but I’ve seen an imbalance of small city gloom lately and not enough other-sights wandering. Winter is too long-lingering. The collapse of ‘the West’ I observe in my squandered hours of news-gazing doesn’t lift my spirits. Dino Buzzati helps a little, I’m away with him for a chapter a day, staring into the mist where the steppe falls away between mountains. I don’t take more than that, it’s a high-proof read. And while I mull on the paragraphs I wait for glimpses of the outer dome and warmer air.

sealed and ready on the steel, primed for a toast to Burns. Orcadia beckons. If I make it to Edinburgh this year I’ll push northwards. I want to see the light up there, the green, treeless mounds breaking the sea. Worlds away and only a few hundred miles from my walled, Headington stone city.

I have to lift my ride over the flood-warning gates, watch for root snags and ice in the dirt that could chute me into the green water. January bites bleak and hard and when Night walks out I hide away with Chekhov and Sontag. She writes of ways of seeing, the mind as a theatre space with its own pictures, sounds and pasteboard scenery. The last thing I really enjoyed was staging my Minos hour, I want another. That moment as the words are said is special, alive and unrepeatable. I must chisel away at the January frost and make things happen.

they offer only a slanted, restricted sense of what it means to see, feel and tramp through this world. But they might be the best tools we have for sharing sightings and thoughts and it’s easier to carry a notebook than lug a block of marble to sculpt or bring troops of dancers to choreograph – should you hope to convey message or feeling to another mind. Coming over the college bridge and down the path we startled three deer and watched them break over flooded fields. I used to deride dance but now I wonder if movement and dance are purer forms of expression than any words I muster, if I’d rather watch a dancer than read from a page. All testimony is unreliable. I begin to prize beauty over pragmatism.

and left behind his lucky cricket ball. He’s off the island now, I don’t know when I’ll see him next so I keep it safe atop a cabinet, pending. His life is moving fast with many changes, mine feels more local and well-rehearsed than ever but the days flicker by. I ride out into the waterways, begin some writing, aim for a draft for the New Year. I’m in London, Cam and Bristol, I walk out into the flooded valleys when I can. Words still come but I wear my dents and damages.

to get back to where I was, but the water sluices at the path and conceals the true way. I ride through, still bold enough to try it but in my nervy scanning for hazards along the channel I forget to throw my feet up as I did as a kid. One sock feels the river cold. I ride on, a little gleeful, dread not stopping me yet. And the water lays swagger over the banks all the way to Osney.

they’re building houses. Luxury semis and a few roadside blocks of flats to meet the planning regs. A mile on they’ve got consent for more than a thousand yellow-brick homes, filling the land gaps between the dual carriageway and the greenbelt hills. The town must swell with people but the roads are all cracked and pitted, there’s no extra capacity for the materials of living. I hope the planners find the answers as I flash by on the bike, a flicker in the morning fog. Watching the changes.

takes train across the southern bloat of England, from Severn Sea to wind-cut Fens. I sit in the middle terminus, pondering strategems and escapes, next steps and the jobs I’ve been putting off all year, mindful of the new era and the struggle for self reliance. I ride out each day, feel the weather turning as we tilt from the sun. You have to be tough to push forward in this world, not let doubt enfeeble you, draw the snap from your limbs. You have to keep stepping out and stay cheery, life’s for living, as ever.

under the wheel of the sky. Dates, Spanakopita and Crémant on the ground rug and the farmer ambling over the field to nod hello in the glow time, still flecked with chewed up greenery from his evening strimming. I took more sleep than I expected when the dark came, S-curled in my sleeping bag on the wool mattress. Breakfast in a Stur bakery and then away, only hours in the county. One hundred miles from home but the land has changed, all lost valleys and cornfields and the block of the sea just over the hills. Each time down there I want to stay. And when I’m back I want to be away. We chase after the things we think will make us happy, in my dawn thoughts and my rare journeys. Home for a week and then away to the Malvern Hills, to British Camp, riding the train as it hums by Charlbury, Kingham, on to Evesham. Wheels and sky always turning.

carry me out to the distant shores of the town, I’m riding seven or eight miles a day now. It’s good for the little chunk of planet air I was polutting, good for my torso. Had to be done, I fear the slide to podgery and Type 2 and I want to swerve the ring road traffic, the town is clogging as they pack more three-beds and flats into the gaps between the carriageways and petrol stations, tarmac over the golf course and the farmers’ fields. It’s only going one way. Off the roads I find tracks and hedge gaps, hidden routes for bikes and walkers. This environment was all set out long before I came along, I’m living in an old design, the new design always nibbling away at it. I begin to crave the clear spot in the sun, the stone house on the headland and bees in the wild thyme but how will I ever give Albion and the threat of podgery the slip? What engine can I make to splutter and fire and beat a pulse again?