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comes wisdom, but that won’t hold a crowd. Wisdom and truths are for the fireside, the night watch pillow book and the heath. The crowd will stand for youth, they’ll give them their shout. And they’ll gather to be entertained. I watch the entertainers on the tv, looking for their crowd. I’ve skimmed their books, they’re no good, they won’t make it into the Library of the Dead, but that was never the hope, the books are just another chance to hold the crowd, they’re no more important than the interviews and the speeches and the wave to the camera pack, it’s all about the lights and the crowd. You don’t have to be a hermit to write a book that’s worth something, but you might have to be lonely. You hold out from the loneliness on your raft of words. And when the day’s quota’s done, you can come down from the keep and step out into the world, crave no lights, crave no crowd.

marvels Riverman, holding his glass up to the late morning rays. I’ve bought him a pint, I’m on fizzy water. Just a social call, to see how you’re doing, got to get back to it, but he wants to nip to the pub. All the tiny things, he says. All so busy, dashing and colliding. The music of the spheres, billions of years old, just reaching us now and nudging a particle and we can detect it. And I thought it was a long way down to North Devon. He sips, cuts the foam from his lip with a square thumbnail. And you worried I’d washed away, rushing out here in a panic, far from it, lad, I’m sound as a pound and anchored. I say my laters, leave him smoothing a pub paper out on the oak.

and my steps left a ticket punch trail in the grass frost. I dreamed of wrecks and adventures, abandoned cabins to shore up, get a fire going to snub the darkness, post a watch to peer out into the wind and canyon approaches, waiting for rescue, knowing it never comes. And I’m busy with books, drawing up lists and sketches, conjuring words until they ring true. Planning the months, Pollock shuffling in the shadows, expectant or without a care, Lecce glaring, Roerich and his Himalayan violet cloudscapes, all that cold space to wander and gape at. And the ice patterns in from the edges, so slow you barely notice, weaving its white on the meadow flood, the car screen, the grips of my bike. The ice comes to life as the fire splutters and I worry about Riverman and the tossed barges and his tiny stove set on bricks, his mittened hands snapping twigs and driftwood splits to shape, laying them carefully into the crackle.

out along the tracks, on the tarmac, snagged on barriers and ticket machines. There are still empty spaces, storm-swaying stump bushes and trash flowers ablaze in the gutters. Drive two hours and we can walk a bare beach, trees leaning up the pebble banks behind us and no mark of man, just the satellites 300 miles up watching, never sleeping. Even the driftwood gone, bagged for the logburners in the village behind the hills. There are still secret, unglimpsed places, songs unsung, words unwritten.

buffets me to shelter by the garage wall, and even here some hand has been busy sculpting. Decor details are hidden about the set, in the alleyways and paint shop yards. Burnished gold under stone and lichen.

gets me out to the town’s new station in 15 minutes. The whole site is built in new brutalist style, all slot-together concrete sections, zinc post security cameras and razor wire perimeter fences, ready to withstand the zombie apocalypse. No whisper of aesthetic slipped in here, hard utility ripped up the architect’s doodling. But the track skirts flooded Otmoor and curls through the Chiltern woods, the scenery shames the conveyance. I roll back from my meeting cloud-gazing, hideaway villas glimpsed through the trees, writing retreats imagined, a few seconds of other-life possession as the invisible thread draws me on home.

comes January. I’ve been reading tales of the Silent Service, their life inside the creaking pressure hulls and ice or tropic fug glistening on compressed cork walls. They called surface sailors skimmers. It must have been strange living in steel tubes for fifty-day patrols, with some men in the engine watch never climbing the tower ladders to see a patch of sky. It’s caused me to gape at the spaces around me, my study walls, shop aisles, car park tiles. It’s too rare that I’m out in the unbuilt open. Winter’s bite – or depth charges – drives the retreat to sheltering walls.

at the park and even though I see the bright colours in outline, I know they’re an illusion, sky scattering trickery. Two guys from the council arrive with the feed, each in his Hi-Viz safety jacket, a green that smarts the eyes. Vision is a riddle set before us and full of wonders.

and rushing along the mud path to the Vic. I skirt the floodline of woodland vice, gunmetal gas bottles, lager tins, blackened sticks and softer relics. Look through the trees, to scrub and bushes along the Ferry Road behind me, where the killer hid some months back. Who knows what beasts or exiles call this place home?

in the squally gloom with that feeling of the day already sailed from the quay. Friendless and perpetually wet, that’s how you’ve ended up, and then I remembered Riverman and the gift I’d been meaning to carry to Fiddler’s Island. I drove up to the north car park and squelched across the meadow. His boat was dark and black with the flood but I heard a sound to answer my knocking, boots moving in the stowage. He came out in a vest and oilskin trousers, eyes sparkling brighter than the rain when he saw the burnt-gold flash of the whisky box under the flap of my bag. Two tumblers on the front cabin formica, glass thick as my thumb. He poured it out equal. Why so glum? he asked. There’s always good things coming. I’ve got some cheddar and biscuits to go with these.