No sleep till Moulescoomb..

It's late, and I really, really, should be in bed. I'm sat up in the dark in my pink hooded top, my comfy jeans, and the room is chilly. I'm wondering again, wondering, wondering where it all will end - this mind of mine and this beating chest, these legs of mine that just want to run. Running away from; running towards. My legs go, fast as summer, like a young girl racing to catch the ball that spins through the air in a perfect arch between her parents' fingers.

I run from, I run towards. Across the beach. Through backstreets. Beside car parks. Past bushes and streams. Up mountains. In the rain. Down the front steps. And it's the shadow of the sun on my face that tells me how alive I really am.

I don't feel eloquent. Or articulate. I am back in the world trying to carve out some bread and butter and a way to hold my head up, but... I'd always rather be at home, under the cover of night, communing with the angels and demons that fly around my head. Inside my flat can be a bit of a raucous party, with all the interesting beings that gather there to cause pandemonium and guffawing, who light candles and sing and bring stars out from under their pleated skirts as gifts for me, and occasionally, throw up on my carpet. Evenings here are never dull, that's for sure. We sit together and eat and tell each other our stories. We dance and make love. We fight. We pore over ancient manuscripts. We invent new languages. Especially when I am disciplined enough to turn off Eastenders.

And of course, they all go back to from where they came, whenever guests pop by, or when I am forced out from behind my safe walls into the real world where people stare if you bring out strange creatures, and buses crash if the haloes around you suddenly start singing. No, I go with notepad and pen, a look of efficiency on my face. But tonight I got lost around Moulescoomb in the dark, and, as I wandered around searching for a house number 113 that didn't seem to exist, and waiting to get my head kicked in, I did wonder what the fuck I was doing there. Trying to earn my crust. And that's what it is. 89p, Co-op own-brand white crust. Without butter on. The dryest thing in the Western Hemisphere.

So I come to you, my keyboard and my letters, to cheer me up, and to keep me from falling on the concrete, and the narrow, narrow roads. I pray to you, poetry, like a guardian angel, to keep me always, always, safe at the hearth, in the homes where I belong. Let the creatures guide me across the sea and ice, let the holy ones light up my face when all has gone dark, and let the ones who will never see me, keep warm in their jumpers at night, when the moon has turned her whitest cycle in the reddest sky, for the very last time.

Dungeness 2

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I couldn't quite believe it when I stumbled across the picture on the internet last night. 'Lighthouse For sale'. And there it was, the Old Lighthouse of Dungeness, for sale for the meagre price of £150,000. Dammit, if it hadn't been snapped up, and 'this property is no longer available' printed across its peak.

This is the same lighthouse I climbed on Sunday with B. We stood in the gale force winds at the very top, looking out over the bleak landscape and mused with him about how it would be to own such a magnificent beast of a place.

"You could throw some great parties here" he considered.

The only kind of parties I could imagine B throwing were ones he could immediately depart from, even if he were the owner of such a cool pad. No, he would be slinking off as the champagne corks popped, up to the very top, alone, watching out to sea or maybe spotting passing gulls in the darkness with his binoculars, pointing out star constellations.



I've wanted to be a lighthouse keeper ever since I can remember. Preferably somewhere off the coast of Scotland or Wales, wild and rugged, only reachable by a wobbly, dangerous rope bridge. I imagined the copious amounts of tea I would drink, alone and startled awake through to dawn. I imagined sailors I would save and the shipwrecks I would salvage from days gone by, pieces washed up on the shore. I imagined the joy of absolute solitude, and the beam of light that I would direct all around the stretch of coast, keeping all sea farers safe for another night.

Another fantasy went like this. One night whilst rambling out on my own, I would stumble across a lighthouse via the dangerous wobbly rope bridge. I'd pull at the clunky door and find to my surprise and delight that it opened. I'd then climb the tower of steps up to the top and find the Old Lighthouse Keeper sitting there. We'd sit together through the night, and he'd regale me with exciting tales of sea and shore. Occasionally he'd get too drunk (for he like a tipple), and I'd be forced to take over, hence saving numerous sailors from certain death had I not been there.

There is something mad about lighthouses, something deranged. And something so beautiful, I can only compare it to the cracked glacier or the uncrossed desert. Yet it's man made, the last outpost of humanity in an inhuman natural world. The Lighthouse Keeper is the last person to stand between this world and that.

I heard recently that before lighthouses became automatic, they employed three men at a time to work in them. Apparently, at first they were manned only by two men, but in one occasion a Keeper died up there (or was murdered by the other Keeper) and so the other was left to man it alone. Since there was no communication with the outside world for months at a time, he sat, alone, and slowly went insane. So apparently they changed it so that lighthouses had three men at a time, just in case one man dies or loses his mind.

So when B and I found the 'new' working lighthouse at Dungeness at nearly midnight on Saturday evening, that stands only a few hundred metres from the old disused one, we were excited. A beautiful thing. Its beauty is a perfect balance of masculine and feminine, towering upwards in spirals, a curved thing of wonder yet tall and erect, reaching high and proud upwards in the sky. I wanted to break in.

We were both convinced that if we did indeed hop over the fence, pull the door, find that it had been mistakenly left open, that what we would find when we reached the top would be my very own flat, supernaturally transported from Hove through time and space to Dungeness. For there appeared to be a curtain in each of the lighthouse windows that was coloured Brighton Rock pink, and behind that, a wall of duck egg blue, both colours just like I have in my living room. I imagined tiny white polka dots on the curtains and an ageing Keeper in a smoking jacket and pipe up there, listening to Parisien cafe music and doing the Times crossword. He would smile as we stumbled in and offer us Port.

But we didn't break in, instead crossing the heavy shingle to the shoreline, where in the wind and darkness, the waves looked huge and ghostly. They looked as though they were moving backwards rather than towards the shore. Strange and chilling.