come complete with secluded valleys that could house the palace of the Bird King, a mist village or floating island. When the continents of cloud eventually begin to fail and become hydrosphere archipelagos, the fields below are French.

Even from thousands of feet up, you can see the difference between England and southern France immediately. A landscape drawn from a divergent colour palette, sun-whipped soil scrapped thinly over limestone. No hedgerow enclosures. Arid peaks and dry valleys. Scattered vineyards. A flash of the Rhône. When we make the Mediterranean, the sun bends the wings of the plane, turns the water below into a blinding expanse of gold. Turning over Marseilles, I struggle to understand how a city of little more than a million and a half people could stretch itself across over such a wide area.

I land in another cliché. Blue sky. Technicolour movie blue. Total absence of cloud. A palpable hit of lavender carried on the warm air. Sunlight so strong my automatic English reaction is that it needs watering down like pastis. My phone’s loyalty morphs from T-Mobile to Orange F. For once there are no problems at the border. Smooth transition from one state to another. Everything is blue skies.

Normally I hate cliché, but this one, exchanging grey for blue, this is one that I can hack.

Postcards From the Edge of England

I have to go back to the Essex backwaters for a day or two. I have problems to solve and ghosts to nod to. Therefore it is back to the 1970s. Back to sleeping on acrylic carpets, watching the news on a black and white TV and no hope of an Internet connection unless I take a trip to Shangoland.

I promise more regular posting as well as postcards from the edge of England when I get back.

Black Dog Growl

It is my understanding that the French do not say ‘I am sad’, but rather ‘A sadness is upon me’. The French have it right. Currently there is sadness upon me. I know it is only multiple clouds of small sorrow combining to feel like a severely bruised sky above, but there is no use denying the weather.

Part of the sadness is due to current gravitational pull of Essex. Tomorrow I have to go back to resolve a raft of Nanna related problems. The prospect of days spent battling with bureaucracy and desperately juggling the finances is fine. Knowing my nights will be spent sleeping on the floor of the council flat my grandparents lived in for 38 years is a black dog growl. A place once filled with the animating love of a couple who had been married for 73 years is now just a claustrophobic concrete shell. After the recent break-in at the place by people looking for me, I have additional reasons to feel uncomfortable.