Grey Area

I worked in Brighton today, I had to be there by 8am, so I was up before 5. I was woken at 4am anyway, another badger in the garden. I was having a vivid dream but I’ve already forgotten what it was - can’t have been more disturbing than the one I had last week, when I was apparently declared the legal guardian of Michael Jackson’s awful children, and forced to go clubbing with them. I have no idea where all that came from.

On the train, as usual - nobody wants to sit next to me. There was a woman opposite who looked a lot like a cheap version of Susan Hampshire - she used her ugly Kath Kidson bag to hog an extra seat.

Being on the train gives me time to think. I’m realy glad I got rid of all that stuff last week, it had been holding me back for years, in some ways - I imagine it being like having a dead body hidden in the house and fretting over it for decades - actually, I have had that dream too, more than once. I was able to get rid of some stuff I’ve had since I was a child - including a Hornby train set that was in excellent condition, because we were never allowed to play with it - not that there would have been any point, it was a ‘part’ set - just some freight carriages and bits of track - designed as an add-on for a full set. It was bought for show, essentially - shown to me, then locked away, I’ve been dragging it around, still in the box for 4 decades. I sold it to a rockabilly lesbian from St Leonard's, she has a retro shop - I gave her a slight discount from the ebay price because I liked her hair.

I sorted the loft 2 weeks ago and piled all the crates up in the dining room - it was a useful exercise, all that ‘stuff’ became a dead weight, like the albatross and I just wanted it gone, barely anything came back out again. I should do that more often, not just with inanimate objects.

A woman on the train is telling her friend that autistic kids have ‘special powers’ - like synesthesia - they see colours and shapes - she’s making it all sound rather excavating, but she’s talking shite - I expect she believes in unicorns too. I can assure you - I see absolutely everything in black and white, even my shades of grey are emphatic and concrete. I can’t even do colour at work - I just don’t understand it - which is a professional handicap in my trade, although I seem to be much better at it than most of the people I have to work with. Oddly enough - I had to take some complex illustrations I’d done earlier in the year and re-colour them manually in Black and White this week - that’s what the client wanted - he couldn’t understand why I protested that it just didn’t work like that.

There was a bloke on the train next to me - he was about the same age, but one of those men who has probably been quite commonplace all his life but suddenly become very handsome in his late 40’s - and he knows it. He’s reading an engineering trade paper - every single article is about vibrations.

Brighton was full of the young and the very beautiful. Even the seagulls look special. I had to work phenomenally hard under difficult technical circumstances - in a room full of people just as stressed as I was, and then we had to present to one of the bigger store groups - I wasn’t expecting to lead the presentation of the creative work - I may have been a bit shaky to start - but the client is happy and we are on to stage 2. It’s quite a difficult brief - a store in Portsmouth that belongs to one to the ‘big’ chains is performing badly - so they want to re-present it as more ‘value’ - for a ‘challenged’ demographic… dumbing down is very, very difficult.

I took a Taxi from the station - quite an extravagance for me - I was just too exhausted to walk up the hill. The house on the corner of my road is up for sale - I knew it would be, they have just spent a lot of money tarting it up ( it was already lovely ) and their next door neighbour has just been refurbished and sold for a lot of money I really resent them, they had a beautiful garden that they block paved over - I won’t miss them. The golliwog in the bedroom picture tells you everything you need to know.

I’m watching an old Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes for about the 200th time. I’m enjoying it more than ever. I bought some beer - it’s really perked me up - but that’s probably just the sugar.