you’ll even be allowed to land on the peninsula. We drove up for two hours by the three lochs, no promise they’d let us in. So it goes with all plans and projections, the dice can roll against you any time you stroll out. But no venture, no true reward.
to Cape Wrath. After the ferry crossing from Durness it’s still an eleven mile clattering ride on a broken track through the firing grounds, with the heather on all sides sown with mortar shells and ghost soldier boy curses. White slabs hidden in the peat banks count down the distance, and you see the light tower after a last, grinding contour crawl. I watched the clouds curl over the hills and thought how mariners must have caught their breath when they first spotted these black and dripping cliffs. Cape confluence of wild oceans makes all comers tremble.
to step the rivers and watch a wild salmon flash by. And I’ll ask the ghillies – discreetly – how they might be minded to quit or keep to the union. For all the rumoured public disconnect with politics, it’s hard to recall a time when there was more at stake behind the ballot curtain.
up to Olympia, walk across to Dean’s flat in Brook Green. He was a saxophonist friend of a friend. We’d meet to play chess, we didn’t talk much. We’d sit in the courtyard off his kitchen and drink Lavazza from little white cups his wife would bring out to us and listen to Sonny Rollins. And get lost in the games. There’s not much better than that. Good things like chess endure. I’d thought those afternoons were gone and forgotten but I remembered Dean this afternoon, sitting here rooftop-gazing, I remember the games. And I can still see a move, with my pawn sitting on the seventh row. It’s taken me twenty-five years to work out what I wanted to say to Dean about that move. I wanted to say: “now Dean, take a look at this pawn, only one leap away from shape-shifting, queenly greatness. This lowly foot soldier has crossed the board and won the right to become anything it wants in the chess world, and all by virtue of its own grit and gumption. It had no bishop graces to start with, no rookish solidity, no knightly flair. But it’s endured and now stands poised to snatch the game. This is you, Dean, if you can only keep blowing your horn, finally owning the game. We’re all players on the same board and the greatest, coolest, most universe-popping piece of them all is this humble, transcendent pawn.”
And Dean would have looked up from the ebony and ash squares and stared me in the eye and growled, so shut up and play.
to a lost cove. A pint of Trelawny and some grilled sardines, then down to the beach. And gazing out to the sealine with my feet in the silky brine, I watched a dinghy come to shore. One of my oldest friends swung out from the landing melee and tiptoed across the pebbles, stopped and stared back, spooked as I by the chance encounter. Sweet and unexpected is this life.
with punts until last summer, couldn’t get around the mockery impulse. But a year back I had to race to an upriver rendezvous at the Victoria Arms and while zigzagging the bends, ducking under willows and kicking away at the bank snags, I finally got it. It wasn’t Wordsworth out on the lake but in the unthinking dash I had my flash of punting serenity, the infinite drip of the green-mirrored water slab made sense to me. Now, when it gets over 25C, I just want to be out on the water. Or mooring up at the beer garden. Flat water has a rightness about it.
before I kick out: take a long voyage in a dazzle ship, to the white wastes of the ice bears.
dangling static over the new space at IWM London. I caught sight of it from every floor, wandering still-dazed between the galleries. The new trench, projection wall and the First World War exhibit are impressive and touch the heart but it was Steve McQueen’s Queen and Country in an end room and the top floor Ashcroft VC gallery that held me longest. You bear witness to incredible things in those quiet places.
with me on one of my occasional benders, troughing economics. I stare at the numbers, rants and reports, thinking the codes must be hidden there, the arcane science of commerce, money movement and the phantom motivations of our leaders. I come away scowling and saddened as though from some mountebank magic trick, wishing the central banks would just stop printing our money to prop up GDP stats, recklessly inflating stocks, debt and housing to keep this bogus, smoke and mirrors recovery rumbling along. Roll on the inevitable bust. Or is the darker truth that the bankers know there’s no going back, that the last 30 years were all built on credit and debt and spending and we’ve come to the end of the leash?
of have/have-not England and turn away from lucre, status and ephemeral digital tat? We waste our hours and energies on these distractions, wavering at the task of making new beacons in art, music, books and ideas. Are we to blame if each yearns for their own walled pleasure garden? Meantime, the old stars, shakers and status figures are exposed as rogues and worse. Those myths of a community and a better, fairer future might be lost for good, or will we find them again, running through the streets?
