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help me write more, let me wring more than a few words a day from the keys? I think they might work better in collaboration, in a band, I can imagine the laughs swapping instruments or singing backwards. But lone wolf scribes have nobody to trade or share laughs with, just the walls to watch and the lonesome afternoon walks. I could get a pooch, all sulks and sad eyes as I hover over the letter pads. But I’d feel guilty for no doggie adventures, no wet grass and no ducks to round up, no yapping at the door bell as the bell never goes. I lie, a guy just bought me a new kettle. The last boiler gave up the ghost after ten thousand coffees, tanker loads of tea. A deliveryman will find me lifeless, while peering through the letterbox, his bell summons unanswered, see me slumped over the 11 inch screen, withered out and wordless. Or I could cheer up and get tapping, oh yeah. Soon as I cut the grass. I’ve got at least eight square meters of grass to tend, it takes a lot of care. And I need to measure up one of the fire doors before I start, get my morning messages out of the way. I don’t need the lateral thinking cards, I need a clock the size of a merry-go-round and a few more hours in each day. Lodger or book bodger.

on the Iron Horse, a memorial day visit to Manchester, a chipped-brick-corner wanderer.

blew in some flying colour, like the exotic, faraway-jungle bug landing on the desert aviator’s sun-cracked glove.

Apologies if I’ve mentioned Antoine and his discovery before.

of layers and masks. If you ignore enough paint chips, wall cracks, leaning doors and scratched glass and can keep adding to the costume you get emergence, you’re at home. Then you have to learn the mood of the rooms and spaces, the random and predicted creaks and clatters, the stair ascents and quiet zones, all inside the roaming of a few private rooms. But hidden under the paint and plaster, the rough fabric does its sentry duty while you flick through Satori in Paris – oh, Jack, there’s barely a page goes by without you calling out for a cognac stiffener, and like Ginsberg said, the ghost of your father leans hard upon you, out tramping the roads – thinking of Brest and how you just missed it in the Brittany mists, a shore too far. I lie here musing on Jack’s words and warnings, my own half-forgotten journeys, the mudslide build up of the years, what chances might yet come.

in the gardens, I can’t resist whistling out the calls. The geese come over in V formation twice a day, from the marsh out by the Old Vic and heading for the flats around the Perch, you can hear their lungs and wings pumping. And there are pigeons in the cedar, they sit and guano the cars in the yard. They don’t seem to bother the guy with the Porsche, everyone else gets hit. This afternoon I heard a collision overhead, still heat and a haze in the air from the sun sinking into the Meadow. There was a thunk as two pigeons struck, and the feather tumbled and curled before my eyes. I reached out for it, the way you try to catch a leaf or a snowflake, funny you never stop reaching, but I’m not as quick as I used to be. It settled on the tarmac by my feet and I kept walking, didn’t stoop down for it.

through the irregular pentagon. There’s enough turf for me to stretch out my corpus and feel the Earth on its marble-roll through the Universe. I’m a man peering through fog when I look back on more confident times, when I thought the world was a great game, there to be unpicked, roamed about and mastered. Now I fret about my fridge, whether I can get it gurgling into life again. It’s been marooned flat dead in the living room for a full year. If I can reanimate the wirings I can have a cold Spaten later. Then I’ll read some Chandler and get my hope back.

a gift carried back from Xian. No gift better than crossing her mind. The mercury rising, the metal fob hot in my palm after a day on the paint. Bees and blossom out in the old orchard, first day of summer. Beer for the working man. A silent, private glimpse of the moon in the kitchen, Nick Drake whispering to me. I have to be up at seven for the carpet man. We don’t choose the path, the path chooses us. But be humble, every breath is a wonder.

the walls, it’s whether you can pass between that matters. I’ve been too busy living to post, still caught up in the house, family roamings and a queue of work. I’m fitting locks and laying lino in the gaps. And the weeks gush by, the tides always on the turn.

rush of air again, a blast from the open oceans. It stops me in the street, calls me away from my messages, the run to the paint shop, the clutched bag for life with tonight’s vittles, my surface trampings and distractions in torn, faded jeans and scuffed boots. My weeks have been a fixed mechanism of late, I move from house to shop to desk. There’ve been no mountains, only the little cathedral peak I have tried to construct in the college orchards, a triangle of black steel. Out to the cutting sheds for a run of granite for the window cill. A limestone square for the hearth, if all the money’s not gone. And in the gaps there is snow and blossom, snow in crazy perfect polka through the open car door, a crystal dust on the old leather. And the thrumming wind. All I can do is stand and watch, hope it doesn’t pick me up and dash me down.

I know but I don’t have the information I want. I wish I knew more than I read in newspapers and on the web, some portal to the national mood to tap into. Is there some glorious fool out there that really knows it all, some atom-weave savant? All I know is I’m not much good at invisible brushstrokes with the mist coat, the harder I try the worse it looks. I’d like to be better at it. But I’m happy trying to improve. I can go with my allotted shape, this spin of the reincarnation wheel. I’m no billionaire but they’re just trying to get the brushstrokes right too, in their allotted skin, it’s all Kerouac and satori when the chips are down. The universe sends you messages to urge review and re-evaluation, a second of silence that breaks through the blood-beating hum.