as the trees, I’ve spent years mapping them in my head. But water maps are always changing shape. This last week I came down with a malady so brutal it was hard to stand, kept me three days on the slab. No warning, no idea where it came from, rougher and longer-lasting in its severity than any other flu or viral attack I’ve known. From day four I could stagger about and eat toast but now a week later I still feel it, the aftermath, far from well. Always back to Darwin, in constant struggle, other organisms fighting for their chance in the atom weave. I was just unlucky. And if that’s not the case, if it isn’t all a vast chain of random passings, encounters, chemical fusings that ended in this instance with me ambushed by a virus and fever-wracked…but by some design? That would be even more beguiling. And like Ahab, I’d want answers and accountability, some explanation and redress for my lost week. For though my wound is so slight in comparison there’s no more precious commodity than time. But who to ask? If only I could speak with the birds under the bridge near Kennington, decipher their tweets, I feel they’d have the answers.

a tale of the waterpaths and trails around this peninsular town, a race around the Plain. I find myself trying to think with my characters, wondering how they’d see and say things. And I make choices each time I ride out by the river and along the canal, take turns and tracks as though I’m out on the same errands and missions I’ve set them on in my study-drawn pages. If a book’s to be any good it has to breathe life into something that wasn’t already there. I must cast their lives in words and feel them flow back to craft my own.

to the sea and the moor. Tried to find the launching spot for Donald Crowhurst’s doomed voyage from Teignmouth, asked around, nobody really knew. Tramping through the back streets over concrete jetties along the estuary, passing crumbling pubs and curio shops. Conscious how those events and mavericks that still flare in my imagination have become arcane pursuits.

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.