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into the clutter of books and music that always saves me, makes me think it’s worth stamping the dust. The vocal refrain from A Love Supreme. Frank and Django on guitar, Starbuck in The Whale, London rain in Autumn Journal, a glass of porter and Native Son, Chandler and Hem and Riders to the Sea, Guernica and a private viewing of Homer’s The Gulf Stream, a martini afterwards, My Darling Clementine, Bill Hicks and Le Cercle Rouge, all those French movies, and Boethius, Cicero, Lucretius, the Library of the Dead, the timid artists, the daubers and splatterers, all of them within lazy reach on the shelves. And none of these distractions worth, equal or more mysterious than a single moment with someone you love.

we’re late for training, catch sight of her footprints on the stone, blown away on the air in a few seconds. But they were there and I saw them before they faded away. All words, all photos, just trying to hold the sea back from washing away our footprints. Just a reflected flicker of what it means to be beach-running and alive.

it’s been a week of tears.

works for me, I like the bike flash-by blur of the grass and trees caught on its belly. But its setting is woeful, wedged between dull brick, crash-landed in a vicar’s garden. I guess these are the constraints of working architecture into fossilized towns. But where else in the world would you get such dullard, gate post primness?

to oblivious, but rare times I catch the random colour clash of the universe, look up to see the lurid pink/blue clatter of my bike stand neighbour. Wish I was more aware of combinations and fusions, the great horde of hues on nature’s palette. Tangerine, turquoise, bottle-green and jet. Verdigris and silver, carmine, violet. If I could read the colours I might decode de Kooning, rather than stand there gaping and shamefaced in cement-shoed bafflement.

back in harness, you have to chase after that distant flash of anything’s possible on waking, cling to it as the storm gloom swirls about the house and the ancient debts and challenges bob up from deep mind, bristling, rusting sea mines grey as the waves. I stay cheery, sip my coffee, got it down to 70 cents in Ribeira Quente, growling like a local salt, 40p for a double shot at the Grange. It keeps me jangling as I slip between the raindrops.

out to bob with the whales and sky-gaze over a glass of Basalto. A story to write on mountains and not-quite lost causes.

to find the summit, cloud rolling in, the blue streak of the sea and horizon a floating balance line against the broken slope. Four hours up to the crater, five hours down, hurting. Lunch in the high atmosphere, island slabs in the ocean, beers and biscuits down in the warden’s office, licking wounds. The volcano visited. Another glimpse of the secret energies, the planet’s pathways and the torrents that drive us on to make, go and see.

on the islands in the sky. But will my ascent be thwarted? Do the whales also chart their passings by a breaching glimpse of its white cap.

when the towing paths get busy with joggers and tourists, takes the David Jones up to a quiet stretch in the Heyfords. He asks me to visit him at the Rock of Gibraltar, then after the jars he points to the tiller, take us out, Henry pal, find us the quiet.