quicker than I pile my words. With the fiction I’m so slow it hurts to check the daily count, but you have to give the hours to daydreaming to conjure up a life imagined. And there’s a wee drop of the sublime when the sentences fall right. I assemble my chunk, a meteor of killer lines, soon to watch it fizzle, flare and cook as it hits the in-tray atmosphere. I craft my strategy, still trying to shunt forward from observe to orient in my OODA loop.
we only get glimpses of the set and most are blurred or distorted. It’s the same with stories and film, only seen frame by frame. We fill in the gaps to reach our truths. I’ve been in this town more than ten years and there are so many roads I’ve never been down, but I think I know the town. I head out on the cruiser, adding notes to my mental streetscape map. Soon it will be too cold for idle bike rides, faces go a-grimace, fingers pinch on the grips and instead of enlarging my town map I’ll wonder only of hearth and home.
as the footie season starts up. A burst of colour around the green slab of the garden, trying to save the butterflies from the leaping cat. The noir takes shape, but too slowly. I’ll send the first ten or fifteen thousand in when I get to the villain, dangling a silver hook in the watery vastness again. Dark loomings keep me wide-eyed through the lonely hours, another lockdown, rumblings in the West, hard times and confusion as we go into the stark, brittle months. I run my DIY errands around the discount sheds, the sky looks down unruffled, bemused by my worries.
to blow the dust from my eyes. I try to write and patch the ship to keep it afloat but Sanin’s shapeless monsters are stirring on the sea bed. Work in the Arts has taken a battering, our leaders talk of fantastic schemes to keep the virus at bay – though we all know they’ll come to nothing – and we bicker and snipe in our dealings on the international stage. I’ve never known a world crisis like this, never needed to pull something out of the bag more than now with my own work and the path I’ve taken. Words, don’t fail me now.
at 4:48, I remember it from her last play, the darkest time for her, bang in the middle of the graveyard shift. The small hours. But that’s pushing five, you’re only an hour from six and normal life for a lot of people, buses and postmen and happy bakers setting out their shelves. I can easily watch the light coming for an hour, plan out the day to come, canter around in the past. Earlier is worse for me. I’d go for 3:05 as optimum grimness, the first flash from the phone, eyes open and fully awake. Too soon for six and first coffee. Too late to be up watching movies or flicking through Bukowski’s laments. That’s when you sink down into the mattress, heavy as a submarine settling in some hadal pit, too deep to ever swim up from. Too late to turn the lights on for a spell. Too early to try not to get back to sleep, though sleep feels like some impossible mystery, not for the likes of me. Who has the keys to sleep? Five-mile walks help. I was down in Cold Ash to fix the car, had to kill two hours, found a quiet lane to wander. And swam in sleep ’til 8.
with the Cherwell sluggish and muddy only a few hundred yards from my front door. The Thames curves just a mile to the west, almost wide enough to swallow a thrown stone there but narrowing as it approaches the sandstone walls of the centre. And cut between the rivers is the canal, straight and willow-shaded by Jericho to where it meets the Thames at Sheepwash Channel. Old hands save journey time by learning the bike trails along the canal and the waterpaths, or take to kayaks and coracles and go bobbing along the flood. Older hands still have tales of ice blocks and tumbling in on five-pint night rides, racers snagged on rudders, boats ablaze, killer swans, red-eyed derelicts with spiderweb face tattoos and festival folk wandering in from Aristotle Rec or the Meadow approaches. There’s a single gondola moored at Folly Bridge, it would be something to see it nosing out of the reeds and mist on my own lonely river stretch.
laying out to the west for a week, reading Conrad and scanning the open horizon to Newfoundland. Swabbed at the airport then drive to the shore, remembered sights and feelings tumbling from the arrival-overturned vault as we surge down the lanes. I feel the tug of my own formed past when I come to this island, the experiences have been funnelled, same pink granite farmhouse where I stay, same bays and woodways, same fare of drinks and diet. It gets harder to slip your past as the sea chest you lug about grows heavier, too easy to daydream in review, looking for clues. And the virus shutdown has amplified my sense of time-paralysis, an end-of-the-tracks feeling. The past snares you in cobweb memories, you have to hack through them to cling onto the present.
keep only a few lines. I get bored of riffing, ranting, setting the scene, it gets chopped as I read through. I’m not sure you have to do that, give more than a sentence or two on the room, the face or life before. I’m drawn to the fat-trimmers, exposition and backstory all sliced, digressions guillotined. These posts are my meanderings, the story I’m trying to write is a surgical strike, sudden and jarring as a shout in the night. In, out, gone before the reader can look over their shoulder and shudder. I walk the riverways trying to lay it out in my thoughts, most of it still just out of reach, hidden behind the curtains of willows, rushes and dual-carriageway embankments. Spooked by it. My as yet unformed familiar, always at the edge of the scene.
and I have to air the padlock innards to get into the shed. I enjoy the mechanics of the task, the assemblage of tools I’ve known since I was a kid, the balance of springs and catches in their lattice of forces, turn this to make that happen. The code of the universe laid bare. If only I could direct my days and months like that, pull the right levers to arrive at my envisagements. But my levers are snapped or slipped their cables it seems, there’s little progress to mark for me other than growing older. Even my pipedreams have lost their piquancy. I’ve tried nine things all shot down in flames – springs and catches in words and stories – time to hammer out the tenth.
this last week or two, the words are peeping out. I have to limp to the machine each morning – smashed my knee into a post dark-riding over the meadow – but I’m free to wander over the keys. And I never hear the exiled blower.
