and fresh linen for Dad. Jabbed up for the hols and looking for new premises. The will is there but the way is enmisted, the path lost in taiga shadows. Where is my golden, lakeside dacha, curtains raised to the window sills to thwart lurking assassins? I’ll have to settle for the semi in Sunnymead, arcane texts shed-scribbled in the gaps between car-ferrying to athletics meets. There’s paradise there, for those wise enough to see it.
before she came along, walked her as a pup and then her pups and their pups. We’ve cut and tramped the grass around this island, heard the wind in the same trees. Yesterday, we climbed down to the pebble splash at Egypt and I saw three dolphins breaching out on the waves. The dog stood watching and then barrelled away into the bracken. There was nothing smart to say and the dolphins were gone around the point so I followed after her. I am time itself, watching the seasons of life tumble by for this dog and me.
no spinning tuft of lawn under the sky. I’m up in the trees, with the vistas, head in the clouds. But I dream of getting down to earth again. I’d like just enough grass to lie out, star-shaped on the sod and feel the shoots of myself flash down through crust and mantle, crackle upwards into the airless elbow-room of the upper atmosphere. I want to feel the overseeing sun on my skin, immense and burning bright. I’d like an apple tree with blush fruit and a squat doorway that leads to nobody-knows and hidden walks and glades and all around that green calm. If I can get my garden I shall cultivate a sunflower, and watch it attend and turn, helio slave like all us living things. And I’ll let out a scream to the sky, a cheer to the molecules, an interstellar call of thanks.
in still air and shadows at the Colindale RAF museum. They look empty, no sense of the crews that blew life into them. Lambert’s cracking up in Len Deighton’s Bomber, he’s starting to think the machines fly themselves to target, that the war’s all about steel and hydraulics and engineered precision killing. It reminds me of the museum visits – the crews are missing. And how did people even fit inside these things? I think of a time trying to drop down through the driver’s hatch of a tank, the sense that the machine’s creators had taken a solid lump of metal, scooped out a space just big enough to crawl into, a sleeping bag crevice wrapped in wires, pipes and sharp edges and then pressed the driver in, tearing his elbows and knees and face in his scramble to get away from the bullets and the blasts and the battlefield roar. I wonder if Lambert’s right and future wars might be fought with no crews, just a satellite link and machine logic. But then I’m out with the kids today and we reach a village, see the memorial to the crews stationed here a lifetime ago. No graffiti or scarring on the prop, only the paint wearing away. Flowers and a few crosses, the grass clipped short. War touches people and lingers deep. It stems and ends from human will.
before a day of rain. I stood in the park, watching the canopy lit up with the promise of another summer. Old eyes dazzled by the light. Strands and cobwebs and specks of debris in the vitreous humour darting like birds, my own Plato shadows playing out on the skyscape. But I know the truth. There’s no way to clean the lights, this track only runs one way. And I remember the conversation with the gaffer at the start of the week, he can’t be far off retiring, the leaves all down in a carpet over his lawn after the blow this weekend he said, as though it was autumn already. He’s seen more seasons than me, he’s got the stare, each iris as faded and world-knowing as the rim of my ghost-summer sky. All the truths are in nature’s passing and returns, the river and season flow, my football practice glow.
but I enjoyed the walk down Gordon Street more than anything on the stage. I miss the squares, the quiet places away from the traffic and the thrumming, restless crowd.
are early risers, tagging the lanes with blooms. I could hear them quaffing, coughing and choiring from the Anchor tap room as I biked over the bridge. But I came too late for the dances. Fifth month into the year, so soon, a morning shadow still feeling my way.
a few hours at the desk, working on Drones and trying to make sense of AI. These methods and devices will knit into our lives, helping us to discover, see and do more. I don’t fear toasters taking over the planet, I’m sure we’ll get along fine. It’s a mutual, joint-stock world, like Melville said, we just need to learn how to share it. And when I tire of digital and yearn for the physical, there’s always the string and the soundboard. I’ve moved up to acacia from spruce. It’s a warmer sound, a whisper from the island dots in the wide splash of Pacific blue.
of my own rainy kingdom. I scrape and paint, teetering on the roof tiles, a weather eye to the clouds blowing in from the Ridgeway and daydreams of Baudelaire.
at the fire hotel and half a mile on they’re digging up the station square. Follow the inner ring and you’ll see the old lime-yellow car park levels broken and exposed, Auden’s wedding cake face left out in the rain, to be replaced by a glass mall nobody wanted. The city approaches are creaking, overwhelmed by job-rush fleets of Audis and Qashqais bought on the monthly, luxury flats at risk of flood, these roads intended for dog carts and dons on penny-farthings. Magdalen Bridge keeps its dignity eastwards, refusing to slip a notch for the Iffley massive. City under strain. We should take to the water on our paddleboards, pedestrianize the lot of it. We should build more schools and homes and concrete the hills to save the meadow.
