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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.

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.