these are important, the rest is all a means to an end or diversion. I’ve been padding the boards in my Laurel and Hardy chain gang flappers, humming along to Reasons To Be Cheerful, best intentions, foot-forward. As long as there are things you still want to do then you’re in the game. Clear skies and clear intent, settle the bills and be diligent, get out on the blue slab next spring. There are always new books to read or dream about writing. Days are as fresh and eager to run as ever.
lately, lots of them. Joined a car club after we lost the old trooper and I’ve been riding around in different EVs and hybrids. They’re great but the EVs cost too much and I can’t see how we’ll dig the lithium out of the ground to build enough of them. Maybe another tech will win out? Pics of lithium mining send a shudder, there’s a cost in any breakthrough – often or always to the scarred Earth and the animals that live on it. And I see the modular nuclear pitch and remember worries I had twenty years ago that we’d end up with a grid of reactors every fifty miles across the UK. I don’t have much faith in capitalism saving us. Capitalism is about wanting more. And what will power the machines designed to suck the offending gasses out of the ether? The only answer that rings true to me in a gut sense is to do less, buy less, go less, ask for less and eat less. Anti-capitalism. I get the feeling that a lot of the people working closely in the field think it’s already too late for reductions, the capture idea is the only way out. And massive lifestyle changes. Then I read the excitement from airport bosses about the thousands of planned, restarted Atlantic flights in coming months. And the morning roads are packed. People want cars, why shouldn’t they want cars? The EV promise begins to feel like a fob off to me, telling people they can still have a car when we don’t have the tech or resources for hundreds of millions of EVs. But I’ve tried without a car and it’s a hassle with a family, you have to plan well and spend more time on travel in the business of living. It’s easier with a car. So we got an old one, one that already exists and we’ll try to keep it going as long as we can. I’ll drive to my croft and live off a pan of fresh-caught mackerel. I’ll patch my jeans and spend all my spare time in the poetry books. I’ll try to learn again how precious energy is – both the spraylet of exploding gasoline and the synaptic spark.
they didn’t survive the long winter of the shutdown. And six-pound pints were a hard sell in this patch, the thirsty earners drift into the capital. But I had some good hours in there, talking books and other abstractions. Are those moments preserved somewhere, other than the unreliable memory cells of the extant topers? Are they played out over and over, with the audience trying to bite down the yawns? Or lost along the track somewhere in the gaping night, a torn ticket flicked from the carriage window.
I’ve been mourning it a week or two. White smoke, one of the pistons was burning through the oil and the garage didn’t want to work on it. Two guys with a trailer came and dragged it away. But I’m letting go now, it did more than I’d ever hoped. Not sure now about buying another, the little bites of tax, parking, fixing, fuel and the driving and traffic. I joined a car club, been taking the train, walking everywhere and losing weight. But it’s harder than I thought it would be. We’re nowhere close to giving up the fossil flash, even in this city that pretends to be looking forwards. I found a derelict friend in the back of the shed, got some new parts in and the old ride is badass and road-ready again. Wheels keep turning. The air tastes better when you’re moving through it.
they’d send one of Lawrence’s Coastal Rescue launches to look for you, roaring out of the Solent at 39 knots. I watch it surge by doing about 20, waving to the whooping passengers. We go up high on their wake when all’s safe, zipping back to the red buoy lane and I push the throttle to lock at about 28, aim for the horizon. The spray and the air, life to breathe.
I return from the sea. I’ve been out on the Solent for two days, learning to tie clove hitches, dragging up chains from the briny deep, steering in neutral and then giving it a nudge. I’m prepped for command of a vessel, just stepping out. Follow the green posts, steer away from the red and always sniff out the tide and the winds, they won’t let you rest. Trying something, waiting to see where it leads.
through plastic channels, capacitor pots and burned metal contacts. Down the copper wire to the shuttered exchange, its 30s bricks all splattered with graffiti. From there we flash through space, tunnel into the Kentucky servers blasting through their yes/no, on/off tireless assemblage of dots and digits all to be bounced back to our little screens before we can blink. Today I’d rather be reading Singer. I choose ink and aged paper, relics from the pre-internet age. If I don’t keel over with the stalking plague I’ll be en train to the coast in a day or two. I’ll tie knots, work lines and engines and remember how cold the Blighty spray can be. But until then I’m chained to this device and the LED glow. I tinker with its entrails and secret pathways, unscrewing its mysterious linkages from the landing wall.
and staring out ‘gives me vertigo’ as per a friend. But is the lure of turning in and being content in your own few square miles the same isolationist drift of nations? I stay in my postcode, loafing around the independents, snatching a few hours in the afternoons to earn enough for the business of living. But I dream and plan of escapades. Maybe the turning in will drive us out again, down unimagined and uncharted paths.
green for the jungle blur, the overcast sea close to shore, the hills I used to go driving in ten miles free from the city, the lime wedge on the razor rim of my shot glass, green as symbol of renewal. I can’t fume in my green room. I kick back and listen to old Hillage albums and remember the 80s. And I plot my fantastic escapes to see what it’s like skimming on the Solent, only the green line and the open sky ahead of me, will I make it happen, will I kick myself to make a call?
and scuff but only humans feel the strange need to evolve and improve. I found myself plodding around the supermarket, shame-faced because I was there again, how many hundreds of times in this same store still picking up the veg and the crisps and the discounted kitchen towel, I haven’t evolved. But I know that’s bogus, would I really be happier and feel more noble paying a PA or staff to fetch my groceries, I guess it’s likely I’ll never find out. I used to think it would be good to find out. To move up a level. And I’d be putting in the essential hours at the novel or making grand discoveries instead of shopping and fixing skirting boards and rolling over the roads. But there’s time to write, even attending to the business of living as a non-evolved scribe. I can’t say I don’t get the time. Books worth reading come out of the secret hours, out of the planning, musings and mootings, the journey there and back and the idle driftings along the aisles of other imagined lives and pathways. And if it needs saying you can always find the time to put it into words. Getting rich would probably be just another distraction. But I don’t have to worry about that one.
