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but how bad, let me tell you how I got it. I was working on another continent, lonely as it gets and young, think I was nineteen, in a job I really struggled with. And I was homesick and pining. But I stuck it and every week I took home my slip. I was saving to buy a car and drive around and see the sights, coast to coast. And I did it for a few months and had about enough for a solid runner, a VW Rabbit I’d seen in a garage that was being prepped for sale. Then one night this spooked-looking guy knocked on the door of the apartment I was renting, he was a friend of my landlord. And this twitchy guy said he had debts, bad debts, and he’d heard I was a guitarist from the landlord and he wondered if I wanted to buy his guitar. He needed the money right then. And he fetched the case in and I played his guitar for maybe ten minutes and that was it, I was all in, I bought the guitar with every bit of my savings. So no road movie for me then, the guitar had other plans for me. I came home, joined a band and moved to London. And all those curves and blaring halls, meetings and driftings, all from the knock on my door. That’s what you get when you lay your money down.

woke me at three, cat jumping on my face. The wind blew the doors open downstairs and he had the run of the house. I carried him down in the dark, gave him some food, returned to the Morpheus slab. But the dreams didn’t come, I was packing too many cares and the wind was crashing around the flat roof over my pillowed head, lifting the zinc panels and quivering them like wobble boards in the hands of over-eager stage techs. And I know metal can snap. Metals let you down if you ask too much of them, whether gold, silver, brass or iron. Everything has its breaking point.

and a projection of authority, ever ready to stand by your words. If you were truly broken you wouldn’t write a word. And if the words aren’t worth anything why read them? Oh, and it has to be fresh, even ancient wisdom has to come over as fresh. Herodotus is fresh as a bell. Cicero is sitting at your elbow, whispering. Those are the three things you need, he tells me, if you want to write. And it doesn’t hurt to have something to say. At that he throws his head back and starts to hoot and gurgle, screwing his left eye tight in the laugh spasm and rolling the other wide and scary to the ceiling. He slaps his chest and stretches a paw to the chunk of glass on the worktop. I hear the rim chime as he pours and taps the bottle. I’ve been in colleges and among the cannibals, says Riverman. And found each in the other.

Stealing lines again, I tell him.

Borrow and make better, he answers, with a smile.

on the second floor, a single room just up in the troposphere. The wind starts prowling when you’re forty feet high, reclining at chimney pot altitude. It curls in around the roofline and finds whistle-runs, moaning and humming, a constant choir. The sound of motorbikes racing the ring road is my Gorky wolf cry. Night trains judder the Meadow-side track and the Brize Norton transport’s cloud-wanderings over the town add extra howls. But these restless purrings are a fine backdrop to my page-turning, strange and muted enough to go unnoticed if the text is worth its ink. I slip back into my green pool of light, free for a few hours of this city of walls, traders, grant grapsers and knowledge chasers, all its lost causes.

as they stroll by the info board, off for a baguette or a finger of java at Brew? There’s a record player by the window there, an arcane, first-spotted device for some sippers, I imagine. The paint-peeling board strikes me as some similar totem from the past, its local councillor missive, lost cat plea, windows cleaned cards, all inked and scrawled. Like the book, its old design must still work, and it’s a voice for the last hold-outs and mavericks that shun the screens. So there are moves too to stop the cash-only hipster outlets, lest it bars the bankless. I still gaze at the info boards. I still try to write and draw, when I get the chance. But the gulf between worlds grows wider.

but these mortice locks have been around for centuries. This one I’ve untombed might be 40 years or older, and sophisticated enough for me to flip the latch bolt and move it to another door. Energy stored and released for decades in a spring. I add my mark to the lever numbers and other trade codes. A process revealed, age pulls the curtain back on some things. In the last run of fiction I read I sensed what was at work, picked out a moment when I knew I was hooked and understood how the writer had done it. I’ve been at it so long I can see the levers. But those are the scam books, the entertainments and adventures, no disgrace there but no contest with lived experience. Some books offer more. Those you can’t open up like my lock, you go to turn the fastening screw and the whole device vanishes under your fingers. They’re not put together with springs and levers. And I’m no closer to unravelling their magic weft than I was when I first turned a page.

