and do my repairs, not free to wander far in the new lockdown. It feels stricter this time, gone is the old bonhomie. We’re not out hand-clapping the carers this time. And like some torn-trousered castaway etching away his weeks in lines on the cave wall I marvel at how resources can keep shrinking and we still get by. The house has stood us well but shows the strain. Kettles blow, panels crack, sofas fray. The front door lock snapped on me one morning as I stepped out for the daily food run. I opened the sarcophagus casing, prodded at the cam wheel that turns the deadbolt and a piece of the returning spring dropped out. There aren’t many brown-coated hardware hold-outs left these days and even fewer in the plague. But I called a shop I knew. We don’t keep springs for nightlatches, he said, they never break. How long’s it been on the door? I turned the casing over in my paw. Could be thirty years, I told him. Could be back to the eighties. That’s a lot of turns. But he knew a guy on the Cowley Road, he fixed me up with a new spring. I’m still limping a bit from the summer bike crash. As I paced back from the shop to the car I felt it twinge, thought of the crude reveal of the lock with its case plate pulled away. All those turns. I decided to shed some kilos to help the healing along. Locks and knees, all mechanisms need tending.

cutting the bridges, turning the plain under the carriageway embankment silver and flat. The disease lingers and probes like the fingers of the flood as we wait to be jabbed. I read Cancer Ward and dream of mountains and the black-wooded taiga, feeling time has stretched and thinned, my minutes and days dragged out to months under plague confinement. The gulags seem a thousand years ago but the shacks and roadways still scar the snow. My last drive out to the country feels a decade back. I must constantly remind myself of time’s calendar.

the not-knowing, makes me think of all the false surfaces, Ahab’s paper masks to punch through. You can only know what’s true when you see it, breathe it for yourself. Stumbling in the fog. And I worry I’m already a ghost, listening to music from the 70s, music I grew up with, reading ancient books and staring at ancient paintings, feet stuck in the quick-fix concrete of the past. The five-mile deep immensity of the ocean past. Staggering through the present.

for gazing. Better than the eau-de-vie gleam of gold. When the Earth tilts back to sun I’ll return to this boatyard and punt my way upriver, along the bursting green banks to the pool close to where I live.

today, it was waiting for me when I roused back to life. It followed me around on my masked messages. My usual vistas all swathed in murk. The market town with the uni grafted on but hidden behind walls. The shabby shop-fronted high streets and clipped grass parks, the ring road tarmac and low hills beyond Port Meadow. So thick this morning it was pressing up to the window glass.

and the woods open their reaches. There are still bright days, days to wander and snap, days before the gloom presses in.

for November, waking me in the small hours in the dormer box we grafted atop our semi. Whistles, snaps and thuds wobble the steel frames of the windows and a neighbour’s watering can tumbles and tolls about the lawn. The winter crush is coming, venting out the last warm air for the sting of the morning cold when I pad down to feed the cat and make first coffee. The country is locking down again and the goose ain’t getting fat. Will be a pang to see the new bookstore close its doors, I’m no devotee of the company but they deserved a better shot at making it work. And the library too, though the visits are grim enough already, thinned shelves and a plastic crate for returns, a three day quarantine before they scan them in. How many months will it last, hard to trust the dates we’re given. But here’s change, working around us. Some find opportunity in the closings, firewood from a felled tree, while others look on in wonder.

on my blockwalk tree, down at the Cherwell landing. Two men drag a canoe from the flood. The cars whine from the ring road bridge as I pad along the muddy track, in and out of the embankment copse. There’s no glamour here, no glitz, only a few twitchy squirrels and the low, black-smoke clouds rushing in from Kidlington way. And the light on the Cherwell tree.

quicker than I pile my words. With the fiction I’m so slow it hurts to check the daily count, but you have to give the hours to daydreaming to conjure up a life imagined. And there’s a wee drop of the sublime when the sentences fall right. I assemble my chunk, a meteor of killer lines, soon to watch it fizzle, flare and cook as it hits the in-tray atmosphere. I craft my strategy, still trying to shunt forward from observe to orient in my OODA loop.

we only get glimpses of the set and most are blurred or distorted. It’s the same with stories and film, only seen frame by frame. We fill in the gaps to reach our truths. I’ve been in this town more than ten years and there are so many roads I’ve never been down, but I think I know the town. I head out on the cruiser, adding notes to my mental streetscape map. Soon it will be too cold for idle bike rides, faces go a-grimace, fingers pinch on the grips and instead of enlarging my town map I’ll wonder only of hearth and home.