here in Oxford town, three days walk from any sea. I get my salt air from books, ocean-roving across the pages. But they’re hit and miss; I thought I was in for the duration with Patrick O’Brian then slipped away in the second title, with his captain shipless and hunting foxes. I need the spray and the coming storm, coast no more. Landlocked in Ox, I dream of getting lost in the great, watery immensity, gone with Pip into the azure world. But in truth, I tremble whenever I bob out onto the extreme irreverence of the flood. Working sailors don’t yearn for these driftings, they cling to the charts and the sat nav. We humans plot ourselves at a footprint point on the globe, map every alleyway and net the world in satellites. And when Turing set out for uni across the Atlantic, he carried his own antique sextant aboard the liner, always certain of his locus under the stars.
