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for a month, an experiment to quit the half pint I’ve been heating every day for my joe for the last twenty years or so. From the third or fourth cup I don’t miss it. It was the same with sugar, I quit a two-spoon habit when I stayed at a house in Stockwell with no supplies for a few weeks. No milk in the tropics, living in a hut on Rarotonga. No milk in the village in And Quiet Flows the Don, the returning combatant cossack’s new wife branded a witch for spooking the cattle. Only a few pages in and it’s tugging me away from On the Eve. Turgenev’s dreamy ramblings don’t have the earth and blood hammer-hit of Sholokhov, like you can smell the ponies and the steppe dust. I thank the stars for the Russian scribes. I thank the stars for the two inches of java juice that keeps me turning the pages.

resting in the ivy opposite the butchers. I’ve stomped past here a hundred times and never spotted the masque, only with the fresh, sober snap of the New Year do I see it. All the things I must miss on my morning walks, hung up trying to download another distraction, I should throw the phone over a wall and spend my moments hunting for the hidden in the real world, the things lurking at the edges of the senses.

is fading. I spent the gathering days here, inside the city limits, pacing the lanes with my boxes and cards. There are more people sleeping out than ever, a change must be coming. And now to London, a last tarmac sleigh ride before the New Year. And more wisdom to search for in a week free from work, borrowed from the bowing shelves.

that leads up from the allotments, you’ll see the outline of the bridge through the bushes and the grey-sky fuzz. It’s quiet here, even with the cars taking off for London and the hospital traffic, the wind blows the engine fermata out over the floodlands. There might be nobody around for miles. You’re forgotten, but your heart keeps beating, defiant.

of books, the business of living and the moon glowing bright as a hole in the sky. All the leaves are going, the window rectangles from the estate poke through. The squirrels are getting tubby and I tramp Shabbington Wood with the mushroom hunter, pause to see the last red roar of the winter sun. Come the cold and the colour-fade and the consolation of a sip of Calvados.

going out. The tide stays where it is, lumped mid-slop in Newton’s magic trick, held by the moon. It’s you rolling away from the tide, carried away on the turning Earth. You’re not left behind, you’re moved on. We’re all freeloaders and freeriders on the sphere, with just an instant to admire the rose in the community apple orchard.

to work. It tempts the eye and a longing to be out there. I sit and look at the sunflowers and think maybe I should have a dog, a dog that begs walks and then pays for the beer in the valley-crease boozer, leads me tramping away through the flower fields. All those millions of upturned, sun-blanched sunflowers to border the curling roads out at Trafalgar. Eyes staring fifty miles instead of the five inches to this screen. But there’s no dog and no tramping, no fifty miles, just me and the M&S sunflowers on my work table and Wes Montgomery playing D-Natural Blues. But that aint bad and it’s not too late for another cup of the tropic nectar. Five paces away.

clouds in my coffee give the game away. I work at the table, trying to imagine a plan before the winter snap rolls in. But I’m taking so much fire from the ground, so many flashes and hurts, I can’t see the LZ for squint and smoke.

so cool it soothes. But you get nothing back from the desert, only a hot, maddening wind and the taste of salt on your lips.

with the ghost of Nelson and a rushing palette of blues. Africa stands off in the cloud line.