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I’ll take a nibble on another limoncello. There’s time for a last walk on the terrace.

and cashed out at Monte Cassino. I’ve been reading his memoirs, shadowing his Bren carrier in my rental Opel on the autostrada. He made it to Pompeii and walked the lava lanes alone, unlike me, but he didn’t stroll out on the infinity terrace at Ravello. That’s where the scribes hid away, sipping limoncello in paradise. They weren’t dragging howitzers or brewing up tea composite in mess tins. I never guessed that Spike was a full-war soldier. He’s the real deal.

and by the alleyways found myself at the Turf. I didn’t linger on this shore, day marching on and many puddles to swerve before nightfall.

over Airmen’s Bridge, down by the ruins and along the banks. I made it to the Perch and yelped at the price of a pint, wish I’d known Riverman with his barge and glass-walled wheelhouse, his would have been the better shelter, watching the rains blow in over the meadow. I’ve never had so much to juggle in life, so many rewardless and pressing decisions with no last measure of conviction to make them. Where’s shuffling Riverman with his gave-it-all up glare, softening to a smile as he understands, beckons me aboard to sit and stare over the soon-coming rain-patter ripples on river’s slide.

in love or money, you just have to keep taking part, pelting down the track like a maniac. And when the day’s work is done, head on out to your playground.

has its maddening limitations…with meandering compensations.

they’ll have to be smarter than us. Their superintelligence would gust them off on uncharted, unguessable pathways. The profs at the futurology foundations worry about human obsolescence and machine supreme but I’m trying to look on the bright side: those bots might get into daydreaming and lounging and 1,000-yard gazing. They could start watching the treeline blur, looking for the connections in the atom weave, even craving an altered state. Bots gone beatnik. Bots as life/love-bedazzled as we organics. Introspection as a consequence of self-reflective consciousness.

on a hot fence. I waited for one to settle. Waiting for the words to come.

a Ken Kesey title, took a few minutes to come to me out of the fog. It was Sometimes a Great Notion. And I was thinking of the pranksters and the Further bus and Cassady flipping hammers with his eyes all wild and Marty Feldman – this is walking to the station Sunday a.m. to buy a coffee from the girls still half-asleep, half-hidden behind cellophaned croissants and the humming milk-froth machines, must get a copy of Young Frankenstein, see if it holds up – and that book title struck me as odd and at once I understood that I’d done this before, some other year, some other morning walk for coffee, yeah it’s a lyric and then I got Goodnight, Irene and Lead Belly and the line,

Sometimes I have a great notion

To jump into the river and drown.

And that’ll get you into American roots and blues and from there you might get to Charlie Poole and If the River was Whiskey and another great line,

I looked down the road just as far as I could see

A man had my woman and the blues had me.

So I got it playing on my phone speaker, in my shirt pocket, for the walk back over the track, clutching my styrofoam coffee cup, a fine drizzle, spooking the early-bird tourists here to park in the gravel yards around the station, marvelling at the low grey clouds. Cassady died of exposure walking down a railway track. Just set off walking into the Mexican night in his beat jeans and white t-shirt, like he didn’t care if he got anywhere. He’d had enough of the pranksters and the San Fran scene. The Grateful Dead played their last ever concert yesterday. Ferlinghetti’s still giving interviews, the rest are gone. The roads keep coming and then they’re gone. And I was thinking, do people still read Sometimes a Great Notion, do they have the time for 700 pages of Oregon angst? But I can’t answer that. All I can do is order a copy when I get home, and hold fast. Hold fast and step on.

by the Tintin house. Shuttered windows, louche sports car on the gravel and callers at strange hours. Did our reporter scale the wall with Snowy a-sniff the funny-money ink, ears a-twitch those clanking sounds from the basement? Was the gang boss necromancer consulting with his brazen head in the library, saw a vision of our sleuth in the grounds and set loose the house gorilla? In the chase, the good duo tip-toed along the bough, luring the ape forwards and with its bound the bark tore and the beast lay stunned on the pavement. Was that Calculus ghost-peering from the back window of a departing car? And where’s the captain, but rabble-rousing down The Anchor with assorted North Oxford salts and stowaways. Books endure, symbols and story remnants to pollinate these ride-by dreams.