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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.

today, it was waiting for me when I roused back to life. It followed me around on my masked messages. My usual vistas all swathed in murk. The market town with the uni grafted on but hidden behind walls. The shabby shop-fronted high streets and clipped grass parks, the ring road tarmac and low hills beyond Port Meadow. So thick this morning it was pressing up to the window glass.

and the woods open their reaches. There are still bright days, days to wander and snap, days before the gloom presses in.

for November, waking me in the small hours in the dormer box we grafted atop our semi. Whistles, snaps and thuds wobble the steel frames of the windows and a neighbour’s watering can tumbles and tolls about the lawn. The winter crush is coming, venting out the last warm air for the sting of the morning cold when I pad down to feed the cat and make first coffee. The country is locking down again and the goose ain’t getting fat. Will be a pang to see the new bookstore close its doors, I’m no devotee of the company but they deserved a better shot at making it work. And the library too, though the visits are grim enough already, thinned shelves and a plastic crate for returns, a three day quarantine before they scan them in. How many months will it last, hard to trust the dates we’re given. But here’s change, working around us. Some find opportunity in the closings, firewood from a felled tree, while others look on in wonder.

on my blockwalk tree, down at the Cherwell landing. Two men drag a canoe from the flood. The cars whine from the ring road bridge as I pad along the muddy track, in and out of the embankment copse. There’s no glamour here, no glitz, only a few twitchy squirrels and the low, black-smoke clouds rushing in from Kidlington way. And the light on the Cherwell tree.