today, it was waiting for me when I roused back to life. It followed me around on my masked messages. My usual vistas all swathed in murk. The market town with the uni grafted on but hidden behind walls. The shabby shop-fronted high streets and clipped grass parks, the ring road tarmac and low hills beyond Port Meadow. So thick this morning it was pressing up to the window glass.
and the woods open their reaches. There are still bright days, days to wander and snap, days before the gloom presses in.
for November, waking me in the small hours in the dormer box we grafted atop our semi. Whistles, snaps and thuds wobble the steel frames of the windows and a neighbour’s watering can tumbles and tolls about the lawn. The winter crush is coming, venting out the last warm air for the sting of the morning cold when I pad down to feed the cat and make first coffee. The country is locking down again and the goose ain’t getting fat. Will be a pang to see the new bookstore close its doors, I’m no devotee of the company but they deserved a better shot at making it work. And the library too, though the visits are grim enough already, thinned shelves and a plastic crate for returns, a three day quarantine before they scan them in. How many months will it last, hard to trust the dates we’re given. But here’s change, working around us. Some find opportunity in the closings, firewood from a felled tree, while others look on in wonder.
on my blockwalk tree, down at the Cherwell landing. Two men drag a canoe from the flood. The cars whine from the ring road bridge as I pad along the muddy track, in and out of the embankment copse. There’s no glamour here, no glitz, only a few twitchy squirrels and the low, black-smoke clouds rushing in from Kidlington way. And the light on the Cherwell tree.
quicker than I pile my words. With the fiction I’m so slow it hurts to check the daily count, but you have to give the hours to daydreaming to conjure up a life imagined. And there’s a wee drop of the sublime when the sentences fall right. I assemble my chunk, a meteor of killer lines, soon to watch it fizzle, flare and cook as it hits the in-tray atmosphere. I craft my strategy, still trying to shunt forward from observe to orient in my OODA loop.
we only get glimpses of the set and most are blurred or distorted. It’s the same with stories and film, only seen frame by frame. We fill in the gaps to reach our truths. I’ve been in this town more than ten years and there are so many roads I’ve never been down, but I think I know the town. I head out on the cruiser, adding notes to my mental streetscape map. Soon it will be too cold for idle bike rides, faces go a-grimace, fingers pinch on the grips and instead of enlarging my town map I’ll wonder only of hearth and home.
as the footie season starts up. A burst of colour around the green slab of the garden, trying to save the butterflies from the leaping cat. The noir takes shape, but too slowly. I’ll send the first ten or fifteen thousand in when I get to the villain, dangling a silver hook in the watery vastness again. Dark loomings keep me wide-eyed through the lonely hours, another lockdown, rumblings in the West, hard times and confusion as we go into the stark, brittle months. I run my DIY errands around the discount sheds, the sky looks down unruffled, bemused by my worries.
to blow the dust from my eyes. I try to write and patch the ship to keep it afloat but Sanin’s shapeless monsters are stirring on the sea bed. Work in the Arts has taken a battering, our leaders talk of fantastic schemes to keep the virus at bay – though we all know they’ll come to nothing – and we bicker and snipe in our dealings on the international stage. I’ve never known a world crisis like this, never needed to pull something out of the bag more than now with my own work and the path I’ve taken. Words, don’t fail me now.
at 4:48, I remember it from her last play, the darkest time for her, bang in the middle of the graveyard shift. The small hours. But that’s pushing five, you’re only an hour from six and normal life for a lot of people, buses and postmen and happy bakers setting out their shelves. I can easily watch the light coming for an hour, plan out the day to come, canter around in the past. Earlier is worse for me. I’d go for 3:05 as optimum grimness, the first flash from the phone, eyes open and fully awake. Too soon for six and first coffee. Too late to be up watching movies or flicking through Bukowski’s laments. That’s when you sink down into the mattress, heavy as a submarine settling in some hadal pit, too deep to ever swim up from. Too late to turn the lights on for a spell. Too early to try not to get back to sleep, though sleep feels like some impossible mystery, not for the likes of me. Who has the keys to sleep? Five-mile walks help. I was down in Cold Ash to fix the car, had to kill two hours, found a quiet lane to wander. And swam in sleep ’til 8.
with the Cherwell sluggish and muddy only a few hundred yards from my front door. The Thames curves just a mile to the west, almost wide enough to swallow a thrown stone there but narrowing as it approaches the sandstone walls of the centre. And cut between the rivers is the canal, straight and willow-shaded by Jericho to where it meets the Thames at Sheepwash Channel. Old hands save journey time by learning the bike trails along the canal and the waterpaths, or take to kayaks and coracles and go bobbing along the flood. Older hands still have tales of ice blocks and tumbling in on five-pint night rides, racers snagged on rudders, boats ablaze, killer swans, red-eyed derelicts with spiderweb face tattoos and festival folk wandering in from Aristotle Rec or the Meadow approaches. There’s a single gondola moored at Folly Bridge, it would be something to see it nosing out of the reeds and mist on my own lonely river stretch.
