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we’re fresh out the caves after all. But you can choose how to act. This ice won’t bear my weight, it’s the long way round for me.

as I roll over to visit Riverman. There’s no softness, classic grace or aesthetic stealth with the public architecture in this town, even the paint they’ve selected will soon fade to sombre Vickers Gun green, peeping from its topcoat swirl of tags and symbols to arrive in coming months. And no lights. Here some sour shuffler might lurk hidden to coincide with my journey home from the motor yacht, accosting and hurling me into the path of a Chilterns rumbler to Marylebone. The Bicester shoppers recoil from the sight, scrunching toes in their Gucci slip-ons while my hot claret is Pollock-flicked along the carriage windows. All for the absence of some subtle uplighters. Who designed this span? Have they already brought in the AI, brute calculus that never looks past load-bearing stats and trapezoid angles – while fleshy organics pad alone towards the meadow, pondering lost arts, stone grandeur and slender wood.

in the dry days of Jan, and the year all to play for. Hack at the weeds growing fast about your ankles and sprint for the shore.

set me pondering the decline of the moral centre, the rent cloth of state and self-survival stratagems. Back in Ox the January gloom presses hard and heavy but I can’t dodge a chuckle when I gaze at my replenished bedside book towers. I’ll take Riverman A Shropshire Lad when I’ve closed the covers, he likes to stomp the galley growling  rhymes…

That is the land of lost content,

I see it shining plain,

The happy highways where I went,

And cannot come again.

quarter sawn oak, expensive, wasteful and tricky. But you get the waves and rays. The creative figure. The flair. It’s the most stable timber, won’t cup or split, can’t change it’s grain. And iron hard. I’ve got three planks of quarter sawn for my tabletop, and there I’ll sit to toast Noel.

in the Aeneid or If I Die in a Combat Zone that isn’t forsworn before the last pages. You can’t write on hate, it’s a false energy. No great books are full of hate, it cheapens. Negative prose is all parlour tricks. Watch the great writers step around it. I walk out into the night-press mists and dream of words and legends, ships closing on the coast, guides waiting at dawn to climb the mountain, humble souls never speaking out against friends or family. Step on.

for sun today, dark on waking, dark as I prepare my last coffee of the day. Murk dirt-white as the steam in Furnas, colour of the sea off Rif, watching the snowfall from the hot tub. Murk dark as the inside of a cow, Twain’s tales from the prairie. Murk of receipts and ledgers, the bescarfed clerk’s dribbling nose. Murk of Mega-City One’s lower levels, of the dust kicked up in Lucky Luke’s Ghost Town. I hide in books and chip away at tasks. I’ll ride the boats in, battle for the beach and then stretch out in the headland grass. Surface skimmer, strip away my cares.

still, is the wind of change not yet blown out? Are we forever coming to terms? But I remember Punk and duck and cover mockery in the nuclear anxiety age, power cuts and Blair Peach and families renting their tvs from shops on the high street. I remember RAF roundel t-shirts and Noel’s Union Jack guitar. Empire regret feels tired now. So is it the fall of the West? Is it labour prices and the robot threat, AI writing our Christmas card poesy and driving the bus? They’re still building mirrored towers and investing in my town, the uni must bring in more money than all the real-stuff making hereabouts. But people seem nervy and out of hope. I look on, musing, trying not to feel like I’m to blame for everything.

hoping I’ll get smarter, wiser, forge some kind of personal alchemy. The Cantos have been shelf-exiled for years, since I was out in the lagoon, but I’ve picked them up again, bought other books that might give me clues to the Ezra riddle. And as with pages ventured I seek out new city tracks to wander, and the city repays. I found the silver ash and crown, hope yet when people will dream and build and drape a tree with words.

reopens soon, will sweep me back out to the cows and puddle lakes, my life coursings determined by the chance turn of civic water gates. Months gone by and I haven’t walked up by Riverman’s mooring. I’ll take him a transpontine gift, mud-splattered and ice-cold, aslant in my technical jacket poacher pocket.