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for good reason and Anne of Green Gables is a fine book. Even that old grouch, Mark Twain had to love it. Anne Shirley is hyper sensitive to colours, to grating point at times, but in gunmetal November I’ll take what colours I can and mutter my thanks. I’ll cross the street to get closer to the International Klein Blue of a building plot fence on my way to the shops, smile at the memory of that Karate chopping colourist. If only he’d jumped out of the window for real, broke some bones for his art instead of cutting two pics together and running fake newspaper stories. But maybe great art needs some artifice? If too real, it passes unnoticed, hidden in the furls of our everyday lives and observations.

back from Riverman’s without stopping if I get enough speed up but the fog unnerves me, jabs into the thought jumble and the subconscious calculus. Night on Bald Mountain from my phone, a forgotten Halloween playlist, rammed into my shirt pocket. The towpath greasy with leaves, almost lost the back wheel at the guard rail turn, peddle faster. Are books analogue downloads of our that-second state of mind, our imaginative yearning and reading of things? Every novel is a map learned. Where for coffee, Zappi’s bike cafe is the best in town, please don’t besmirch my cappuccino with cocoa, wouldn’t dream of it, sir, not at Zappi’s, but you can never get a table. Why is the aiming reticle – why reticle? a net for your target perhaps – so slow in Drake’s Fortune, I get blasted and keep greying out. The game’s AI knows me too well. All gone into memory past, gone with the geese chevron clacking overhead as I crest the bridge a cold second later.

along this coastal path he told me, I sought it out on my visit. The boards peel and every pane is cracked, can’t be long before they tear it down to build flats with tiered views of the estuary. But for now it’s wild and alone and I can imagine him in his toast-crumbed peacoat looming at the window, eye to the distant whitecaps and the comings of boats, the little fishers and the ferry back from Lundy. Riverman had a child and a woman he loved and for most he was happy, but some flawed part in him fouled the workings. Broke-anchored, he drifted up to my landlocked town, drinks tea and gin in the shallows, holds forth about the right to be left alone. The right to live undisturbed in the gaps of this world. But you’re welcome anytime you are, son, if the cabin chain’s off I’m aboard, you just knock and I’ll answer.

coming in than you expected, slapping the black stones under your window and foaming in the slipways. It wakes you in the still-dark morning, more restless and alive than your own aching body under the duvet. The miles seem longer as you age, and the tides faster. Moon’s turn fever never slows, snapping at your cracked heels.

stand beguiled by the analogue. Making cupcakes with my kids, I try to explain that the pointer moves in response to the weight of the flour. It’s all cogs and levers and springs, I mutter. And I remember the needle trembling as it entered the red zone on my first car’s speedo, out on the road to the hills, the Crimson album back cover with the danger gauge, my friend’s roaring wreck with its rows of glowing dials and tiny clocks buried in the walnut dash, amp meter, oil pressure, a feast of needles all rising and falling. The same friend with a show on in London tonight, my invitation coded in an email, not sure I can make it in, stretched, self edging into the red. We’re analogue too, I want to say to the bakers, alive to continuous change in the physical world. We’re inexact. But wisely I keep my mouth shut and fetch the caster sugar.

in my age it seems, but time. The hours too precious to me now, I shudder when I think of my twenties and the squandering of days and years. Would that I could write something great to make amends. I leave early from the desk, bike into town to a talk at All Souls, the mighty sundial of the second quad flashing in the winter sun. Guard and savour your hours, I take the inscription as warning, for all is recorded and noted and held in testimony. There’s no escaping the sum of what you are, in moments of self-reflection in the four a.m. dark. I couldn’t get my mind off the sundial as I found a seat in the seminar room. But the talk rang true, it was an hour well-spent. And the town looked right and glorious riding back, a low, bright sun to light me home.

lives down on the island loop between the Thames and Castle Mill Stream, lazing in the green fringes of the parking lots and industrial units. Here, the waterways double back and disappear under a graffito brickface in the railway bridge, the leaning boards of ever-sodden rear gardens and overgrown banks. I’d like to kayak around these lonely side channels and forks, measuring all the forgotten turns and willow-canopied green pools. I could draw up a map of the watery lanes, go silent and unobserved as my soft-padding Ladro.

through the school-run mist, still haunted by a dream. So vivid it only feels one step away from living, a confrontation with a phantom, eye to eye. I can recall her face clearly even now. I wonder why dreams rack and shake us, are they memory traces or some extra, latent sense not yet mapped in the brain connections. Are they something mocking us? In sleep, all our powers and conceits fall away to neonate awe and each morning we must trawl our adult memories and reinvent ourselves, minted new with every sunrise.

through the wake of week’s end revelry. When faced with the whirlpool of an impossible dilemma, Asimov’s robots go mad and shut down but we might choose to Gordian knot it, smash into the street furniture, run whooping from the scene. Did hairy apes go lolloping into last night, shards of red plastic scattered behind them and the nightshift parking control officers mumbling and scratching at their chins?

they shame all sadness, and lure you out to the Meadow to stare at the ponies.