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scrubbed hard yet betray their past, a morning with the trade bare plaster paint daubing the chateau. There’s no money left to pay for decorators, though I might crack and review the budget, slash a slate path or a radiator to escape the brushes. I don’t mind the work so much but time is rushing and I’m behind, always behind, with book work. And you can’t hurry the paint. I remember Clapham pubs with Mark, the early evening light, his hands speckled and streaked from a day at the canvas. Years of those days, patiently mixing and joining his colours. That’s a quarter century ago and I feel no different, just jaded, pudgier, frayed at the edges. The things we talked of are still current to me, still what I care about. But there’s no whooping and roaring in the boozer all night. There’s the knowing I must struggle to be conscientious, knowing I must raise the funds to see another mountain. There’s the house to finish and the year to bridle, cling tight as it breaks to a gallop.

out there on the British high street, just me and the chain shops, gulls dabbing at the after-pub litter and the memorial, always a memorial. I’ll find a coffee and steal away one hundred miles to home.

and bags of gravel, rain constant and heavy. No glamour but it brings an honest appetite. I hope whosoever cut my slate was at peace cutting it, gentle toiler like myself, laying it in the old orchards.

on my birthday, staggered through to the wolf moon tonight and musing on the wondrous gift of another half-c of weeks to explore. I’ll bake some Madeleines and plot my antics. Not much down yet, a house to move into, rope ties for the hammock or first plant the trees for it, Cadiz waiting for me out there in the mist, another cape to bag at Trafalgar. I’d like to see another mountain. The St Kilda cliffs would be special. I’m out there now with Hammond Innes with the waves getting too high for the LCAs. I’ve always wanted to see Harris, I could jump off from there? I’m still yearning.

bar two panels where the geometry needs to be fixed. The room takes its shape. Freud’s Uncanny turned up today, I’ll fix my armchair on the floating screed, garden-stare and roll the pages.

all’s forgiven. A flurry backlit by the morning sun. A day standing open to lay stores in and write.

if you spend your whole life dreaming of making it, and when you do it leaves you more puzzled than ever? Things you long for take their own form and shape when real.

at the mouth of the alleyway, entranced by the streetlight upglow into the yellow leaf undercrown, bewitched by a roadwork stop/go light in the pounding rain. The pasteboard masks and backdrops pass behind the moving faces and chit-chat encounters of my everyday. If it’s worthless why am I drawn to hop off and snap it? I might be moth to candle and cat to string? But always that hidden sense that something’s coming, that you could find it around the next corner and let it change a living part of you.

of Boz about the town, street props, a bit of fog and whiskered cheeks. He’s further back than Holmes, before science and steel blew away all the cobwebs. But he’s lurking yet in our modern poverty.

out on the grey roads, fields only a few miles from town. It feels good to pick up speed, I might even break orbit from the ceaseless radio patter of the can’t stay/can’t leave commentariat, with their touted best outcomes of isolation oblivion or a return to what half the nation rejected. I’m not certain there’s any going back after 18 months of torment. We’ve chained the past and mastered the present, but that only serves to make the unshackled future more terrifying.