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buffets me to shelter by the garage wall, and even here some hand has been busy sculpting. Decor details are hidden about the set, in the alleyways and paint shop yards. Burnished gold under stone and lichen.

gets me out to the town’s new station in 15 minutes. The whole site is built in new brutalist style, all slot-together concrete sections, zinc post security cameras and razor wire perimeter fences, ready to withstand the zombie apocalypse. No whisper of aesthetic slipped in here, hard utility ripped up the architect’s doodling. But the track skirts flooded Otmoor and curls through the Chiltern woods, the scenery shames the conveyance. I roll back from my meeting cloud-gazing, hideaway villas glimpsed through the trees, writing retreats imagined, a few seconds of other-life possession as the invisible thread draws me on home.

comes January. I’ve been reading tales of the Silent Service, their life inside the creaking pressure hulls and ice or tropic fug glistening on compressed cork walls. They called surface sailors skimmers. It must have been strange living in steel tubes for fifty-day patrols, with some men in the engine watch never climbing the tower ladders to see a patch of sky. It’s caused me to gape at the spaces around me, my study walls, shop aisles, car park tiles. It’s too rare that I’m out in the unbuilt open. Winter’s bite – or depth charges – drives the retreat to sheltering walls.

at the park and even though I see the bright colours in outline, I know they’re an illusion, sky scattering trickery. Two guys from the council arrive with the feed, each in his Hi-Viz safety jacket, a green that smarts the eyes. Vision is a riddle set before us and full of wonders.

and rushing along the mud path to the Vic. I skirt the floodline of woodland vice, gunmetal gas bottles, lager tins, blackened sticks and softer relics. Look through the trees, to scrub and bushes along the Ferry Road behind me, where the killer hid some months back. Who knows what beasts or exiles call this place home?

in the squally gloom with that feeling of the day already sailed from the quay. Friendless and perpetually wet, that’s how you’ve ended up, and then I remembered Riverman and the gift I’d been meaning to carry to Fiddler’s Island. I drove up to the north car park and squelched across the meadow. His boat was dark and black with the flood but I heard a sound to answer my knocking, boots moving in the stowage. He came out in a vest and oilskin trousers, eyes sparkling brighter than the rain when he saw the burnt-gold flash of the whisky box under the flap of my bag. Two tumblers on the front cabin formica, glass thick as my thumb. He poured it out equal. Why so glum? he asked. There’s always good things coming. I’ve got some cheddar and biscuits to go with these.

beyond a crumpled ridge above the town, a gravel-drive Shambhala of made-it and moneyed dons, merchants and the odd, lucky scribe. There are views to the spires in the valleys off this grand caldera, but no whine and grate from the river of cars on the A34, the woods here are quiet. I’m left alone to tramp the track, fore-imagining my what-might-be, those painted gates swinging open, a hand and glass outstretched, the secret rooms and glances mine to own. But I’m a veteran dreamer and these are only fond memories of what hope is, the magic trick we play on ourselves, looking away as the hand moves the cup. I know the cavalry’s not coming, the passing freighter won’t get the radio message, these gates won’t glide open by chance. But the mud and the oaks and the hours to come are all mine.

and experience is a work of imagination, turned and reviewed, all a-flicker and ungraspable. It changes even as you examine it, what seems solid is not. Walking the London park and cloud-gazing, I wonder if the greatest truth is all contained in that fleeting flash of self-forgetting and ecstasy, all other truths consequent and ancillary to it, though still infused with the same strand of stardust magic. And could this whole swirling universe be wrapped within the big-bang ecstasy flash, from the dinosaurs to the Romans, all spent in a few galactic seconds? Life is chaos and light. And then we’re walking back for coffee and I’m happy and done-wondering. It’s so simple. Just pass your time with the people you love.

from the charlatan rich, pink brick Victorian Gothic of the North Oxford estate. Gone the whispering leaves the houses and the Astons leer through, but the meadow’s rose afterglow is brighter still.

a belt of stuck stars and comets in the rush hour mirk.