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for the house, handmade, red dust on your fingertips as you pick them up. No Brexit build shortages here, this is a joint-stock world with walls from all quarters, long as they stand. From Marston to Maastricht.

grinding the beans. Tea and breakfast for the family. To town on errands and then I climb the scaffold to sand and paint the fascias. Lot of wood up there. Between coats, chat with the neighbours and drag a rent branch from the middle of the street and lay it in our skip, civic duty done. Then a long shower and a glass of Carmenere and some Haggard – She – or Coward Peace in Our Time, the books moving up in the tottering bedside pile, shrapnel working its way to the surface. And the sight of the kitchen rose, something exceptional in my allotted hours. I don’t even deserve it. Another day kicked in the ass, as Bukowski said, but I think he was about done in by then, enough repeats. It’s all in the glimpses, if you can open your eyes to them. I’m smiling yet. I’m still running my race.

won’t let you go, always muttering past failings, present weaknesses. Just when I’m thinking I’ve shaken him off and go crouching ready to leap for the next wave, he lumbers out of the swelter, monstrous with scars, bolts wobbling in his neck, all the old anchoring slights and setbacks remembered. But I still slough him off, ready the old bones for another portly bound into the unknown.

my pile of rust-red bricks under the Oxon sun, just one subterranean level, access via crowbar. I don rubber gloves and affix peg to hooter, jab at blockage with stick until my eyes smart and stream from the odour released. Where is my lackey? Where my simpering toady, my lopsided hunchback with his coffin axe, my teams of chefs, minstrels and bedturners? Where my blockage-jabber? No staff for me. I am my own chairman and minion, tea maker, pencil pusher and V-wing visionary combined.  I am the lone, holed boat on the Pacific slab, an army knife of blunt blades in need of oiling. I get the dirty jobs and dream of the others. But life warrants life’s troubles, and the view of the skies after the pit is more than enough reward.

I can’t reason with the wind. I can hear it in the trees, the cedar comes tapping at my study window. It wants answers and I have none.

to notice the little bush pushing through in a back corner of the enclosure. Too much rushing around to turn the branches and see the fruit. Saw them first in Mark’s garden forty years back, pocketfuls and a palm of sugar, hiding from his baffled father in the high curtain of a willow. Time in hand then, time to daydream. But roaming the garden after the day’s work is done we find them, an unexpected prize.

room, trying to measure out the steels and the angles and all the other stripped-back habitat arcana, and then for a second I drifted and thought of the colour under the tarp, what I was seeing, the coral pools and electric sky and the way it makes all the other colours so much brighter when I stumble down from the loft and into the gravel yard. And I thought of Anne of Green Gables and the way she notices the colour changes, how she calls them out, disarming, inventive, unashamed. And if you can’t see it too you’re not living. I wouldn’t mock one word of that book. All great characters in the stories we crave speak the truths we hold in.

to read fiction, I keep unpicking the threads of it, pulling back the curtain. Part of it is when you find something really good it’s hard to shake the style of it, so my own words are corrupted for a few weeks. But I write so little these days that hardly matters, I’ve gone all-out Bukowski on the not-writing, and then some. He quit for ten years and started up again in his 40s, I don’t know when my machine’s going to start ticking again. The long stuff terrifies me. Every word like sweating blood, like Colm Toibin said, and the lines used to just roll out onto the paper. And part is I’ve wised up, as Roth told the journalist, it’s too easy to drift and see it as contrived. It has to be special, like Pushkin, or Bellow (and only a few with him) before I can slip into the dream of it. I read in snatches, or I read poems, a quick hit, a glimpse of something like staring at a face flash by on a bus but don’t stick around for it to go sour on you.

And all those books I read as a young man, the burnouts and the alkies, the beats and other wanderers, most were books to read before you can get on a plane and do it yourself. Go see it, do it, you don’t need to read about it. When I was 15 I read Henry Miller, when I was 20 I was living it. Film works better for entertainment now, for me. I watch French gangster films and sci-fi when I find myself with a few evening hours alone, they’re not as clever or thought-out as the books but they’re getting close, with teams of writers and art designers, they outrank the books as entertainments, to my eyes.

There’s still magic, old seams of rose gold hidden in the exhausted mines.

and the whole house fills with dust from the lime mortar crumbling away. Walls and boards are peeled back, the rooms take a battering, just the promise of new shapes and coverings to come.

three flights and a walk up the hill to the cathedral, the tour ends at another gallery. You have to go home and try to write. You have to unpick Alexander’s knot, leave your sword in its scabbard.