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stand beguiled by the analogue. Making cupcakes with my kids, I try to explain that the pointer moves in response to the weight of the flour. It’s all cogs and levers and springs, I mutter. And I remember the needle trembling as it entered the red zone on my first car’s speedo, out on the road to the hills, the Crimson album back cover with the danger gauge, my friend’s roaring wreck with its rows of glowing dials and tiny clocks buried in the walnut dash, amp meter, oil pressure, a feast of needles all rising and falling. The same friend with a show on in London tonight, my invitation coded in an email, not sure I can make it in, stretched, self edging into the red. We’re analogue too, I want to say to the bakers, alive to continuous change in the physical world. We’re inexact. But wisely I keep my mouth shut and fetch the caster sugar.

in my age it seems, but time. The hours too precious to me now, I shudder when I think of my twenties and the squandering of days and years. Would that I could write something great to make amends. I leave early from the desk, bike into town to a talk at All Souls, the mighty sundial of the second quad flashing in the winter sun. Guard and savour your hours, I take the inscription as warning, for all is recorded and noted and held in testimony. There’s no escaping the sum of what you are, in moments of self-reflection in the four a.m. dark. I couldn’t get my mind off the sundial as I found a seat in the seminar room. But the talk rang true, it was an hour well-spent. And the town looked right and glorious riding back, a low, bright sun to light me home.

lives down on the island loop between the Thames and Castle Mill Stream, lazing in the green fringes of the parking lots and industrial units. Here, the waterways double back and disappear under a graffito brickface in the railway bridge, the leaning boards of ever-sodden rear gardens and overgrown banks. I’d like to kayak around these lonely side channels and forks, measuring all the forgotten turns and willow-canopied green pools. I could draw up a map of the watery lanes, go silent and unobserved as my soft-padding Ladro.

through the school-run mist, still haunted by a dream. So vivid it only feels one step away from living, a confrontation with a phantom, eye to eye. I can recall her face clearly even now. I wonder why dreams rack and shake us, are they memory traces or some extra, latent sense not yet mapped in the brain connections. Are they something mocking us? In sleep, all our powers and conceits fall away to neonate awe and each morning we must trawl our adult memories and reinvent ourselves, minted new with every sunrise.

through the wake of week’s end revelry. When faced with the whirlpool of an impossible dilemma, Asimov’s robots go mad and shut down but we might choose to Gordian knot it, smash into the street furniture, run whooping from the scene. Did hairy apes go lolloping into last night, shards of red plastic scattered behind them and the nightshift parking control officers mumbling and scratching at their chins?

they shame all sadness, and lure you out to the Meadow to stare at the ponies.

of a 30s semi, letters carved into sooted stone. There’s a story there, there always is – some mason or fitter whispering out of the past – and I’m thinking of Blake and the sad sweep’s dreaming,

And by came an Angel who had a bright key,

And he opened the coffins and set them all free.

from your library door, pilgrim. A few steps from the books could take you on other adventures.

is the colours of the sunset scattering.

the good stuff, like I, Robot, and the ideas and ethics are still fresh. There’s not much in today’s art cinema AI scripts that you won’t find swiped from Isaac’s short stories. And his 1950s foreseeing that’s turned out to be wrong is no less fascinating than the human-machine psychodramas where his prescience struts. He’s too careful at times – with world population growth, miniaturization and all things digital – or too wild, with his family jet cars and day tripper space rides. But how often does a fiction writer ingrain and fuse ideas in the imagination of the people designing and constructing our futures? Or is this true of all great books? What power that is to dream of, for the lowly scribe.