and the days wash and blur into each other. The planners want to build more houses close to this bridge but the water roils and the subterranean infrastructure won’t allow it, their plans are blocked. Out on the roads the cars zip and press thicker than ever and there’s a hard-done-by mood hanging over the shop shufflers, pint sippers and clutch of pals I still see about the town. We’re all waiting for spring and the dry, waiting for something to come along, things to get better. And I fast and listen to Dele Sosimi, write my lines in the sage-green study and look for animal trails to follow out of the woods.

out on the western fringes of the town for a five-mile stroll. Here be mansions and swimming pools, set hidden in the woods. But I’m locked out from this elevated set, sunk in the hedgerow tracks turned to bog by thousands of advance cagouled trampers. I squelch and slide over the mire, thinking of sad-eyed Baron Trotta the Third marooned in his borderland garrison town, driven to despair by legions of frogs croaking from the marshes. Those who step from the narrow path through the forest are swallowed up. Trotta frets about his fetters and times, who doesn’t? He haunted my for a few days but I’m moving on swiftly, taking the train to the Magic Mountain, already feeling the tug of it after 30 pages. I read more as an antidote to my own swirling times and doubts over which path to take. Aim for the high ground, I reason. Since cell first divided from cell we’ve been clambering away from the ooze, I sense a lesson in that.

probing the boundaries of my soggy patch in this belt of England. The water’s been high here, even the raised paths are bogged. No sight of any vehicles, no shelter other than the birder huts, just a few lone wanderers under the sky. The birds flick among the hedgerows, don’t seem bothered by the crackle of rifle shots from the MOD grounds eastwards. Almost a month into the year and I’m dizzy with the pace of it. Plans and pathways fade to nothing under my fingertips, I try to reach but I can’t feel the universe reaching out to me. Out on the plain we miss a turn or the map is a fiction and we plod miles off our route, have to work to return to the village and the car. We buy a pack of game from a coolbox trader, ride home to feast. Rushing along, skimming over the hours, living to the tempo of every quiet heartbeat.

and I went looking for a fried fuse, bought a multimeter and crawled around under the dash listening out for circuit beeps. But it was an exhausted pump. I booked it into the garage to swap it out and then we got a cold snap – after weeks of rains and storms and the flood plains abrim either side of the peninsula – so the handbrake seized, some moisture on the contacts froze, maybe. I have to wait for the sun and 2˚of thaw before I can roll. Now I watch the weather reports like an astraphobe, fearing the fronts and the frosts. In the summer the engine cuts out because the heat messes with the air intake, in the winter the back wheels lock tight. I have to use the car club to head over to Essex for a rare day playing guitar. It was better in the storms, at least the car agreed to move. Noel was quiet, calm. But I’m still hunting work, ever-buffeted by the book game. Been reading the Russians again, the SWW march back through the towns fought over today, attacks and counterattacks around the rivers and marshes. And The Magic Mountain sits weighty on the shelf, daring me to reach out for it. Could be summer again before I get through it. I move through my days, trying to concentrate on the local, the little things I can buy and do and support. Concentrating on things I can do well, even if it’s no more than making a decent cup of coffee. I have next to no agency beyond the ring road, and I know it.

kills the crackers, must be the third or fourth device I’ve snapped in the runup to the winter solstice, the only time I carry home some bags of nuts. It’s the almonds that gets them. We are soft us organics but we can outlive the alloys, the wires, pulleys, bolts and levers. Physics finds all that’s fragile.

takes you up from the Cherwell and behind the clipped lawns of Summer Fields, between wire, boards and bushes before the track throws you out in the streets of 30s houses. Eyes eastwards and it’s all fields out to Headington Hill and the escape road to London, skimming over the plain to the Chilterns. For a few years I’ve thought I’d like to get away more with work and research but I’m not sure now, I’ve discovered on recent forays that I’ve lost interest in decoding the intrigues and veiled motives of strangers, making sense of what people really want from you as they sell, pitch and posture. It’s not that I’m above it, I was just never good at it and can’t pretend I want to be. And the deal so rarely comes good. I am my own, local oddity, I accept it. I take my pleasure in the Swobo Sanchez running silent down the alleyways, the new bars, my legs getting stronger as I bike more. There I go.

on the fresh-revealed Blighty savanna. The park trees are putting on a last blaze of colour before winter’s lid snaps shut. And I tramp along the alleyways on my morning messages, puzzling over changes in the air and all the reality cables and relays shifting and resetting, musing on what silences and shocks the week might gift me.

to hear reggae under a haze of incense blurring the rafters, gift of an earlier gathering. I wander to the back of the long hall while the band do their check, meet a velvet curtain and gothic door. A web of hidden rooms and courtyards in this city and here I am, walled away from the walkers and tilted drinkers on St Giles’, set on my own arcane quest for the evening but stopped by another locked door. What assembly stands behind it, I wonder as the band starts up and I return to my seat.

from all the crazed hate in the world news I volunteered to help dig and clear along the borders of the floodfields by the Cherwell. I pushed a barrow and picked up cuttings in the sunshine, nabbed some apples from the communal trees and tried not to disturb the person sleeping in the tent down the track. Some cows saw me and packed over the marsh, maybe they thought I had some feed or I’d share out the apples? Do cows eat them, I’ve only tried them on horses? They ganged up along the wire, eyes gazing depthless until a strange, gold-brown cow parted them and looked me over, not a finger away. The light was low in the sky and dazzling and just for a moment the cow’s swirl seemed gold as the fleece in my imaginings – would a wild animal be even bolder, brighter, more striking? Here the stories grow, here in the lonely marshes when we’ve come to hide from the problems out of our reach, out of our reckoning. I went back to my work and then biked for home, baked some apple muffins to chomp with my pre-dusk coffee.

for Asterios and wondering about the ones we turn out to the world. Growing, changing and ageing, we’re all shapeshifters. I wish I had more skill at the making, my mask plans are overthought, too plain or grotesque. But I’ll stick at it, there’s some mystery there that tugs at me. Masks are stories in themselves.