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carry me in, all rumpled and saggy-assed. But London’s riches still warrant a skip, fresh as they were to my first, clear-eyed stare.

The ship pours shining on the quay

The plunder of the world.

And apologies to Housman.

the frozen turf, no game this morning, she said. Sky cover’s all stripped away and the cold’s biting. There’s snow in Spain, snow on the crest of the dunes that fan down from the jebel. I remember the highest peak we got to in Maroc, the guide pointed to the horizon, a trace of fire glimmering at the edge of the Sahara. This cold lays siege to my apartment, fogs the windows, cracks the skin across my knuckles. And I wish I was Tangiers tea-sipping with Bowles, flipping through Pages from Cold Point, taking a ride out of town in the open Merc he bought on his first – and only – big advance. But Bowles is gone, and Jack and Satori in Paris, and I lost sight of the true path through the woods some time ago. We have to live our own adventures now, there’s no vicarious freeloading from other drifters and dreamers. When the pitch thaws, you have to play.

I rewatch Polanski’s Dance of the Vampires. It’s paper snow and spray-on cobwebs, you never lose sight of the stage, but these are glowing, picture book storyboards of folklore and fireside ghost tales, with details from someone who grew up in a land where wolves still prowled, before the smoke and dust of war consumed everything. And under the tavern and camp comedy is a dreamlike terror, how would you cope, driving home the stake? Scattered about the film are touches of greatness. An indoor snowfall from an off-screen skylight precedes the Count’s first appearance, his intended entranced. When the innkeeper is brought home dead, bitten and iced through, Polanski has him strike the pose of a man running, or sneaking about, frozen in motion. He gets the best actors, best score, best script, does all the hard work of a competent director and then adds something more. Write your line, and just when the reader reels at the close, lay on a deeper meaning, evoke a memory mislaid.

fade and crack about the neighbourhood, relics from another season. How will the pavement sweeper AI bots recognize their redundancy, will they look for degrees of decay and neglect to grade their importance? I’ve been pondering the OODA loop, as I gaze at the delaminating tennis board. I’m no fighter pilot, I pass days and months trying to orient, caught in my daydreams, slow to act. The bots will glean, assess and decide a thousand times a second. They’ll pass me under the board, broken-shoes, worn shirt, tired as the sign. And in my daydreams I’m trying to plan for a year from now, if I can imagine it, perhaps it will come to be.

the five of clubs. Glimpsed as I rush to the wagon through rain, hands too cold and clamped to reach down and peel it from the cobbles. There’s some pathway back to me in symbol or action relating to this card and how it arrived outside my door, but it’s undiscovered and unguessed as I drive out with my shopping list.

for work and worry, watching a spinning coin, or in Robert Frost’s Pang stanza, the scattering of notes at the start of the solo from 1:42, in Truck Driver Divorce. After the usual smart ass smut lyrics the guitar sweeps up, sweeter, more magic there than the sense shackle of words. It’s grafted from a live show, a Frank cut-up, and I think of Burroughs kneeling between the ash trays and coffee cups, Paris reeking and filthy outside the streaked glass, the newspaper scissored and squared and stuck together again. Frank in his house in the hills, splicing tapes together at four a.m. with the city lights stretched away to the dead, black rim of the ocean. And me, carpet-starred in my teen Yorkshire fastness, just picked up the album from HMV in town, head wedged between two old speakers borrowed from my dad. My guitar gleams in the corner, I’ll spend the rest of the night trying to work out Frank’s lines. The wind presses at the panes. And decades later, watching the coin, its time snatched a-blur, wandering, only a little shorter than my own.

we’re fresh out the caves after all. But you can choose how to act. This ice won’t bear my weight, it’s the long way round for me.

as I roll over to visit Riverman. There’s no softness, classic grace or aesthetic stealth with the public architecture in this town, even the paint they’ve selected will soon fade to sombre Vickers Gun green, peeping from its topcoat swirl of tags and symbols to arrive in coming months. And no lights. Here some sour shuffler might lurk hidden to coincide with my journey home from the motor yacht, accosting and hurling me into the path of a Chilterns rumbler to Marylebone. The Bicester shoppers recoil from the sight, scrunching toes in their Gucci slip-ons while my hot claret is Pollock-flicked along the carriage windows. All for the absence of some subtle uplighters. Who designed this span? Have they already brought in the AI, brute calculus that never looks past load-bearing stats and trapezoid angles – while fleshy organics pad alone towards the meadow, pondering lost arts, stone grandeur and slender wood.

in the dry days of Jan, and the year all to play for. Hack at the weeds growing fast about your ankles and sprint for the shore.

set me pondering the decline of the moral centre, the rent cloth of state and self-survival stratagems. Back in Ox the January gloom presses hard and heavy but I can’t dodge a chuckle when I gaze at my replenished bedside book towers. I’ll take Riverman A Shropshire Lad when I’ve closed the covers, he likes to stomp the galley growling  rhymes…

That is the land of lost content,

I see it shining plain,

The happy highways where I went,

And cannot come again.