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we aspire to showing truths. If there are no truths in the serenity of considered words, what hope is there for us tottering apes? But then strong writers say books are all lies and artifice. And there’s some undeniable resonant truth in that for the reader, as they caress the upstart pages. How do you square the two states, that books are both truth and imaginary falsehoods?

It has to be some conviction in your own voice and vision. If something’s true as you write it, it stays minted true in the eye and mind of the reader, they’ll cut you a deal, see it with your eyes. And these questions range out from the books and pad after us in our lives, our mask-wearing, our inner-hopes, ambitions and unseen sacrifices. All these things are true, and no less complex than the balancing act of truths in writing. Books are life.

and the birds and squirrels are busy. Breath hangs in the air on the bike ride to school. The sky has that nothingness-white, snow-crystal look to it. I’ve been reading Tolstoy’s The Cossacks, off in the ice-capped mountain lands near Grozny. It’s the Russian runaway’s Wild West, full of noble savages galloping into the forest and dancing peasant girls nibbling at pumpkin seeds. I can’t quite tell if Leo loves it or hates it as some silly myth-making, think I prefer Lermontov’s straight ripping yarn style, or getting lost in the blizzards of Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter. I’ve been reading to escape the carnage and calamity of current affairs – and the Caledonian crusher. And as you read, you learn new tips and truths. Next time I’m lost on the steppe, I’ll know how to find my way to the village. Daddy Eroshka shared his secrets with me over a cup of wine in a Cossack hut. You find a hillock to climb, cup your hands and howl like a wolf. Howl for all you’re worth. And the village dogs will start barking, way off in the distance, a call to guide you home.

I wondered about emergence, thinking it was a sense or thing greater than the lumping together of its component parts. But this week I read a gestalt writer and spotted the misquote, for he said the whole is other than its combined parts. Systems combine to produce new, unexpected different things. There’s a freshness to that rather than common profligacy, it tallies with the gestalt idea of living in the stripped-down moment, trying to understand the forces and ties that are working on you. It tallies with the journey being so much better than the arrival and settling. But I reckon Buddhism said it all a long time ago and the Berliners borrowed like Picasso. Thank the gods for the library, and the ideas, and all the journeys yet to be made.

This was the view from Tito’s cave, out on his Adriatic island HQ. Where did he see himself going from here, with the warmongers and bargainers whispering in his ear? Seventy years on it barely seems real, like a fairytale. I drank the same wines, saw the same sun. The way we fix ourselves in the maps and changes of history are all balance and imagination, spiderweb dreams.

sees me flailing, running to London for an end-game meeting, haunted by all the words I haven’t written. Same as last year. All that’s changed is they’ve blown up the cooling towers. I can see more of the Berkshire field sweep, the deer in the early light unfazed by train thunder, the brash and street-dirty fox lifting his muzzle from the evergreen embankment brush. Motion is life. Daydreams are the antidote to distraction.

at the museum, watching the clouds roll in low and the rain hazard the traffic. Driving into the centre, I was thinking of Welles and his last noir, The Trial, guys in trench coats and pork pie hats waiting in doorstep shadows, midnight train rides and From Russia with Love. We couldn’t find our apartment so made a call and our host told me to wait on a street corner until she arrived. How will she know me, I wondered? Should I text and say I’m the man with the green bag, or just smile at the way you get everything you imagine you want in this life, this Zagreb mystery rendezvous, but always with unseen shifts in the staging.

we’ll get lost on the dead end cobbles until we find an early-hours bar. Talk old times over a Tomislav and some island wine.

should be moated and drawbridged, where possible. Or is this idea of separateness from the world in lonely struggle an old-fashioned one? Perhaps the great books and characters to come will grow out of shared office spaces, start-up meeting rooms and self-described “fiction packagers”? But I have my doubts.

thought the barman. But it’s good either way. More people, that’s what it’ll bring with it. And we need them. No jobs and too many small roads up here.

I didn’t tire of the emptiness.

warn you away, or draw you out further, down yet lonelier roads?

an afternoon’s sloth. I’m not much for casting, when the salmon are fasting.