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is taking your shape, phase two having a good time, phase three starting a family. Phase four is where I am now, trying to hang on and rally, tattered but still standing, fretting still about the Library of the Dead and the next thing, always the next thing. Everyone mixes their phases around, skips some, has their own rare ones, wastes, profits and might even wise up from one. Phase five takes you to 75. And this is all assuming you’re lucky and the cosmic rays and terrifying acts of chance don’t knock you down at any step along the way. 75 to 90 is tricky, though thanks to the miracles of medical science it’s getting better, all the time, though it might not feel like it when you’re there doing the review. Six phases. Best case. And I’m tumbling through the fourth.

my teachers said ceramic engine blocks would transform auto design and make switching devices like tap valves last for decades. They said I’d have to adjust to the Age of Leisure before I hit thirty. They said lots of things. But foregone conclusions reef on unanticipated elements. My bib tap started juddering and spurting last week, the ceramic valve was failing. The maker sent me a new one and I fitted it. In the Leisure Age some robot would have done it for me but the robots are a long way off and I have a spanner and screwdriver. I autopsied the old valve and it looked to me that the base ring had come loose – metal fatigue? 7000 openings at a guess. My car’s just cleared 150.000 miles. How long do things last? Banks said he was unlucky, got hit by a rogue cosmic ray that started the cell mutation that killed him with inoperable cancer. It’s Lucretius and the falling atoms, there might be a ray zipping across the black gap of space right now that’s on course to pass through me and flip the cells into anarchy. Sentience is just along for the ride.

peering at the pixellated screen. Not shadows on the cave wall, more staring at clouds and not seeing the dust particles. Too much to process. An immense, depthless blizzard of data. Too much detail to withstand, we find ways to paint it simple. But it peeps out through the cracks of the paperboard masks we fix in place. Even this key baffles me. The original is lost, the replacement has a collar that’s too close to the turn so it sticks in the lock. I grind it away with my files. With no collar it slips through the casing so I clad it in tape. What an ungainly, hapless tool I’ve crafted. And already with its history, stretching back from the turner in Kidlington to the van from the depot, the metalworks, the smelt or vice, the casual weld, the lazy finishing, the foundry, the boat across the ocean. What before that? Dug out of the Earth somewhere, chipped and hacked, then the unimaginably long sleep before it swirled and pressed and coalesced out of the chaos gap. And all the human interactions, all the grazed and burned skin, the packing and passing, the cares and work loathings, the gauging and positioning on its journey to my jeans pocket for six pounds fifty. Six fifty I could have spent on a paperback. And now worked into words with their own rough edges.

are never far away in my thoughts. I rode out to the edge of the city, where the factory line stops and the fields and lanes start. The break is sudden. I was in the country – as wild as the English country gets – and riding through a village of brick and flint houses, a green, the memorial to those lost in the wars. Something clicked. Dead friends tapped me on the shoulder. I’m as close to them now as I was the day they left. Only some of the background changes, and the wear and tear of the miles and the years.

the paths aren’t busy. City or field there’s plenty of room to stamp about. I cross a field in this corner of the Chilterns and my toe taps a horseshoe, buried for a lifetime, ruby red with rust. Moments ago I was sitting under the trees in the wood behind me, nibbling on a slice of cheese. Moments to go and I’ll be in the Swan garden, supping my first pub ale in a year or more. But here I am under the dazzling sun, feet in the earth, turning the iron relic over in my fingers. Do I want to come out here, to a hideaway in the sticks and learn these paths and byways? Is that something to aim for in life? Either way I can always visit. I leave the iron on a footpath post to spare the detectorists and pace on for the pub.

on the border with Ukraine and I wonder if it’s snowing there. It’s hailing hard here, a ten-second whiteout with polystyrene balls filling up the guttering, mauling my nascent crabtree blossoms. I could run down to the gravel front yard and cover them with a dustsheet to protect the buds, it’s more than I can do about the tanks. Would that just be crazy, would the neighbours stare out from their casements thinking. who is this loon? But the hail thins and stops in a moment and I don’t break away from reading about the horrors and iniquities in the news. I feel obliged to know about them, some faded sense of duty as a member of the human race but maybe I should concentrate my efforts on the crabtrees and the five kilometer region of influence around my house, my local? And then I reason that I should apply the same care and curiosity to anywhere I go, no matter how far I range, local is wherever I am. I’m reading about a Russian now, Oleg in Cancer Ward freed from the clinic and gazing at the apricot tree blossom. He’s fictive, from fifty years back or more and the writer’s seen a different slice of world and life than I have, ever will. But the wonder still rings true and familiar when he stares at the blossoms. And I can imagine him running downstairs to cover his crabtrees in a hail storm. We’re all laced together by invisible threads we thinking things, over cracked continents and down the fluttering centuries.

wheeled and kept time over the Kelmscott plain. I watched the blur of the props on their anti-clockwise loop, lying on the marina grass. We’d walked half a mile from the village and the boatman’s hut was the only building in sight, with birds I haven’t heard all winter in the petalled trees. That boozer we left behind had an inviting look, all warm stone and shade but still locked up for another week. I’ll wander back for lunch when the bolts are pulled free and then tramp the five mile loop along the jungle-green chug of the Thames. My bones have clicked back into place and I want to walk the lanes again. What else to crave but bridges to cross, wanderings and wonderings?

in my garden. I know I’m lucky to have it. When the blossom bursts – Ezra’s white faces – I get up close to inhale its perfume. The scent is too heady on first opening but if fades with the days. I stop to inhale it on my march between the house and shed, sanding and painting, hammering and fixing. Driving to the tarmac field of the supermarket this morning I was thinking of it, flashing under the streetlamps, this aroma to drive the bees crazy and freeze hacks in their tracks, nostrils twitching. It came through as a gentle memory under the feedback shriek of my daily discord – fretting over the coolant level, the broken window switch, the intermittent engine warning light – DI cassette my best guess – the panic news drone from the radio, the shell-smashed bank account, frayed duds, all the wrong turns and wasted hours. The scent of the cherry and the prospect of the afternoon spent tapping at the keys and getting lost in the sentences were a balm to all.

for the plague era and a grin on my face. My jab’s a-coming. Until then I’ve got C Jam Blues to bring a surge of memories of a date in Montmartre, going out for coffee to a rain-lashed corner place and the barman playing a tape of Peterson loping about the keys. Memory fragments unreliable but still precious. I’ve got Chris Foss and his spacescape diversions, with Schenker’s lead breaks echoing around the cargo halls. I’ve got 81 pages of The Steppe to read and each one as close to perfect even in translation. There was a time long ago I could pick my way through the Russian but I’m too impatient now. I’ve got Carver, his pupil and himself a voice to reference back to it. And I’ve got my kin safe in the house, our cat curled up and snoozing. This Earth tumbles through the nothing, dragging its atmosphere and oceans with all its horde of snorting, twitching life and me kicking back in a chair with my scribblings, sounds and reveries. Interludes of happiness, impossible to deny.

they’ve been locked up for much of the last year. Many won’t survive, like this uni stalwart that reeked of stale ale on my last visit. The college want to convert. I was never a fan but it was a blaring and bright-lit marker on the cut through from the parks, a welcome corner of din in a too-quiet town. There are only a few other ghosts like me out on the frosty boulevard at 8am, shuffling by the dead pubs, reminiscing. There’s no morning buzz, no commute theatre, everything is pending. But the blossoms are out on the apple trees.