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at a letterbox strip of life, trying to make sense of the universe. There’s so much data on display, the vast library of a world with its words in motion. This house I visit on the granite island has a garden walled by trees and they make their own sway and whisper as the sea breezes rush through; I’ve heard that same air swell over twenty summers and heard it nowhere else. This heartbeat maze is well-supplied of variety and I’m mindful of the particles, the Lucretian molecules streaming down beyond counting, the call of the wind in one island corner where I’ve tilted my head to gaze at the trembling leaves. And all those other islands to explore. Fingers reaching out beyond the wire, stretching to feel a different air.

you moon-slave basin of blue. Wash away the cares, scour away the worries. I’ve missed your salt sting kisses.

the recovery’s ersatz, the political class is floundering and NASA says the icecaps are melting. We’ve got 200 years, max. But on my walk back from town in the constant rain, the gates stood open to hope. We’ll have clean fusion and new propulsion drives for the rockets in a decade or two and nascent planet homes to wander, pebbles on a black shore. I’ll see twin suns and phosphorescent birds and all the fantastic sights I dreamed of as a kid reading Asimov, Heinlein, Bradbury and the others, huddled in front of the electric bar fire. And if I don’t make it, the nippers will, before the polar bear cubs are heard mewling on the high street. Books are all escapes. No wonder my visions of hope follow the same wooden horse tunnels, barbed wire squeeze-throughs and stop-or-I-fire bolts for the treeline.

but you have to host the scars. Out wandering on the vale of doom that’s my forties, I’ve learned that I no longer mend as I did as a kid. When I pick up some malady or clunk nowadays I don’t clear it completely, it’s as though the body knows it will have to carry some remnant ache or knobble from future blows and molecular assaults, can’t shrug them off as before. The bar’s dropped and I begin to understand how I might never clamber free from the elephant pit of a serious illness or smash, not get back all that was lost. And that makes me wish I’d burned brighter in footloose years, knowing the invincibility of youth was sand falling in a turned glass and the get out of jail card of shiny rejuvenation would be snatched away. That sand falls for every one of us. And the numbers are hidden, spinning, ungraspable until the moment they always foretold arrives.

to the falling Oxford rain. And on waking I see it paint the junction outside my house shiny black and turn the Victorian bricks garish pink and the shrubbery a green so vernal it stammers the eye. And I remember youth and my coffee-shop whispers of Baudelaire and his rain-streak prison bars, Heinrich Boll and the Irish skies leaking onto his journal. I see again that rain in Durban that coated everything in view, all instantly drenched and dripping and even the lines I tried to write. And London days at the desk, watching the plane trees shower the tilting pavements through the long afternoons. All those journeys and dashes when there was a chance to meet, running stooped beneath the cloudburst, crashing through cafe doors into light and noise and then talking, spouting for hours. Sharing worthless secrets and book visions, seeding all with my camouflaged hopes and clues. In sanctuary, two faces over the cups. Is it still like that now? The kids run in, order their drinks and lock eyes to their devices. But they must watch for signs from friends and others, the codes, the suggestion of what stays hidden in those moments alone when they’ve listened to the rain? Those times of drizzle murmur and mystery. Oxford rain is all rain, I feel today, at my dawn window.

Opening line, with apologies to MacNeice.

images rope them down. In prose, you can choose how much description you’ll add to a scene, face or thought but in film you have to tear the curtain back and show it all. You can try hiding or blurring light and detail but it soon feels like style and trickery. So images have that stark, instant power to entrance and haunt the viewer, whereas words tiptoe in and plant lingering truths.

watched Hitler lay his cap on the map table and lead his Eastern-Front generals to the far corner of the room. I wonder what went through the would-be killer’s mind as he stole over and stretched a hand to touch the Fuhrer’s hat? Perhaps he was thinking of quickly trying it on, the costume of the emperor, to see how it might change him? Or maybe it was mockery and playful subversion, with the time-bomb already concealed and primed in the hallway, ready to be smuggled onto the master’s returning plane. He tugged at the fabric but the cap didn’t move. It took both hands to lift it easily. Hitler’s cap was lined with steel, even the black peak. It was armour-plated.

I don’t worry about sniper bullets. Or time-bombs and treacherous underlings. I have no underlings. There’s no killer hiding in the trees, no ticking device to blow me to atoms. I do worry about cows sometimes. I’ve seen them on the gallop, been chased by a maddened herd in the past. So I look along the path a little. And count my blessings if the road is clear.

of a daylight drinker, have always preferred darkness as the backdrop to the Bacchus kiss. When I lived in old London, I’d pick coffee joints for afternoon assignations in the Soho and Covent Garden crossings of the city compass lines. One of my favourites was the Photographer’s Gallery backroom canteen off Leicester Square. I liked the prints glaring at you as you huddled over the Formica-fake benches, the gloom of the bookshop and the quiet spaces. I’m not so keen on the new gallery, off Oxford Street. There’s too much glass and too many people passing through. I joined the shuffling feet to look at the Burroughs pics there not so long ago, too distracted by all the brains ticking away around me to get into his gripes and scribbles and stark black and whites, all glass-cased and not much larger than a page torn from a book. He never touched my heart, Bill, not like Jack and Neal and Corso and Huncke and all the others, Bill just wasn’t a romantic figure, everything about him was sour and starched. That said, I wish I could have dropped by his villa for cocktails in Mexico City one of those sultry afternoons, when Jack was living in the back room writing Tristessa. All the books. All those snippets of dreams. And Bill’s cut-ups ideas are startling, the more time I spend on words the more chance meetings, splits, echoes, rebounds and bumps I spy in stories and art. All art moments – a music track, a short story, an image – they might all be cut-up escapes and diversions, snippets of dreams where we can hide and reflect for a few seconds, slipping loose from our reality boots. They might remind us of truths these cut-up shards, but I’m not sure they’re truths themselves. I feel this as I write my fantasy scenes and moments in make-believe lives for the story I’m working on, trying to anchor them to a narrative. What’s more true, the cut-up strangeness or the this-happened and so that-happened storytelling? Burroughs might get the last laugh.

there are no truly desperate situations, only desperate people. I’ve been floundering this week, dazed by a blow, a forever loss. But the Ridgeway woods move through their seasons mindless of my keening. That blow touches everyone I care about. Leave not a tender word unsaid.

a boy, Corey Young, to Planet Cassandra? What if he was taking the Xanadu Trail to start a new life with his family, riding in convoy in an ex-combat patrol vehicle they called Blaster? What if Corey was accompanied by a talking, alien bird and a robot head loaded with the personality chip of his old juve-school teacher, Mr. Kowalski, recently deceased? And what if I wove a story out of all that?

Would you buy that for a dollar?