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?
by the channel in Dalyan, lounging on the deck with Der Steppenwolf. Much of it reads as teenage froth after The Magic Mountain – that book will throw a long shadow – but it’s got a few sections where he stares deeper into the heart of the wolfman. It’s not the right tempo with the heat and the boats chugging by, the carvings in the cliff, the sips of Turkish coffee. I should have stayed longer, brought other books, should have spent a week by the lake channel to the sea. But we were out to Istanbul after two days, to a thin terrace between the crumbling chimneys and the gulls, the air-con boxes and pipes, the roof slope disarray and bottles of Efes Pilsner Reserve, salted almonds in white bowls and cut views of the blue waterways. I should have stayed longer in that place too, with the street cats. Always rushing on, no time for my terrible drawing, no time for strategy.
after completing another half-billion-mile bolt around the great lamp. They don’t appear much changed with all that distance under their belts except the red of their petals is brighter, a satin carmine. The cool weather has shifted their chemistry. It plays with mine too, the cold rain wakes me in the 4am shadows, a sigh along the windows. I could do with a long dry season, the sky peeled back and cast high as we set out on the next circuit.
and love the street patter and the solo character voice. But if you record it and listen back the dialogue can come over as jarring, lifeless and corny, to my ears anyway. The way we read and process written speech is different to how we react to the spoken word. When you write a line you imagine it being spoken, but again when you hear it you might find yourself snapped out of the scene, that fingerclick of the uncanny you get from seeing youself caught unwarned in a shop window or photograph, fixed mid-step, mid-sentence. The writer’s speech comes from somewhere else in the process of reading and understanding, writers aren’t actors and the reader grants each character their own voice. I’ve been mulling on this as a readthrough looms for my short bull-child play. The spoken words won’t be mine any longer. They’re not really yours the second they’re read by another, they’re out there making impressions – or not – in ways you never intended or imagined. If you can pass on some part of the meaning you wanted to craft into a text then you’ve shared something. But spoken words at a readthrough are more transitory than any text, they’ll be live tremors in the air gone in a second and never sound the same if spoken again. There’s rarity in that.
is Asterios, calling up from the tunnels. He’s been on my mind a lot this last year and longer, brooding on Daedalus, bull-worshipping Minos and what lies beneath Melville’s pasteboard mask natural forms. I’m not sure I’ll ever settle on how I feel about the Minotaur but I suppose what he represents most strongly to me is that desire to send out runners and riders into the Universe and see whether the Universe wants to answer, wants to engage. He’s awake and he wants an answer. But the days are spinning their threads towards Asterios, he just can’t see the players and plots from the gloom of his Labyrinth. I suspect it’s much the same for the rest of us.
