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.
he knows the heat’s coming. He’s been out chasing butterflies while I flail and fail over the lines. The words have been sticking lately, I waste hours daydreaming about boats and skimming the blue. I watch the old action flicks, Cold Sweat and The Last Ride, washed-up crims running yacht tours and caning it around the corniches. I wonder if I’d love it or hate it, fishing in the bays between the gaps of boat chores, repayments and routines. I think it’s because I’ve been landlocked so long, my sea fever, and the world feeling more bound up in rules and restrictions than I can ever remember, with the dread of another winter lockdown nagging at me. I could take the skimmer out to St Kilda, camp out for a few nights. Across to the pink granite isle. Or are we always worrying about one last job, the big payback, the easy money that never comes. The cat’s got the smarts, he knows not to waste his time future-gazing when he could curl up and snooze.
others handle fixers. I found it snapped last night, doing my rounds on my way to bed and coma. Maybe the cat was getting anxious and discovered a way to lever the catch. He’s a trickster. He wants to get out with the midnight prowlers and rough guys, the ones that screech and yowl in alleyway standoffs and azalea ambuscades. But he’s not beefy or scuffed-up with experience and I try to keep him in when Night comes walking by. Maybe he looped a paw around the catch and snapped it free, intent on busting out. But he’s got his alibi sorted when I pop down for a screwdriver and find him heavy-kipping on the sofa. Things just break. Things suffer unseen pressures. What looks solid can be just about to shear.
as I ponder my options, conscious that I’m not pulling the levers on global events, can’t march into the wood-panelled meeting rooms and demand action. I’m not rubbing shoulders with the suited leaders but I am in control of how I think and view things, I’ll take that as enough to be getting on with. If I can be fair and try not to moan about things that’s a start. I reward myself for my sageness with a bowl of ice cream. For a few sweet moments I fend off the heat and the hayfever scratch – it’s come on hard this week – before any more fretting about planetary driftings.
tarmac rolling and I’m out in the valleys, folded in the green fuzz bloom of a sodden May. I climb the chalk track to the nature reserve and gulp the air, taste the ticking heat that heralds summer. I’m open to everything except malice. Let the good work roll in.
