on the second floor, a single room just up in the troposphere. The wind starts prowling when you’re forty feet high, reclining at chimney pot altitude. It curls in around the roofline and finds whistle-runs, moaning and humming, a constant choir. The sound of motorbikes racing the ring road is my Gorky wolf cry. Night trains judder the Meadow-side track and the Brize Norton transport’s cloud-wanderings over the town add extra howls. But these restless purrings are a fine backdrop to my page-turning, strange and muted enough to go unnoticed if the text is worth its ink. I slip back into my green pool of light, free for a few hours of this city of walls, traders, grant grapsers and knowledge chasers, all its lost causes.
