Apparition

I got a letter from Claire this morning, which really came as a surprise: it tugged at me inside. She's started her teaching course in Whincliffe and looks set for the next three years; there was a hint of loneliness in her words, as though she wants to talk with someone she knows. I immediately sat down and penned her a reply, over-worrying as I did so about how I sounded. I still can’t get over it.

Mum told me that Nanna P. had “a vision” when she stayed here last week. She was sitting at the dining room table when she noticed someone she thought was Dad outside, but he was at work. Then (as she told the story to Mum), a “blob” appeared and gradually morphed into Andrew’s face looking in through the window. I immediately thought about psychic connections with the dead, etc., and as Andrew is in Denmark. . . ?

Precog

All I did today was write a letter in reply to the ”Write to me!” Andrew put at the end of his.

Walking in the city

A nightmarish and depressing trip to Whincliffe to look for trousers.

I met Lee outside Victoria Hall and we were in Whincliffe by eleven. The noise, the crowds of people and cars and the unbearable sun were awful. Lee left early, saying he felt ill, and I walked miles along anonymous bustling streets passing shop after shop, looking for but not finding anything to buy. At times it all got too much; the sharp jutting angles of buildings and harshly shadowed deserts of concrete, glass, brick and plastic, the stifling heat and people people everywhere with their loud voices and so soon forgotten talk. As I walked beneath an arcade frontage, loud waltzy music roared out above the street rumble. I soon had a headache.

I hid inside a dark record shop where I lost myself in books and records and T-shirts and, as I turned to leave, I was gripped by a feeling I’m sure came from the future, a feeling of fear and despair at having to go out alone, miles away from anyone I know. It really depressed me, so I retreated to a nearby bookshop and looked for Kerouac novels, which I found. Seeing them there somehow cheered me up.

When I got home I lay on my bed in the heat and felt ill.

At nine I got the bus to Grant’s. We were going to the Hot Club again but found it closed and silent and we were puzzled, as were others who drifted around the entrance. The moon was red and bloated when it rose and looked incongruous like a sullen eye hanging above Schofield Street. Grant said it inspires him.

So we walked round Easterby instead, calling at the Potting Shed Café (“Paul’s Pie and Peas – open till 3”), which was deserted. We ordered two steaming plates of pie and mushy peas with heaps of mint sauce and we shared a can of beer, glorying in the food at the odd late hour and the noisy revelry down below in the wide dark city. We read problem page letters in Tidbits out loud: worried tales of incest, famous sons making sexual advances towards sheep. Loud laughter across empty table tops. I felt suddenly sad as I watched the café owner perched in the tiny bright den of his hidden eating house alone and hopeful while the world sleeps ("four in tonight!").

We walked home past cramped taxi offices, the muffled lights and laughter of Roy’s Café and Speedwell Club reggae pounding from behind purple-lit curtains upstairs. A Pakistani lady sat glumly on the steps of the Nawaab, chin-on-hand, watching the weary funsters trudging by too busy just to stop or call in and buy food and reward her plans and ambitions.

Grant and I said goodbye until Saturday and the eve of our London trip and I walked home over dark and creepy Castlebrigg playing fields. It was so warm I stripped to the waist but still felt slimy.

And I still haven’t said all I wanted to.

Sketch

I've started reading Marcus Cunliffe’s Literature of the U.S. In the afternoon I sketched out ideas for a painting (a portrait?).

In the evening, nothing.

Silent hills

Sheet grey torrential Sunday morning skies. We were going on a hike, but Robert had a huge blister on his heel from walking home again last night so he couldn’t come with us.

Mum, Dad, and I set off in a mood to match the weather, parking at Busk Falls, the rain still spattering onto the car windscreen. We had a look round the twelfth century church with its squat, almost ugly bulk crouched behind a short tower. We bumped into a probation officer acquaintance of Dad who destroyed Dad's hopes for a future probation-officer job with a pessimistic and comfortless realism. As we trudged off on our walk Mum was close to tears.

We clomped up a narrow winding lane through Lowbrough, Stakethorne amid lovely limestone landscapes of boulders and stunted scrubby trees, the grass clipped lawn-short by rabbits and sheep. We leveled out onto a broad plateau crossed by tumbled walls and dotted with rocks, on our left the gaping eye socket blackness of Haw Cave beckoning high among limestone outcrops.

As we crested a rise we saw Swinmoss stone circle, which is hardly a circle at all with scarcely half-a-dozen members: the standing stones are short, round and split like broken teeth. It looked more impressive from a distance, nestling under a white wall side.

It was sticky and very humid as we climbed up to meet Scar Lane which snaked away across the hazy slopes towards Oaklass. Swinmoss calls itself the “smallest town in England” (there are only two houses, plus associated barns and outhouses), and here we blundered a bit, getting lost. As Mum struggled up the hill from Swinmoss she said she felt “shattered” so we took the last three homeward miles to Lowbrough easy, pausing a long time on the hilltop limestone clints and again past classic fractured rock outcrops by Haw Cave. We climbed up to its dark entrance and gazed out over the timeless fields and deathly silent hills.

I'm going to write in this journal only when the mood takes me so as to escape the daily grind of having to think up what to write. Some days I just don't feel moved. Hopefully by doing this the writing will improve and it’ll be more interesting for me to read.