arrives for Burns supper, I’m shy of offal so no haggis for me. A gift to the house, from one who is shy of salmon. All things passed along and waste avoided, I’ll fry up a huge batch of blinis and gather the clan. And there’s one from the islands who can read and turn the lines with proper relish. Feast, then fog and frost on the bike ride home.

from the inner zones of our towns and cities. The ICE versions are poisoning us and the rise of the electrics will see ride-sharing, short hires and more of the cheap taxi culture, followed by better tech that lets the cars drive themselves off and park cheap out of town, or underground, only appearing when summoned or planned and further culled by constant-monitoring scheduling efficiencies. The old car ads of mystery, status and adventure promise are gone, the current ones changing to reflect the new disinterest, but still ridiculous. All advertising is ridiculous. Drop your tv in a skip and your tolerance/acceptance quickly fades, you see the ads for what they are – garish, frantic, absurd – when you chance across them in moments of exposure in hotel rooms or weekend stays. And these last-standing ads are shrinking, flashed by on digital skip-forward, banished from the streaming sites. They have to pounce on you, five second flurries, a burst on a web page or bus stop screen, too fast for you to turn off or turn away, the threshold of what you’ll absorb before your hand reaches out to click away. But I’m old enough to remember the time before internetization. I straddle the tech fault lines, a weary colossus with one foot in the analogue past, the other toe-pinching for a grip in the now – can’t call it the modern anymore, that old chestnut exploded long ago. I remember the night walks, the march back through silent streets when I couldn’t afford a car or take a taxi and there was no late bus, no late bars and it wasn’t hip to ride a bike. After 11 my town was grave-quiet, and I was a small hours stroller with a house more than a mile from my nearest night-owl friend. I hurried over the cobbles and yorkstone flags, rationing cigarettes to last the journey. Just a glimpse of the empty loading strip here in my present and I’m fresh-set in my night-walk memories. Decades ebbed away but memories so sharp I feel I’ve just turned a corner and slipped out of sight. A shadow walker passing. Barely a moment ago.

at the ranch, young admirers who asked him what he thought of the current president. He didn’t know who was in the job, didn’t follow the news from decade to decade. So the tale goes, something I read in one of the US magazines. I’ve been wondering about my own attempt at disengagement from the instant snap and clamour of the news, if not as thorough. I was too close to it last year, squandered too many hours. Maybe Burroughs was only interested in the old stories, the ancient dust. He’s on my mind this cold morning, still in print but I suspect membership of the beat myth – the half-forgotten daydreams of nations – the sordid tales recounted in the bios and the cut ups are more his legacy than the books. I’ve been cutting up the plans I’m making, the fledgling strategy, wondering if there’s a clearer route to decode from my tangled draftings. Hoping for a signal to come bouncing back out of the inky neuron weave, a clue to something unimagined.

with a glance back to the flooded Meadow, the hillside cubes of the Radcliffe glowing silver in the low sun. And here a woodland hideaway come the zombie apocalypse, a quad bike and walls of tinned food in the scullery. No mark of the city, barely two miles distant. They don’t clear the split branches and dead trees, it gives the woods a creepy, untended air. This is a place to read ghost stories, with your back turned to an open door and the dusk. My grandfather used to flick through his Hitchcock Presents paperbacks in the basement of his towering terrace, green linoleum and the retired operating chair bulky in the shadows. He read with door open to a lonely alleyway, a glass of Black Label within easy reach. I’ll take some MR James out to the woods next time the family agree to a yurt or dome excursion. I’ll read out the scare stories, teasing the silence, welcome in the New Year and the shrinking dark.