Only Clovelly Heath is Real

An internet cafe down Western Road. Time to kill between finishing work and (hopefully) joining others down The Cricketers for dinner - though I may only stop for a pint and head home.
Another blindingly sunny day - no clouds in the sky and the sea from the call centre window still and tideless; drifting boats, a lone swimmer, water-skiers, and larger ships on the horizon. At lunchtime I take a walk to Dave's Comics down the North Laine, and everyone looked summer-y, pre-sunburnt, and in all the yellow-dusty air I'm thinking what's happened to spring?

(and by spring I mean those white-grey days under flat but churning skies, churchyard afternoons under incongruous willow trees, and the evenings gold as September, the taste of blossoms and rivers and electric with all those lost and forgotten arcana of the spring-time gothic)

These days feel likie drifting in summer-water, perhaps a pool in a cathedral wood, or a calm lake shadowed in lake monster territory. Happy drifting in the water, happy under the shade of trees in too-hot days, and the summery air buttery and languid. Then there is a cold thread in the water, and you feel as if something has opened up below you. Look around. The colour of the water has gotten darker, and thicker, and the day is shifting down afternoons to a more sober time. Drifted into deeper water, and the deeper water is colder, less trustworthy (more undercurrents) and dangerous. You don't know how to get back.
There is a shadow here.
There is a snake in the grass, and it all seems somehow inevitable.

(waking in the night, and under the wind and the rattling and the creaking you hear the unmistakeable sound of a footstep on the stair, and you should be alone in the house, so you turn over and pretend you haven't heard it, and you pull the covers over your head so you don't have to hear any more, but you know there's something there, a shadowy constellation in a sky full of stairs

They're playing some classical music in the internet cafe now. Erik Satie? They were playing him earlier certainly. What they're playing now reminds me of the film Picnic at Hanging Rock. I don't know why. I look at the corner of the screen, and they've forgot to reset the time. Only 17:11. Sudden panic, did I leave work too nearly at 4:00pm? Of course not. I would check my phone for the time but it's in some pocket somewhere and I can't be bothered to reach it.
A woman sits two seats to my left tapping away, a man to my right, scrolling down the page of a website I can't see.
I remember leaving a bag in here back in autumn 2010, and they kept it safe for me till I returned the next day.

Spring-time in Worcester hangs over today. The images I associate with it (well, today anyway) make little sense; railway tracks, a narrow path through a field full of high weeds, a garden I've never seen of a house I've only dreamt of and a path stretching to a knife-sharp distance full of poplar trees).
I remember a day in the back garden of no 37 Bransford Road - my second house on that street. No-one went into the garden much, too scraggy and desolate, and the few trees there all stunted and full of insects. One experimental day out in that garden, smoking cigarettes, looking up through the branches of one of those trees stays with me, looking up into grey skies, but warm grey skies. Don't get those kind of days down here.
I miss Worcester.
Or do I?
What is it that brings me back again and again to that place? After I left there in 1999 and moved here to Brighton, I spent the first few years writing stories set in a heavily mythologised version of that place called Clovelly Heath. Clovelly Heath was the Worcester of my imagination, of what I remembered and dreamt about, a place constructed of ghost stories and lacunae and those tales swapped with the friends (Joe, Al, Sarah...) who had moved down here too. It was with some surprise that we all discovered that Joe B had moved to Worcester through his job. My first return to Worcester was in 2006, a rainy-grey November weekend, where I lost my glasses and only found them again an hour before leaving. Then there was that second return in May of 2010 - where I found out that Telegen - my old job - had gone bust. A few weeks later I met Em, whose home town is Worcester. We went back October that year, and a few times since too.
It is easy to mythologise a place that is distant - a remote place from childhood, or some holiday destination perhaps. I visit Worcester regularly (ish) and I find that it's mythological power only seems to increase.
When I visit Worcester now, it feels like I am visiting that other Worcester.
Only Clovelly Heath is real.
Worcester is a ghost.
Worcester is full of ghosts.

(I remember sitting on Fort Royal Hill with Joe on a blazing hot Saturday in May of 2010, watching the sun seem to sink into thye spire of the cathedral. Fish'n'chips and cigarettes. I remember being with Ross here back in the winter of 1998, trying to light a cigarette in December wind and darkness. Only a few matches left and we somehow succeeded. Was that Clovelly Heath? Was that Worcester?)

When I left the flat this morning, there were workmen in the Mews, somehow connected to the workshops below us. White vans and snatched fragments of overheard conversations. Talk of tools and jobs, anhd I slipped past them, and I thought the sky looked new and blue, and the air tasted as fresh as any I had ever breathed.