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just a few shufflers, spook-eyed, how-this derelicts and an early runner, a slow-moving decorator in the saloon bar where we used to sup back in ancient days. A time when a roll of £300 would last me for weeks and all that mattered was the next rendezvous, the next open car door and show to play. All the while that crazy breath in the air that we were free, chasing after what’s got to come, no looking back on what’s been. I step quickly away from the beer hall.

Alone now in the streets of little brick houses. Here would be a fine place to hide away from the world, Riverman had said. They might not bother you here. You could lock the doors and work on your poems and yarns, prowl out to the Punter for evening drinks, sharing fantastic tales with them that chug up and down the canals. Hang a kayak in the back garden and foray out at dusk, exploring secret waterways. Crepuscular as a barge cat, stepping silent through the riverbank bushes. I feel sure I’ll find him here.

thinking on life under the malady. It presses in. With no vaccine I can’t see the politicos saying lockdown was all for nothing, so the perspex screens and nervous distancing will stay. The Oxford team are 80% confident, should know by June but I don’t hear from them on the radio or tv, only the holding-to-account journos and the harried, hopeless and hapless ministers in charge. I’d like more science but even there it’s weather forecasting, nothing’s certain. We can’t know what would have happened, what the other turn might have led to. With no vaccine we either hide away or try to live cautiously, always keeping an eye on ward capacity. But I nod thanks that we’ve been allowed to wander out with our cabin crew, to follow the curve in the water. Riverman was moored here one winter not long back. I heard he’s back in town for the corona caesura. And from tomorrow I can head out to more distant backwaters, I’ll go a-searching.

of cooling, to make my granite setts. Broken away from Africa and hewn in what we call Portugal. They’ll linger around my fruit trees as a stone border for a few more years, their journey’s so long my own passes in a heartbeat.

and reflecting on the guy in Taos, I wonder if his dunroamin’ days came on in stages. Already in the first moments of departure I begin to enjoy the prospect of the journey back more than the venture out, but that could be because so many of my journeys lack glamour or novelty. And I fret more as I age, about the humdrum perils of delays, checks and other hassles. But these things never used to cross my mind, just to be moving was desirable. I’m more protective and want control of my time now, though I’m a dismal housekeeper of the hours. Or it could be that I’m more conscious of the horde, that I – and no other – can make accurate inventory of minutes left. Disarmed by the not-knowing I pace and waste the gushing seconds. So the stages creep on and I barely notice them. What was unimaginable is slowly gained by this gentle creep, until all longing to see a new valley or cove is gone. I’ll resist that, put down a marker. I’ve still far to go, stomping in my reality boots – with a nod to Jack.

is under lock and key and grizzled vets like myself are banned from the end stools, turning the pages over a pint of porter. Virtual drinks don’t have the visceral tick and bustle of the long-windowed room, the fug and glimmer, the wood tabletop with its scuffs and beer drops, the tapster persona to ponder. These pixel parleys are flat and false and the tech never works as well as it should. And there’s no shared experience, just some slither of a foreign kitchen or second bedroom over the shoulder. It’s a lonely business, wondering how you come over in the low-res LED flicker, serving only to remind me how much I miss those infrequent tramps to my local.

the last hours done? All the time I’ve squandered when I should have been working to win entry to The Library of the Dead, never knowing how deep lies the pool. It might be time’s up already, but I don’t feel that way. We’re all troubled like Katya is in A Dreary Story, I imagine, in the manner of our character, whether or not we’re a negative phenomenom. All thinking things must have doubts, an awareness of their mistakes and misses. It’s a journey back on ourselves, this time of standing off from other humans, closed borders and grounded planes, all but housemates shunned. I can only hope for purpose glimpsed again, a path emerging through the gorse before the haar blows in.

it’s been with me my whole life. I know it from the overcast Yorkshire gloom, dripping woods, blackwater streams and the bone-jolting judder of the rugby field. I know it from the scrub trees and bushes of howling motorway service stations and industrial parks, interviews with unsmiling men for jobs I didn’t want, the sweet relief of not getting them and another turn of the cards. I know it from Dear John ice-cold park walks, supermarket parking lots, dreary terrace gardens and the weeds growing out of locked up Grosvenor Square town houses. It’s the crayon green of public space Blighty, overgrown railway track sidings and roundabout reservations, plastic bags snagged in the branches. And I’ve ventured about in other lands and seen other greens, sunlit and balmy, but this is the one I always come back to. I didn’t choose it, I don’t like it or dislike it, but it dogs me. There’s no swerving my England green.

and the cat’s been beheading the tulips. I rescue them for the vase and think of O’Keeffe colours, the drive up the rutted track to the writer’s cottage, the enormous sky and the red chile sauce over a wrap of fries, Dave the barman acting Chekhov, lazy talk of the abstract greats and distant LA. I remember drinking beer with a guy, perhaps he was the age I am now, and saying we were heading out in the morning. I joked he should come along for the ride and he shrugged, said there was a time he’d drop everything, go anywhere just to be moving. But now he just wanted to sit on the porch and drink beer. I’m not there yet, there are places and things I still want to touch and see. I’ve miles yet to go, when the curtain lifts.

at four, no traffic hum from the ring road, no gurgling drunks taxi-rolling home. And thousands of lonesome lockdown insomniacs like myself following the phrases. I try to steal back into sleep before the sun comes around, sleep a thick-walled sanctuary from care and the sameness of the waking hours. My dreams are all adventures. When the glare glows too bright I make coffee and set out into the quiet roads for my dash to the shops. And then I work my chores and try to tap a few lines. I read Chekhov for clues on exile, Freud and Hoffmann to chart the uncanny alley we wander now.

as the plague lingers. I worry less when I’m moving the dirt, wondering how to fix the front yard so the neighbours don’t let out a sigh as they walk by. Shovel labour blunts the dread. And there’s a lot of it about.