henrybrook.com

picking my way through the ruin of the Last of Us Part II. I wanted to know what happened to Joel and Ellie, but all the wonder’s gone, the phantom of life that made Ellie special. The developer talks of the audience experiencing the game rather than enjoying it, but I came away mourning my lost hours and the lost potential of the characters I knew from playing the first game. I picked up Factotum for some light relief, curled pages of another wanderer and his nickel beers and flophouse ravings but at least the old tramp has his dreams, a rheumy eye fixed on the stars. Then I drove over to a games shop and sold my copy of the disc, it felt good to move on.

at Broadway, the hill dotted with picnicking Brits. The lockdown is easing. The council ticket inspectors are back doing their rounds and shops begin to open. But there’s no sense the virus is beaten and the news media continue harrying the government for its many failings, how could they do otherwise. Clausewitz friction dogs our leaders, the mishaps, mistakes, false intelligence and false starts of any live campaign are at play with the response to the virus. The ventilators we didn’t even need procurement fiasco, how much breath and twitter space was wasted on that? The desperate chase for PPE that wasn’t fit to use when it finally arrived. Schools not opening because the government didn’t reckon on recruiting tens of thousands of new teachers in a few weeks, and doubling available class space, didn’t reckon on no good will from unions and councils and didn’t have wartime powers to push the policy through. National data comparisons will mean nothing if there are second waves and outbreaks. The present is all smoke and dust, we’ll only know the truth in retrospect and that will be argued over and reinterpreted and rediscovered according to passions and partisanship. The only truth you can be sure of is what you smell and touch and witness from an arm’s length away – you have to be in the room or on the field – and even then another witness to the same event will see things you didn’t see. But we need narratives that people can live with. Stories where most agree. It’s the human design to take the terrifying immensity and uncertainty of things out of our control or knowing and shrink them to simple parables, to a few words shared when we meet a friend, a nod of the head. We crave the new normal, something we can understand. But I begin to wonder, what’s coming next? Changes that used to take decades to filter through the markets now happen in days and nation states have shown they can reshape and replace long-held values overnight. All it takes is enough people to ask.

loitered at the edge of the crowd. I’d say there were between 500 and a thousand people there but there were more coming in as I pedalled away. A girl rolling fast on a bike with her BLM cardboard placard fixed tight in her teeth. I didn’t go into the press, I’ve never been at ease in a crowd, that’s an anonymity I never revel in, not in the concert hall or the football stands. I remember looking out from the stage when I used to play and being terrified of the crowd, a wall of outstretched limbs poking out of the dark. And my cousin dragging me to the Kop when I was thirteen, the roar swelling up in waves to make the terraces shake and the air tremble. I’ve always shunned the crowd. I saw no aggro at the demo, nobody jumped up with a lasso or a wrecking bar while I was there. There was no effort to keep people distanced, though there might have been for the sit-down protest before I arrived. “Want a mask, Boss?” asked one guy, but I declined. Arrivals passed me trying to spot the statue, asking friends to point it out. Why didn’t Oriel take it down years ago – well, those in power don’t like being told what to do, even when they know it’s the right thing to do. And OPD – Oxford Personality Disorder – is rife in the colleges, a detached arsiness that gets more toxic the longer you stay in the town. They should put him in the Ashmolean. I’m no Oxford booster but I had a shock as I rode away, there were others at the fringes, other watchers in exhausted, faded, slacker garb. Other riverpath-wandering gazers that know their French gangster movies, their Gregory Corso and Huncke, their graphic novels and Coltrane, their Rashomon and their Roerich. That’s why I’m here, of course, the city of lost causes, I can’t join the crowd but I fit right in. I biked up one of the side alleys, passed by someone who was supposed to come for dinner but it’s never worked out, surprised to see he was vaping. At the next quiet turn I come across the riot police sitting and kneeling in the lane, pulling on their black tumble suits at the open doors of their transits. It’s storm-humid and they’re sweating, joking as they tug at the kit. I ride by, under the Bridge of Sighs and out of sight. Up in Summertown, two miles from the statue, there’s a corona-masked girl standing on the road divider holding a BLM sign in the air, writing so small I can only read it when I’m five feet away from her. I think of her fashioning it back in her rooms. And all the others making their signs and their plans. All these unseen moments might change this world.

