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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.

and cleaned the contacts. Millions of charges through the metal gates have left their mark, surges of electricity to the window regulator, seventeen years of it. And then one day the accumulated muck, the summer dust, spilled drinks, cement grains from runs to the dump and sandwich shreds from rained-off picnics, they finally coat the surfaces to the point where the switch won’t fire. I could have saved it, I figured out its workings. But the front rocker plastic was too fatigued, it crumbled away under another prober’s thumb. I laid out the ruin on the baize, the spring fragments that had burst out in one last spasm, the tiny smashed citadel of the plastic housing. All the parts and pieces of this world, all the intricacy. Plastix, meknix, electrix.

for the fleece and not dream of being a passenger on the Argo? To be in the company of Herakles. These last stormy nights I’ve dreamed of being among the chosen. But I’m a bookworm imposter and in my visions I hide from the breath-stealing wind under the rowing seats, arranging draping bits of sail to make a tight tent so I won’t be noticed by the heroes. No spray or rain disturbs me. And I have a bearskin or ram fleece of my own, stuffed in my dreamer’s backpack. I spread it across the Athena-sawn boards, stretch out and wrap my cloak about me. I can hear the sons of Boreas leading the boasts as the wine goes round at the prow, hear Orpheus trying to lull the storm with his song, hear the soft, barefoot step of the barbarian princess, restless and wide-eyed at the stern, trying to catch a scent of her lost homeland on the warm night air.

and do my repairs, not free to wander far in the new lockdown. It feels stricter this time, gone is the old bonhomie. We’re not out hand-clapping the carers this time. And like some torn-trousered castaway etching away his weeks in lines on the cave wall I marvel at how resources can keep shrinking and we still get by. The house has stood us well but shows the strain. Kettles blow, panels crack, sofas fray. The front door lock snapped on me one morning as I stepped out for the daily food run. I opened the sarcophagus casing, prodded at the cam wheel that turns the deadbolt and a piece of the returning spring dropped out. There aren’t many brown-coated hardware hold-outs left these days and even fewer in the plague. But I called a shop I knew. We don’t keep springs for nightlatches, he said, they never break. How long’s it been on the door? I turned the casing over in my paw. Could be thirty years, I told him. Could be back to the eighties. That’s a lot of turns. But he knew a guy on the Cowley Road, he fixed me up with a new spring. I’m still limping a bit from the summer bike crash. As I paced back from the shop to the car I felt it twinge, thought of the crude reveal of the lock with its case plate pulled away. All those turns. I decided to shed some kilos to help the healing along. Locks and knees, all mechanisms need tending.

cutting the bridges, turning the plain under the carriageway embankment silver and flat. The disease lingers and probes like the fingers of the flood as we wait to be jabbed. I read Cancer Ward and dream of mountains and the black-wooded taiga, feeling time has stretched and thinned, my minutes and days dragged out to months under plague confinement. The gulags seem a thousand years ago but the shacks and roadways still scar the snow. My last drive out to the country feels a decade back. I must constantly remind myself of time’s calendar.

the not-knowing, makes me think of all the false surfaces, Ahab’s paper masks to punch through. You can only know what’s true when you see it, breathe it for yourself. Stumbling in the fog. And I worry I’m already a ghost, listening to music from the 70s, music I grew up with, reading ancient books and staring at ancient paintings, feet stuck in the quick-fix concrete of the past. The five-mile deep immensity of the ocean past. Staggering through the present.

for gazing. Better than the eau-de-vie gleam of gold. When the Earth tilts back to sun I’ll return to this boatyard and punt my way upriver, along the bursting green banks to the pool close to where I live.