is under lock and key and grizzled vets like myself are banned from the end stools, turning the pages over a pint of porter. Virtual drinks don’t have the visceral tick and bustle of the long-windowed room, the fug and glimmer, the wood tabletop with its scuffs and beer drops, the tapster persona to ponder. These pixel parleys are flat and false and the tech never works as well as it should. And there’s no shared experience, just some slither of a foreign kitchen or second bedroom over the shoulder. It’s a lonely business, wondering how you come over in the low-res LED flicker, serving only to remind me how much I miss those infrequent tramps to my local.
the last hours done? All the time I’ve squandered when I should have been working to win entry to The Library of the Dead, never knowing how deep lies the pool. It might be time’s up already, but I don’t feel that way. We’re all troubled like Katya is in A Dreary Story, I imagine, in the manner of our character, whether or not we’re a negative phenomenom. All thinking things must have doubts, an awareness of their mistakes and misses. It’s a journey back on ourselves, this time of standing off from other humans, closed borders and grounded planes, all but housemates shunned. I can only hope for purpose glimpsed again, a path emerging through the gorse before the haar blows in.
it’s been with me my whole life. I know it from the overcast Yorkshire gloom, dripping woods, blackwater streams and the bone-jolting judder of the rugby field. I know it from the scrub trees and bushes of howling motorway service stations and industrial parks, interviews with unsmiling men for jobs I didn’t want, the sweet relief of not getting them and another turn of the cards. I know it from Dear John ice-cold park walks, supermarket parking lots, dreary terrace gardens and the weeds growing out of locked up Grosvenor Square town houses. It’s the crayon green of public space Blighty, overgrown railway track sidings and roundabout reservations, plastic bags snagged in the branches. And I’ve ventured about in other lands and seen other greens, sunlit and balmy, but this is the one I always come back to. I didn’t choose it, I don’t like it or dislike it, but it dogs me. There’s no swerving my England green.
and the cat’s been beheading the tulips. I rescue them for the vase and think of O’Keeffe colours, the drive up the rutted track to the writer’s cottage, the enormous sky and the red chile sauce over a wrap of fries, Dave the barman acting Chekhov, lazy talk of the abstract greats and distant LA. I remember drinking beer with a guy, perhaps he was the age I am now, and saying we were heading out in the morning. I joked he should come along for the ride and he shrugged, said there was a time he’d drop everything, go anywhere just to be moving. But now he just wanted to sit on the porch and drink beer. I’m not there yet, there are places and things I still want to touch and see. I’ve miles yet to go, when the curtain lifts.
at four, no traffic hum from the ring road, no gurgling drunks taxi-rolling home. And thousands of lonesome lockdown insomniacs like myself following the phrases. I try to steal back into sleep before the sun comes around, sleep a thick-walled sanctuary from care and the sameness of the waking hours. My dreams are all adventures. When the glare glows too bright I make coffee and set out into the quiet roads for my dash to the shops. And then I work my chores and try to tap a few lines. I read Chekhov for clues on exile, Freud and Hoffmann to chart the uncanny alley we wander now.
as the plague lingers. I worry less when I’m moving the dirt, wondering how to fix the front yard so the neighbours don’t let out a sigh as they walk by. Shovel labour blunts the dread. And there’s a lot of it about.
are sacrosant in the lockdown era. War stopped in the desert for the Germans to grind beans and the Brits to boil up tea. So I break for my joe three times a day, drop all chores, the long-neglected DIY and writing pitches to boarded-up publishing houses.
getting through, they’re tiny malevolent meteorites against the motes of dust big as planets. My mask is for sanding, stripping down the construction timber I got for a tenner from the recycling shop. I’m shelving the study, making way for a second desk. The house is our ice station now, last fortress against the blizzard biting. I gaze out, wondering when the all-clear will sound. It could be Sep before the schools go back, could be later. I feel shoved online more than ever, yearn for the physical world. But the physical world is hostile, confinement means we must travel in the mind for a while. I’ve laid in my stores. I have millions of pages stockpiled, The Anatomy of Melancholy and The Golden Bough can take opening bat.
slopes close the door these days, with plague pressing at the city walls and no clear route ahead. A phoney war hiatus, with old friends elbow-bumping in the bars. But people are trying things, the cranes still go up. I make my pitches and send out notes, fledgling steps as I imagine a writing agency, my own Universal Exports of scribes for hire. All the answers and pathways are there to be crafted in the study.
am I, only watcher and sometime wanderer. I’ve never been much good at kicking the doors open, though I learned long ago that the cavalry is delayed, indefinitely. Living is waiting, or action, the world being under no obligation to lay out its ways and wares before you. The world only keeps rolling away from you, going about its business streaking through nothingness. Things come of things tried, new in shape and unexpected. And you have to try ten things to chance that one will spark the kindling and send out a first, hesitant flame to light your snow hole. Of all the accounts I’ve read of soldiers waiting alone along a winter line – and I’ve read a few – most end with the ragged defender coming to understand that the officer won’t be along after all, that he’s going to freeze solid long before dawn and that’s only if a snake-silent raiding party doesn’t reach him first. Then he moves, seeking out the Turbin’s fuggy rooms and the sharp crackle in his toes as life springs back into them before the hissing samovar. Or flagging down a Huey. Pelting along a communication trench to the artillery station. Swimming out to a MTB, the last ship off the beach. And if he doesn’t move…well, those are the short, hard stories that go unheard and uncelebrated. The sun finds a figure quiet and still, no part left to play in the planetary marble roll. Would anyone read a book of tales where the hero decided to wait, no action, no bold deed? I guess you could argue that’s bold too in its way. But it’s not Beowulf, is it? He heard talk of a monster, climbed into his ship and set sail to meet it. Always eager. You don’t see Nelson waiting at anchor, holding back the fleet. We have more modest choices in our day to day, but it’s still wait or do, strive or sofa. It’s a restless journey a life of trying, and only when you stretch out your old bones by the great hall hearth can you sift and weigh the memories. Until then you keep moving, riding your unlucky tram to never-seen corners and crossways. Roll on with your smile reflected in the window glass.
