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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.

are fields and fake grass pitches, darker stretches beyond where they argue about new housing estates, badger culls and long lane potholes. What would Newman have made of the court juxtaposition, my poor boy gallery walk? He’s up in town but I can’t deal with the RA crowds, the polite shuffling and the hum of all those lungs and throbbing gristle and I’m not hip or rich enough for a private view invite. I saw the work twenty years back, when my eyes were young and nobody bar students, teachers and afternoon drifters visited art galleries. I’ll coast on my hazy memories. I’ll find some silent, lonely spot in the stands and gaze at the zips.

and who can say what manner of beast haunts the outer dark, just beyond my fire bowl glow? Pull the creaky garden furniture closer and hug the smoke.

we leave a park track and he rests his bike up by a pub door. I don’t know this part of town, have never seen this boozer. City is different for all of us.

Day’s road ends, says Riverman.

calling out their reports. It’s never too thick to see your feet in Oxford town, it hangs back, shrouding the street corners and gables. In Valparaiso it covers the Pacific out to the horizon and from the high town you can’t see the market and streets below, the ascensors rising out of the white foamy air, sea beasts breaching. Only half awake I stumble out to do my messages.

again, is it the hour before dawn or after dusk? My night pattern’s shot, I lie gazing at the billows of the ceiling, twitch to every lighthouse sweep of a passing taxi, the howl of a ring road bike bandit. Where is the kiss of sleep, out there in the wind, rushing carefree over the Ridgeway hump or black water. She’s forgotten me in my room at the top of the house, she won’t visit again until the winter press sets in and the iron cold snaps at the glass.

Patrick Hamilton stared out from an orangery or boat house over there, gin-sipping, sleeping it off under the willows. He traded the thunder of the Euston Road for upriver plenty but he carried the glassware along. I’ve read stories of people visiting and finding themselves legless before lunch; a three bottles a day man. Didn’t stop him writing better pages than most of the between-wars lot. I stamp along the bank, trying to imagine a life there, sun rooms and staff and something shiny and fast waiting on the driveway. It doesn’t seem like much to long for, and that could explain why I’ll never get it. You have to believe in the magic trick for it to work. Sceptics and septics get to plod the riverpaths, chasing other dreams.

bus stop and pavement my purlieu, my gaudy backdrop. Oddball’s negative waves trap you in cul-de-sacs, steal the track from under the engine. All it takes is a sideward step and you’re free, back in the maze and a-dreaming. Hack through the hedges, to colour again.