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comes over on the Brize Norton run, splitting the boundless winter sky with noise and its white wake. I wait with the bikes, staring up at the lofty gape and the cloud line. Skyships, starships, landships. Restless on the blue.

finds me pacing, and the tree still bare and hunter green as it stood in forest formation. December flashes by, out of my grip. And too many jobs to do before the calm, the quiet, the fragile feast.

into a map, almost feel the air rushing on your skin as your eyes sweep over the far-flung oceans, the capes and blank passages wrinkled with crevasses. After reading Verne’s tale of Fogg’s mad dash last month I found a map that gives a pastel palette to time’s arrow, a calendar planner for the age of steamships and railway track. More days ticking by, more distant and exotic the lands in my imagination. And I began crafting my own time chart, with different shades to show the thirty years it took me to reach South America, the stretches of illness and idleness, lack of funds or will, the chance meetings and diversions that have governed all my weeks and months and journeys across this flat grid Earth. All the ports never visited. And the most dazzling, lurid shades reserved for the island dots and jagged coasts I still aim to paint before I kick out.

I went riding, foraging for dinner amid the early evening throng. I’ve been reading Spengler, looking for the answers, but the world’s changing so fast the arguments are all blurred and in flux. I should read further but every book I pick up seems to describe a moment that’s already spun away into a half-remembered, stylized past. I must read – and write – faster, race to keep up. Or quit the sprint completely, give up on the terrifying nowness detail of data world, return to daydreaming and wondering and losing myself in stories and fleeting, magical glimpses of the shy sublime.

dash over the Meadow, to the call of air horns and a leaf-whirling blow. Keep running and laughing, never stop.

anonymous oak doors and mossy alleyways. I know these streets well but not the arcane spaces. I’m still at work, fashioning my grappling hooks.

for good reason and Anne of Green Gables is a fine book. Even that old grouch, Mark Twain had to love it. Anne Shirley is hyper sensitive to colours, to grating point at times, but in gunmetal November I’ll take what colours I can and mutter my thanks. I’ll cross the street to get closer to the International Klein Blue of a building plot fence on my way to the shops, smile at the memory of that Karate chopping colourist. If only he’d jumped out of the window for real, broke some bones for his art instead of cutting two pics together and running fake newspaper stories. But maybe great art needs some artifice? If too real, it passes unnoticed, hidden in the furls of our everyday lives and observations.

back from Riverman’s without stopping if I get enough speed up but the fog unnerves me, jabs into the thought jumble and the subconscious calculus. Night on Bald Mountain from my phone, a forgotten Halloween playlist, rammed into my shirt pocket. The towpath greasy with leaves, almost lost the back wheel at the guard rail turn, peddle faster. Are books analogue downloads of our that-second state of mind, our imaginative yearning and reading of things? Every novel is a map learned. Where for coffee, Zappi’s bike cafe is the best in town, please don’t besmirch my cappuccino with cocoa, wouldn’t dream of it, sir, not at Zappi’s, but you can never get a table. Why is the aiming reticle – why reticle? a net for your target perhaps – so slow in Drake’s Fortune, I get blasted and keep greying out. The game’s AI knows me too well. All gone into memory past, gone with the geese chevron clacking overhead as I crest the bridge a cold second later.

along this coastal path he told me, I sought it out on my visit. The boards peel and every pane is cracked, can’t be long before they tear it down to build flats with tiered views of the estuary. But for now it’s wild and alone and I can imagine him in his toast-crumbed peacoat looming at the window, eye to the distant whitecaps and the comings of boats, the little fishers and the ferry back from Lundy. Riverman had a child and a woman he loved and for most he was happy, but some flawed part in him fouled the workings. Broke-anchored, he drifted up to my landlocked town, drinks tea and gin in the shallows, holds forth about the right to be left alone. The right to live undisturbed in the gaps of this world. But you’re welcome anytime you are, son, if the cabin chain’s off I’m aboard, you just knock and I’ll answer.

coming in than you expected, slapping the black stones under your window and foaming in the slipways. It wakes you in the still-dark morning, more restless and alive than your own aching body under the duvet. The miles seem longer as you age, and the tides faster. Moon’s turn fever never slows, snapping at your cracked heels.