henrybrook.com

I have a hideaway sanctum. I pass through a low door from my lonely study and down some creaking steps, through a corridor, another twisting staircase and another splintered door, to emerge in shafts of light, a secret, lofty room with a balcony outlook at the far end of the planks, a high view of the city. And in the room, a glass of Irouleguy waiting in the train diner glass and a copy of Robert Graves’ war poems and maybe a sofa, for lounging and recuperation and reflection. And maybe other discoveries attend in this room, the answers to arcane queries and yelps? Could I write a coded language with all the pushed-down things I yearn to ask, and would the people I want to, understand it, would they see through the tangle and would it touch their hearts, would they care? When you tap words, how can you know the readers and hopes you’ll brush up against, if only a lonely few, all dreaming of their own hidden rooms.

I’d meet a friend, Ranger in Camden. We’d drink in the Bucks Head, the Elephant or the Caernarvon Castle and watch Shakey Vic’s blues band play through to midnight. I was fresh in the city, kept my wordlies of two or three hundred in notes stuffed down the front of my jeans. When it was my turn at the rounds I had to slink to a corner and fumble for the cash. Ranger worked in bank systems and the suit he wore passed through stages of advancing grubbiness and ruin as the evening wore on. We were both tottering and shouting in the blues hall fug, before the traipse back on the Hell Worm to Tooting or Stockwell or whichever quadrant of the town owned our £50 a week rooms. I had shows to play at the weekends, but the weekdays were my own. Free to wander the endless corners and intrigues of the capital.

the track to desired outcomes and futures, does that make them more likely to come your way? I might see myself in different habitats and settings dozens of times through every day, but the abiding, dominant feeling in my own writing life is that not much changes. I don’t lounge in Malibu ocean-front villas with each day dawning as a fresh nibble at everything planet Earth has to offer. I buy a loaf. I pay a cheque in (now and again). I chat with the bookshop owner about how many of his own title he’s sold this week, never more than five or six, but at least he’s selling. I try to work and breathe life into things, most stumble and fall. I understand the allure of grass-is-greener gazing – other places, other faces – but I don’t want to swap the keel and beam of my present life. If I could smash things and start again, I wouldn’t. Here I am trapped in the puzzle, more than content to examine its intricacies, close turnings and mirrored walls.

and rolling by crumbling brick terraces, a glance to the ageing Oxford loons in their once-modest million-pound homes. A couple dead-heading the roses. Holes in the floor and carefully placed rugs, time-travel kitchens and peach bathroom suites, copies of the TLS from the fifties, when there was still something worth reading making it to print. I carry my falafel nugget lunch and a card from Blackwell’s Art Shop, trying to shake the memory of faces, the girl in the deli with the sad eyes and a Queen Wealthow braid, the white-faced youth in his sackcloth cassock – where was he going, what high-walled holy quod does he call home? Another hour lost and no progress made, not even a paragraph pushed out. Beat it home and resist the wood panels and golden foam of the Gardeners. Nod hello to the Monkey Puzzle tree on Warnborough and pick up speed, three hours to write, three hours my own.

at the tower and spied the bible-black streak of the canal boat, wrapped in a copper-green winter shroud. Oxford’s oddballs don’t shout and boast, they hide away on Folly Island and the green tunnels of the river twists with their imported gondolas. I might have to buy a stand-up paddleboard and perfect the art of reading MacNeice, nonchalant, between elegant strokes. Oxford river cranks, I salute you.

I understand why some might posit a universal design. Why daffodils? Why sand patterns after the tide? Why dragonflies as blue as the June canopy, skimming the grass between my steps? But I’ve seen beauty staring back at me from broken-down bus windows and supermarket queues, scattered in slums and salons and fetid street corners, beauty beyond any guessing or rule. It’s an accident of alignments, angles and tones – and most striking when it appears with no warning or link to its surroundings. Beauty doesn’t feel part of any cosmos blueprint, it’s a supernal trespasser at the commoners’ ball.

with black cats, a city hush and the day’s detritus of thoughts and sights, soon to loom up as ghost ships in my dreams.

on the north coast of the island, pebble beaches where the German concrete ruins rise up from pink boulders and cliffs. And there is a glade, steep and shaded, with a memorial to a British Special Forces raid, lives wagered when the order was out to kill all commandos. I found a bullet still in its cartridge there, lobbed it far into the ferns. It can feel lonely in the North Coast ravines, away from the choked houses and clipped lawns of the main port town, and that must be a precious thing. There’s no yesterday, only the silent gathering of the past.

so much, but gives back little for the hours it steals. It’s too hard to ignore the commerce and schlock, the maneuvers and machinations of the merchants that fund it all. Cars and homes and holidays aren’t worth a lifetime’s questing, if even a moment. Browsing is time in coma, a dereliction of duty to self, picking crumbs from other men’s tables. None of it, not one page or post or line can match a few seconds walking around the island garden or daydream-wandering by a train window. Those journeys lead to insights and discoveries from your own thoughts, alone and untainted. Sweet physical world. And sweeter vistas of the unshackled mind.

from lonely forts and towers. A redcoat with an 18 pounder. A boy in feldgrau with an MG-42. And now me and the kids, climbing the stones and staring out at the chop, waving to the tourists on the Saint-Malo ferry.