henrybrook.com

on an errand, stopped to stare at the downs and the open sky. I’m craving another mountain. The noise on the wires will squeeze the life out of you, got to run to find a clear spot.

sober as I wake and face the sun. First coffee, the first hour the best. Meditate by morning, abandon all hope in the long afternoon.

playing September Song, pad out to the canal. But Riverman’s lost to the quiet waterways, his old boat gone and nothing left but a slur of dead weeds and ripped earth where it broke free. Could be a month or a year before he returns. He once told me I could always write to him at the Blue Anchor, Hammersmith, if I needed him. A friendly salt would leave the card behind the bottles until he blew in for a pint, or pass it upriver on the boats. He doesn’t do tech, Riverman, doesn’t trust the digital flicker. This town feels more friendless and forsaken than ever.

with the appropriate traffic cones. The lines are all painted and grooved, we hurtle towards the break.

a man by the keys he carries. But they tell a part of the story. Two house key sets, a steel mailbox, bike shed, three bike locks and a venerable cruiser. These are the doors and bindings I pass through most days. It’s not easy to cast them away and break orbit, but it’s a fine feeling when you do. They lie in wait for your return, scheming in drawers and forgotten pockets.

with the apple juice before me, my two kids chomping pizza. Curse those bricked-up doorways, they make me feel ancient, the six thousand bars under my belt, skies all different, killing time before the gig or waiting on a friend. World’s all out there to conquer behind the lip of the pint jar. Until you wise up and understand the doors lead to other doors, the pieces are all moving out of your ken.

first gazed twenty years back, woken in a 3 a.m. electrical storm with the drapes billowing and rain-streaked, I stepped to the hotel room balcony to furl them in and saw the tower leering and flaunting at the thunderbolts. I begin to repeat my journeys, older and more worn than the sagging steps to the bell tower. And even as I drive across to Lucca I know I’ll be back to see the tooth a third time, prince or pauper, it’s already writ.

up at 42° on the Firenze omnibus. Too hot for coffee, have to take my morning shot in a crystal bowl of granita.

my Nazca Lines, odd geometries to suggest my daily trials and tasks, the house build, the unwritten books, the cobble-worn claims of memory. I tramp my map, conscious of my dot of light on some Milky Way microfiche.

but I’m still tying my laces. I’m watching the clouds stretch out and the storm welling, watching the butterflies – why so many? – in the construction site garden, only just worked out it’s an Anderson shelter foundation that I thought was a flower bed or compost dump in the back corner. The chemicals moving and changing in my head, another memory locked in, for a while, another me-component. All this data to gaze at, to wonder at. That’s why people write, must be in part, in hope that there’s another lonely soul somewhere out there that reads the lines and shares something akin to that wonder, glances up from the page and out to the clouds and there’s some kind of sharing. It’s the wolf call from the deep ravine.

It’s gone time I bike out to see Riverman, he always grounds me.