The chill early morning is blowing a natural mystical gale, cutting through the car park off Southwick Square. I am sitting with the Girl in Black – my daughter, flesh, and blood – discussing why the car radio is only transmitting lullaby classical music and flashing up symbols and digital nonsense on the LED screen.
She has a date with a friend at Hove Lagoon, I have a date with the familiar, primeval enemy – that old devil, psychosis.
Later in the afternoon, I am striding in the nomadic, anarchic wind, along the only pedestrianised street in Shoreham-by-Sea.
And it’s an ill wind, bent only on destruction, carnage, and damage. The French style cafés are all boarded-up, stacked chairs and tables abandoned inside the darkened windows, doors littered with notes of staff shortages.
There is an apocalyptic feel, and I have my eyes peeled for the four zombie horsemen off the ‘Red Dead’ arcade game.
Stumbling in the wind, I drift ghostlike past St Mary’s church, and spare a fleeting thought for the long-departed posse and graveyard crew. Bowling into a lonely café opposite, I pull up a small round wooden table, and quiz the menu. It had been brewing all day, but in this moment the ancient dark mists and shadows of yesteryear rolled into this innocent café.
Paranoia engulfs my person, pours over the table, floods my airwaves, and chokes my every thought. The banter between the Cook, the Waiter and the Shelf Stacker is growing darker by the minute.
As my flat white begins to taste like Satan’s pecker, the conversations become more lecherous, stirred up with bitter depravity, and twisting into dark corners of perversion territories. It’s really happening – that old devil, psychosis.
Outside now, I spy a ‘Welcome Back’ shop sign, swinging eerily in the wind. And through sheer bleeding gut instinct, I know the forces of darkness have returned for my soul. Again.
The long walk home is full of worrisome hallucinations of bending pavements, dark passageways of the mind, and deathly shivers up the spinal cord. Stomping fast, with grimace and low reserves of guile, I have been transported to the shadow lands.
I see my enemy in the distance. It’s the Blackheart man. He watches me walking fast over the gilded wooden splinters. He is waiting, a simmering evil. He is whispering dark, salacious peals of hate, fear, and paranoia.
Back home, the Blackheart man is busy crushing my life and everything I own, like Wreck-it-Ralph throwing out his toys on the arcade game. Family, friends, hopes, dreams, hearts, minds, and souls. And today, it is my soul is he craves most. I bunker down, crying out for help, crying for Asylum – but all the state authorities serve up, like grim gruel in Oliver Twist, to my tortured soul, is the suggestion of a nice cup of tea and a walk.
Twenty-odd hours later, as I write this, the storms have passed, clouds curtain raised for the sun who’s got his hat on, and an armistice called on another day in the Trenches.
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