of a 30s semi, letters carved into sooted stone. There’s a story there, there always is – some mason or fitter whispering out of the past – and I’m thinking of Blake and the sad sweep’s dreaming,
And by came an Angel who had a bright key,
And he opened the coffins and set them all free.
from your library door, pilgrim. A few steps from the books could take you on other adventures.
is the colours of the sunset scattering.
the good stuff, like I, Robot, and the ideas and ethics are still fresh. There’s not much in today’s art cinema AI scripts that you won’t find swiped from Isaac’s short stories. And his 1950s foreseeing that’s turned out to be wrong is no less fascinating than the human-machine psychodramas where his prescience struts. He’s too careful at times – with world population growth, miniaturization and all things digital – or too wild, with his family jet cars and day tripper space rides. But how often does a fiction writer ingrain and fuse ideas in the imagination of the people designing and constructing our futures? Or is this true of all great books? What power that is to dream of, for the lowly scribe.
dazzled on the asphalt, shuffling along the avenue, weighing up the day’s pathways and potential, silently revelling in the what-may-come.
and I’m out in the drizzle, stamping the frost-spike sidelines. But it’s good to be under the sky, great billows of cloud hung across the straw fields and decking the blue out to the Chilterns ridge. Nature rampant and showing off. Everything still to play for.
you’ll find refuge from the floods in the tottering Punter. I’d stop by when it was known as the Waterman’s Arms and the tapster almost growled when pestered for a pint. Or push on along the broadening river, come alive to its mysterious magnificence, searching for Riverman moored up in the reeds.
I’d get out to Venice to gaze at Pollock’s Mural, before the show closes in November. But I can’t see an alignment and I’ve other business that harries the idea from my mind. I might have to content myself with the sweeps and circles I spy in the rain.
outside Hardys, pear drops to rival palm trees. Back to the desk for another stab at it before the winter storms blow in.
as they grip the railing. Hush at the sight of the plain below, hush in fear of rousing the rippling black-sack bee colonies that hang in the wind hide.
