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at the ranch, young admirers who asked him what he thought of the current president. He didn’t know who was in the job, didn’t follow the news from decade to decade. So the tale goes, something I read in one of the US magazines. I’ve been wondering about my own attempt at disengagement from the instant snap and clamour of the news, if not as thorough. I was too close to it last year, squandered too many hours. Maybe Burroughs was only interested in the old stories, the ancient dust. He’s on my mind this cold morning, still in print but I suspect membership of the beat myth – the half-forgotten daydreams of nations – the sordid tales recounted in the bios and the cut ups are more his legacy than the books. I’ve been cutting up the plans I’m making, the fledgling strategy, wondering if there’s a clearer route to decode from my tangled draftings. Hoping for a signal to come bouncing back out of the inky neuron weave, a clue to something unimagined.

with a glance back to the flooded Meadow, the hillside cubes of the Radcliffe glowing silver in the low sun. And here a woodland hideaway come the zombie apocalypse, a quad bike and walls of tinned food in the scullery. No mark of the city, barely two miles distant. They don’t clear the split branches and dead trees, it gives the woods a creepy, untended air. This is a place to read ghost stories, with your back turned to an open door and the dusk. My grandfather used to flick through his Hitchcock Presents paperbacks in the basement of his towering terrace, green linoleum and the retired operating chair bulky in the shadows. He read with door open to a lonely alleyway, a glass of Black Label within easy reach. I’ll take some MR James out to the woods next time the family agree to a yurt or dome excursion. I’ll read out the scare stories, teasing the silence, welcome in the New Year and the shrinking dark.

in what you ask for, exposed as idle-note wishes made real. Books as ciphers and hints and stories of self to come. The lock pins lifting. This next digit flick brings changes, a road up by venture and resolve or folly exposed. Was it just the not-asking, or was there nothing there? What glorious and revelatory work is this.

laying down the nuts. Seven on a sideplate and a sip of Calvados, Yule provisions. And so it begins.

pulsing LED heralds of the solstice and gift-giving. The dark’s still rising but there’s more cheer about than the November slog, Melville’s grimness about the mouth. The days will start to stretch soon, light cracking the blackness before I wake. And people look outside themselves a little. The long nights bring more time at the pages. I find another collection of Orkney tales of crofters and fishermen, yule yarns and candles in the stone-set glass, old men by the fireside. There’s some yearning in me for the natural, living as I do in the asphalted shards of it, the strip of grass I planted, the herbs and spindly organics in the border. Most things under my patch of sky here are designed, straight-angled and hard. It’s taken me a long time to see the art in this designed world, a different kind of beauty that resonates nonetheless. I’m drawn to the magic of the lines, colours and shadows, they have their own rightness. That rightness of music, of craft, of Newton’s mappings, Jack’s confused missives and all human efforts to match the natural resonance. The best of our designed world is no less sublime.

of free expression via daubings on the hoardings. Coded art for morning wanderers, collectors of biscuits, coffee bandits. There was religion in the markings but they’ve been wiped away by the orange-vested site porters, only the silver streak remains. It speaks more to me than the original marker scratchings. But this quadrant of the town is rich in godly souls, I see robes and staffs on my Banbury Road driftings, I saw a guy standing in a bus shelter earlier this week holding up a number-plate-size sign with JESUS printed across it in orange letters. I don’t think he was waiting for a bus. There are sanctums here, quiet lodges with 70s fittings and floral wallpaper where theology seeps from the bricks and shag carpets. Perhaps the site message was for these more-godly residents?

from an unexpected gift carried back from the Horn massif. It tastes of sun and smoked spice. I grind and let it bloom, wrap my fingers around the mug when the drip’s done. Cold snap came down hard this week, there’s a frost on the back lawn when the night clears. But I keep the rads off until four. Work to a candle. And drink more Ethiopian. I may be a poor scribe but I have coffee fit for kings.

steals in, breathing chill and dark over our lips. The fishermen haul in their boats and I wait for a contract. I dig out the front garden, setting fence posts and ordering in the Siberian Larch. The eccentric millionaire swinging his sledgehammer to smash the lilac stump. Scratching at the earth. ‘That it should end like this,’ said the tank commander in Kolyma Tales, staring out at the taiga scrub from his escapee bear-cave hideout. I haven’t known cold like that. Only up in the Altiplano did I get a sense of cold that will kill you, cold to chrystalize your lungs. I’ve never seen an ice forest to every horizon, though I tried to write a tank duel in an imaginary one – the Kassan Woods. I had a German crew pursued by ghosts – it was cold and scary. But I don’t know real cold. I’ve only read London, and Albanov, and Cherry-Garrard, and the most frightening opening chapter I’ve read in years, Simmons’ The Terror. I light a candle and count my luckies, curl up with the cat. I’m a fairweather scribe.

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.