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we leave a park track and he rests his bike up by a pub door. I don’t know this part of town, have never seen this boozer. City is different for all of us.

Day’s road ends, says Riverman.

calling out their reports. It’s never too thick to see your feet in Oxford town, it hangs back, shrouding the street corners and gables. In Valparaiso it covers the Pacific out to the horizon and from the high town you can’t see the market and streets below, the ascensors rising out of the white foamy air, sea beasts breaching. Only half awake I stumble out to do my messages.

again, is it the hour before dawn or after dusk? My night pattern’s shot, I lie gazing at the billows of the ceiling, twitch to every lighthouse sweep of a passing taxi, the howl of a ring road bike bandit. Where is the kiss of sleep, out there in the wind, rushing carefree over the Ridgeway hump or black water. She’s forgotten me in my room at the top of the house, she won’t visit again until the winter press sets in and the iron cold snaps at the glass.

Patrick Hamilton stared out from an orangery or boat house over there, gin-sipping, sleeping it off under the willows. He traded the thunder of the Euston Road for upriver plenty but he carried the glassware along. I’ve read stories of people visiting and finding themselves legless before lunch; a three bottles a day man. Didn’t stop him writing better pages than most of the between-wars lot. I stamp along the bank, trying to imagine a life there, sun rooms and staff and something shiny and fast waiting on the driveway. It doesn’t seem like much to long for, and that could explain why I’ll never get it. You have to believe in the magic trick for it to work. Sceptics and septics get to plod the riverpaths, chasing other dreams.

bus stop and pavement my purlieu, my gaudy backdrop. Oddball’s negative waves trap you in cul-de-sacs, steal the track from under the engine. All it takes is a sideward step and you’re free, back in the maze and a-dreaming. Hack through the hedges, to colour again.

kiss the architrave, I stretch my first-waking fingers out to them. They trick my eyes after a bad night, fade too quickly to ungilded daylight. When you drop a glob of gold on your palm you can feel it pressing down, feel it wanting to sink into the mantle again. And I’m back in the long, wood-plank work room of my grandfather’s town house, bunsen burner and a gauze, melding all the spits of king metal shaved away from crowns and his other gnasher craftings into a nugget the size of my ten-year-old thumb, fresh and bright and perfect as the day it was split from the rock. Still dozing, I roll away in the sheets, think of Chaplin and the bear and the tilting cabin, his Gold Rush masterpiece. He put the hours in, always the work first, to the point of madness, he called it. I should be up already and at the desk, pounding at the keys. No gold bar glee hidden under my mattress, no pirate coins in the garden. But the gold wash of dawn always finds me, a gift glimpsed from under the pillow, my ersatz riches, my poor man’s treasure.

until hour changes and night sets in. The leaves get deeper, a chorus of late-morning blowers make the study window hum.

the leave vote has split the oak. Why did we spend months on silly leadership games in the aftermath? It was easier to deal with, normal, we knew where we were with that. But the vote is chaos, destabilizing. The moment one side dares to choose a future, the other side decries it, trying to catch smoke in their clenched fists, insisting there must be a better plan. There is no plan, there cannot be, how can you plan for something that is smoke. How can you invite chaos into your home? Any choice brings certainty and real choices, half the nation cannot accept. There’s no winning in this. And the EU itself has no clue how to heal, it’s a broken wheel. Contracts in dollars from now on, the pound’s gone bitcoin. Out to see Riverman, maybe he’s got the answers. Him and his roving cats, the fresh split ash for the stove, the spud sack by the skylight…

into the clutter of books and music that always saves me, makes me think it’s worth stamping the dust. The vocal refrain from A Love Supreme. Frank and Django on guitar, Starbuck in The Whale, London rain in Autumn Journal, a glass of porter and Native Son, Chandler and Hem and Riders to the Sea, Guernica and a private viewing of Homer’s The Gulf Stream, a martini afterwards, My Darling Clementine, Bill Hicks and Le Cercle Rouge, all those French movies, and Boethius, Cicero, Lucretius, the Library of the Dead, the timid artists, the daubers and splatterers, all of them within lazy reach on the shelves. And none of these distractions worth, equal or more mysterious than a single moment with someone you love.

we’re late for training, catch sight of her footprints on the stone, blown away on the air in a few seconds. But they were there and I saw them before they faded away. All words, all photos, just trying to hold the sea back from washing away our footprints. Just a reflected flicker of what it means to be beach-running and alive.