through plastic channels, capacitor pots and burned metal contacts. Down the copper wire to the shuttered exchange, its 30s bricks all splattered with graffiti. From there we flash through space, tunnel into the Kentucky servers blasting through their yes/no, on/off tireless assemblage of dots and digits all to be bounced back to our little screens before we can blink. Today I’d rather be reading Singer. I choose ink and aged paper, relics from the pre-internet age. If I don’t keel over with the stalking plague I’ll be en train to the coast in a day or two. I’ll tie knots, work lines and engines and remember how cold the Blighty spray can be. But until then I’m chained to this device and the LED glow. I tinker with its entrails and secret pathways, unscrewing its mysterious linkages from the landing wall.

and staring out ‘gives me vertigo’ as per a friend. But is the lure of turning in and being content in your own few square miles the same isolationist drift of nations? I stay in my postcode, loafing around the independents, snatching a few hours in the afternoons to earn enough for the business of living. But I dream and plan of escapades. Maybe the turning in will drive us out again, down unimagined and uncharted paths.

green for the jungle blur, the overcast sea close to shore, the hills I used to go driving in ten miles free from the city, the lime wedge on the razor rim of my shot glass, green as symbol of renewal. I can’t fume in my green room. I kick back and listen to old Hillage albums and remember the 80s. And I plot my fantastic escapes to see what it’s like skimming on the Solent, only the green line and the open sky ahead of me, will I make it happen, will I kick myself to make a call?

and scuff but only humans feel the strange need to evolve and improve. I found myself plodding around the supermarket, shame-faced because I was there again, how many hundreds of times in this same store still picking up the veg and the crisps and the discounted kitchen towel, I haven’t evolved. But I know that’s bogus, would I really be happier and feel more noble paying a PA or staff to fetch my groceries, I guess it’s likely I’ll never find out. I used to think it would be good to find out. To move up a level. And I’d be putting in the essential hours at the novel or making grand discoveries instead of shopping and fixing skirting boards and rolling over the roads. But there’s time to write, even attending to the business of living as a non-evolved scribe. I can’t say I don’t get the time. Books worth reading come out of the secret hours, out of the planning, musings and mootings, the journey there and back and the idle driftings along the aisles of other imagined lives and pathways. And if it needs saying you can always find the time to put it into words. Getting rich would probably be just another distraction. But I don’t have to worry about that one.

he knows the heat’s coming. He’s been out chasing butterflies while I flail and fail over the lines. The words have been sticking lately, I waste hours daydreaming about boats and skimming the blue. I watch the old action flicks, Cold Sweat and The Last Ride, washed-up crims running yacht tours and caning it around the corniches. I wonder if I’d love it or hate it, fishing in the bays between the gaps of boat chores, repayments and routines. I think it’s because I’ve been landlocked so long, my sea fever, and the world feeling more bound up in rules and restrictions than I can ever remember, with the dread of another winter lockdown nagging at me. I could take the skimmer out to St Kilda, camp out for a few nights. Across to the pink granite isle. Or are we always worrying about one last job, the big payback, the easy money that never comes. The cat’s got the smarts, he knows not to waste his time future-gazing when he could curl up and snooze.

others handle fixers. I found it snapped last night, doing my rounds on my way to bed and coma. Maybe the cat was getting anxious and discovered a way to lever the catch. He’s a trickster. He wants to get out with the midnight prowlers and rough guys, the ones that screech and yowl in alleyway standoffs and azalea ambuscades. But he’s not beefy or scuffed-up with experience and I try to keep him in when Night comes walking by. Maybe he looped a paw around the catch and snapped it free, intent on busting out. But he’s got his alibi sorted when I pop down for a screwdriver and find him heavy-kipping on the sofa. Things just break. Things suffer unseen pressures. What looks solid can be just about to shear.

as I ponder my options, conscious that I’m not pulling the levers on global events, can’t march into the wood-panelled meeting rooms and demand action. I’m not rubbing shoulders with the suited leaders but I am in control of how I think and view things, I’ll take that as enough to be getting on with. If I can be fair and try not to moan about things that’s a start. I reward myself for my sageness with a bowl of ice cream. For a few sweet moments I fend off the heat and the hayfever scratch – it’s come on hard this week – before any more fretting about planetary driftings.

tarmac rolling and I’m out in the valleys, folded in the green fuzz bloom of a sodden May. I climb the chalk track to the nature reserve and gulp the air, taste the ticking heat that heralds summer. I’m open to everything except malice. Let the good work roll in.

is taking your shape, phase two having a good time, phase three starting a family. Phase four is where I am now, trying to hang on and rally, tattered but still standing, fretting still about the Library of the Dead and the next thing, always the next thing. Everyone mixes their phases around, skips some, has their own rare ones, wastes, profits and might even wise up from one. Phase five takes you to 75. And this is all assuming you’re lucky and the cosmic rays and terrifying acts of chance don’t knock you down at any step along the way. 75 to 90 is tricky, though thanks to the miracles of medical science it’s getting better, all the time, though it might not feel like it when you’re there doing the review. Six phases. Best case. And I’m tumbling through the fourth.

my teachers said ceramic engine blocks would transform auto design and make switching devices like tap valves last for decades. They said I’d have to adjust to the Age of Leisure before I hit thirty. They said lots of things. But foregone conclusions reef on unanticipated elements. My bib tap started juddering and spurting last week, the ceramic valve was failing. The maker sent me a new one and I fitted it. In the Leisure Age some robot would have done it for me but the robots are a long way off and I have a spanner and screwdriver. I autopsied the old valve and it looked to me that the base ring had come loose – metal fatigue? 7000 openings at a guess. My car’s just cleared 150.000 miles. How long do things last? Banks said he was unlucky, got hit by a rogue cosmic ray that started the cell mutation that killed him with inoperable cancer. It’s Lucretius and the falling atoms, there might be a ray zipping across the black gap of space right now that’s on course to pass through me and flip the cells into anarchy. Sentience is just along for the ride.