trying not to watch or listen to the news, the rancid cursings of solitary drunks on their moonlit returns. Too ill for my inky alchemy, though the wolves paw at the welcome mat. I run to the hills and walk between villages, over by Caractacus Pott’s windmill. My friends are sure of what they voted for. I’m not sure of much, not even sure the car will start for the journey home. But I still make plans, as the world wobbles towards darkness. I’m putting up scaff shelves in the study, strong enough to hold a legion of egos and opinions, strong enough for Hem through to Huncke via Hegel. I’ll keep a light burning and campaign through the pages.
at the superstore, miffed because they’ve started filming me at the checkout. For my own protection. I scan the car park slab searching for more cameras but only spot crow up on the apex of the grocery shed, gazing calmly at Creation. And the moon and the daylight-hidden stars and memory-mocking ancient time are a canopy over my cropped head. I have slipped between the cracks, I’m a ghost to the hours who suddenly remembers what it was to be alive. Do the work and then do something that makes you feel more alive.
that dubbed us Holy Dungmakers. Sidestepping all the other meanings and thematic nods in that, the name comes back to me as I glance at the mud underneath my fingernails. I’m a digger and a spreader of dung, though not my own, shifted back and in touch with waste and the cycle of decay, the unticked centuries of working the dirt for a plateful. Three hours sifting the soil and sprinkling seed and I’m invested in my tiny spot of earth, as much as the crazy father in Love and Death and the square foot of ‘land’ he carried around in his coat pocket. I really care when I spot the birds pecking away at my sowing, dash out there with my twine and silver foil. If they ignore these measures I’ll deploy the cat, dopey and titchy as he is, though that’s the nuclear option, I don’t feel good harming any living thing these days not even a fruit fly, (though I’m not as tender as the guy in Mull who can’t bear to mow the grass around his house). Fruit flies have got life and choice in them, the neuroscience researcher taught me that, they move away from pain. I don’t want any dead birds, it’s bad enough when they stun themselves swooping into the glass panels and leave their wing impact ghostings on the panes. I don’t want dead flying things on my conscience, my guilty-of-everything scribbled list. Twine and foil first. And time. The dirt demands your hours. At the close of The War in the Air, Wells’ proud shopkeepers and merchants are breaking the sod, trying to grow enough to live on in the aftermath of global war. It takes all their waking energy to work the land, to raise enough food from it for a scrawny existence. Only the master gets to loll in the library and pen a few pages, and I’m no master. I’d be serf in the soil come the zombie apocalypse, still muttering lines from In Parenthesis as I rake and water. Still turning them over in my head, these last six years and more since the last entry.
and rushing nights are coming. Jackson’s wood nymphs dance between the pines and beckon towards the forest. They lure me from work, from the slog of solutions over conflict, the reality plod of three meals a day, the straight life. For enchanted seconds I’m barefooting through the long grass, lost in the glades. I’m Port, floating in non-being, the world a zodiac of endless choices and chances all threading away from me, a fantastic diversity all to be explored. And then I snap back, the thread recedes and it’s the keys and the bills and the pinch of the real. Every moment of waking a haddock-slap across the chops. And every breath a gift.
with six days on the shoreline, big winds and the wave slop along the mole, canvas and rope lines playing the masts. All that watery coming and going, the moon-slab tilt, with me reading tatty Lucky Lukes I found in the market stalls and eating cheese. Looking on. Sea as companion. Sea reassuringly unfake and in your face and in motion. Back in Ox I’m sixty miles from the wet and the syrupy, flytip rivers are no substitute. I pine for the flood.
myself up the mountain, but I made it to the cave. There were dolphins in the blue on the way out and behind us the cube of the Iona church rock-steady on the sealine. And the waves poured in, no music to my ears, only the onomatopoeiac sham of words trying to capture something unsayable, Jack’s scribblings at Big Sur, Debussy and his beautiful sounds still missing the note. There’s no mind-born facsimile for waves on basalt. But in the reaching there’s something just as precious, moreso as it’s born from our yearnings, imaginings, the still-unknown sparkings and secret worlds set between human ears. The passengers gasped and gaped, thrown about on the swell, in wonder for Staffa and wonder too for their own journeys and driftings that had brought them here, to the quiet island of the church and the edges of the old western world. A clear-skied, glorious day.
of the wards, the last, wanderable boozers and views out from the fringes. This town’s befumed. I’ll run northwards for air, try to climb another volcano and set the ink coursing again.
comes hours of the tarmac whine until a crash holds us above Exeter, with a helicopter inbound for casualties. I pad around the forbidden reservation, hunting for rocket among the wildflowers and broken bits of trucks. All lanes are shut now and the engine winds down.
to trawl the banks looking for the cat donor, I’ve been in the tunnel trying to clear fifty thousand words. You have to carve the hours out of the day to write, the sand in the glass is always falling. I try to avoid the lure of current affairs, it’s too fleeting and worthless. The old machines don’t work in the new age, nobody is up to the job, none of the players are clean. But it’s hard to look away, even harder to turn the router off. Soon there’ll be no off-switch and the devices will be conversing. But I have my escape plan. I have an Eden in mind, just me, the family and the cat – if he wants to come along. He might prefer the urban scene, he’s a Barton bruiser by birth. But it’s only when you reach your Eden that you understand the depths of your folly. I’ll have some years left to reflect, listening to the sea from a hammock in the orchard.
and gifted me a companion. I wasn’t here, he left no note, only the box and the cat and “from Riverman”. He sits on my shoulder in the long afternoons, gazing through the glass doors. I’m wise enough to enjoy it and feel lucky while it lasts, before the call of the wild draws him into the garden. And I step out looking for Riverman along the waterways.