and the tv all week, like Zappa back in ’65. Not nearly enough has changed, has anything changed? Listening to Chuck D from 1986. How can it still be happening now, so brazen, so shameless. That policeman was born in the mid-70s, what culture is still at play that forged him? Been listening to Al Sharpton and who could claim he’s wrong when he says there’s a force that oppresses and holds non-white Americans down, that works against them at all turns, that never gives them an equal break, from cradle, to school, to work, to even being safe to walk the streets and live a life. And forces like it coil around this world. We can’t rely on our leaders, change is going to come from the people. Change is upon us now.

of the tick inside my RedSox cap. I remove and reseat the hat twice before I see it, a damselfly blue as the skies we’ve been having, blue as the eggs I cracked for my chilli smash this morning. I staked my claim on the day with that button-popping breakfast, set my plan. Down to the DIY sheds for timber and ironmongery then hang a gate I fashioned from an old fence panel. After lunch I’d retire to the keys and forge a thousand words of something new. Each word as fresh as a newly minted coin, to pinch from Hem, talking about a girl’s face at the door of his cafe, just come in from the rain. But I didn’t write a line. The day and the damsel got in the way.

in the time of corona, the medicos are clear. My canalside trampings burn a few cals but my chops intake has soared, a gorging and storing atavism to keep the dread at bay. Dreams are more vivid and questing, we earthlings sense the times are unhinged, gone fuzzy, and I find myself repeating my walks or shifted to some shadowland itinerancy, wandering about in a wagon, plodding along a cliff top. Any thought of shedding weight seems worlds away from this strait. But it’s the survival game, it’s what we do. Everyday, when the eyelids first flutter, we reinvent ourselves.

just a few shufflers, spook-eyed, how-this derelicts and an early runner, a slow-moving decorator in the saloon bar where we used to sup back in ancient days. A time when a roll of £300 would last me for weeks and all that mattered was the next rendezvous, the next open car door and show to play. All the while that crazy breath in the air that we were free, chasing after what’s got to come, no looking back on what’s been. I step quickly away from the beer hall.

Alone now in the streets of little brick houses. Here would be a fine place to hide away from the world, Riverman had said. They might not bother you here. You could lock the doors and work on your poems and yarns, prowl out to the Punter for evening drinks, sharing fantastic tales with them that chug up and down the canals. Hang a kayak in the back garden and foray out at dusk, exploring secret waterways. Crepuscular as a barge cat, stepping silent through the riverbank bushes. I feel sure I’ll find him here.

thinking on life under the malady. It presses in. With no vaccine I can’t see the politicos saying lockdown was all for nothing, so the perspex screens and nervous distancing will stay. The Oxford team are 80% confident, should know by June but I don’t hear from them on the radio or tv, only the holding-to-account journos and the harried, hopeless and hapless ministers in charge. I’d like more science but even there it’s weather forecasting, nothing’s certain. We can’t know what would have happened, what the other turn might have led to. With no vaccine we either hide away or try to live cautiously, always keeping an eye on ward capacity. But I nod thanks that we’ve been allowed to wander out with our cabin crew, to follow the curve in the water. Riverman was moored here one winter not long back. I heard he’s back in town for the corona caesura. And from tomorrow I can head out to more distant backwaters, I’ll go a-searching.

of cooling, to make my granite setts. Broken away from Africa and hewn in what we call Portugal. They’ll linger around my fruit trees as a stone border for a few more years, their journey’s so long my own passes in a heartbeat.

and reflecting on the guy in Taos, I wonder if his dunroamin’ days came on in stages. Already in the first moments of departure I begin to enjoy the prospect of the journey back more than the venture out, but that could be because so many of my journeys lack glamour or novelty. And I fret more as I age, about the humdrum perils of delays, checks and other hassles. But these things never used to cross my mind, just to be moving was desirable. I’m more protective and want control of my time now, though I’m a dismal housekeeper of the hours. Or it could be that I’m more conscious of the horde, that I – and no other – can make accurate inventory of minutes left. Disarmed by the not-knowing I pace and waste the gushing seconds. So the stages creep on and I barely notice them. What was unimaginable is slowly gained by this gentle creep, until all longing to see a new valley or cove is gone. I’ll resist that, put down a marker. I’ve still far to go, stomping in my reality boots – with a nod to Jack.