crests Shotover Wood and we’re down into the next village to eat pancakes in a cafe terrace. There are homes and silent glades here I never guessed at, unseen views to the plain and the motorway embankment curling away to the Cut. We step off the track to let a rider pass. Tramp a few miles and you’re in another land, a stranger in your own town. How can I know the world and the people in it when I don’t even know what hides in this wood? When all of us are passing riders or walkers, not even a word exchanged.

but I suffer for it, knee feels strapped and bruised for days afterwards. Goes back to my meadow smash on the bike, the bollard looming out of the night at high speed and the bone-tingling crunch. Been semi-lame ever since. You take loping and shifting about for granted until it’s snatched away and I’ve grown cautious. Not for me the cat dance over the zinc roof, I shuffle and test every surface in my approach shoes. Reckless was better, I miss it. Reckless and you don’t even know it and when you do it’s gone.

get on with it, the days are ticking by. All the talk is fear but there are new building sites across the town and we’re not even in recession yet. I bought a monthly comic today and the guy at the till double-checked the price, “in case it’s gone up.” Prices are frothing but he’s driving an Audi TT. Maybe the crunch is coming but it’s not here yet. It’s fear of how bad it’ll be next year that’s in the news, keeps people watching the tv hosts shouting, keeps us comparing bills. I feel slapped in the face with the economics. I’d rather be talking with a friend about the comic I got, or Lermontov and how he puts the character right before you in a sentence or two, or that silhouette of a black hole. But the business of living has the gravitational edge, it’s hard to snap free. Meanwhile the concrete is drying out on the tower and the workers will be in soon to fit out. I’ll walk down there in a few months and they’ll have finished. Time to get tapping at my own chapters, fashion my own spire.

in the fence bed, they weren’t there yesterday. Cat will likely deadhead them in a day or two, he likes to snip and eat grass and flowers. Tulips were out at Bowood House the day before, bold and white in every stone urn. I stared at them from the library, thinking it wouldn’t be bad to look up from the page and admire Capability’s handiwork. Then you could shuffle over the cobbles for a ride out along the lake or visit Byron hiding on the staircase in his Albanian bandit rig. The portrait is at the British Embassy in Athens, I’ll be out there in a few months, would the Ambassador grant a viewing? But I prefer the Oxford garden tulips. I’ll admire them until the cat comes stalking.

I gripe about the cost of a coffee from a market square van in the Cotswolds and think of the Italians taking to the streets as a stand-up espress jumps from €1 to €1.50. The little cup on the zinc, a glance around at the pass-throughs and the staff. I’ve known those places many years, the magic of a single coin laid down on the countertop and a golden minute in the company of strangers. I’ll know them again but some prices set your standard – pitons and mooring lines – and it’ll never be one honey coin and a gruff nod again, I’ll remember the change.

as it shugs around the world. I don’t move quickly or finish things and I’m too hampered by other obligations to get out on it. And it’s been a cold six months for the wave spray lash, even had snow cut the air of the street today, it’s too easy to hold off. These petty excuses sting, if I had the means or the true urge I would have gone out anyway or flown to warmer seas. I’m waiting too, not sure why but I hesitate on the bank. Something keeps me landlubbing, the way my path is drafted. But time carries change on its uncaring tick and the water waits for me.

I think I was conscious of a piece of fence panel exploding at the side of the road before I understood there was something moving behind it. My passenger saw the falling tree before me and screamed, maybe that’s why I looked? It was only part of a second. Time though for memories of catching a tipping roof prop in a lakeside house thirty years back, I saw it tremble and begin to move, didn’t hesitate and was up and holding it firm in place while the host sat there wide-eyed and spilling his martini. I caught that one in a fingerclick, wouldn’t catch this, had to get rough with the little blue car’s pedals and slide to a stop with the branches scraping the roof and a hiss and crackle of twigs and bark. It was close. I turned us around with the tree still shuddering from the tarmac slap, didn’t want to get stuck there. There was another couple, coming the other way, they hit the gas to drive under it and it must have been even hairier for them. We saw them a few minutes later, compared notes, thanked the angels. And all around us the wind throbbing and filling the sky, the storm in charge of things. Was dumb to even venture out. A moment later we’d have been under it. If I hadn’t stopped to help a neighbour lift her bin rolling down the street in the gale we’d have been under it. You can go any second. And every choice, distraction, daydream plays its part in the mysterious alignment.

the less I know. But knowing is a bolted horse, you keep chasing after it until you can’t draw another breath. Only fools think they’re smart, who do they measure up against when the night stretches out beyond all reckoning? I look at the shows coming up here and I still want to go, still curious. But I’ve known these places and spaces too long, could do with a change of the scenery. I’ve hung around until I’m a ghost in my own bad novella. Time set in amber. But I’m just catching my breath, watching for the cracks.

I drag the ink. It’s all drawing now, the digital click has set that straight. It takes an hour or two for me to draw a letter, complete with messy sketches and figures I’ve known since school days torpor. When stamps were cheap each week I’d send a few postcards with etched lines and outbursts but missives feel more of an investment now, I’m careful not to mess them up and swerve the costly scrunch. The content is largely unchanged. I scuttlebutt, riff and rant much the same as I did when I was fifteen years in but I’m not as sharp now and the connections take longer to pan from the memories. As long as I can find the grains and a voice I’ll keep scribbling the notes to my bewildered and scattered compadres.

these days but not because of the plague, it started long before that. I always got edgy in a press, remember being in my early teens terrified at a Leeds game standing on the terraces, hearing the endless roar building and swelling around me, so loud you could feel it on your skin and pushing in on you, a pressure change. I had a strange memory flash of that experience last week when I stepped out into the winter-blasted garden and a squall of little birds flew over the house, hundreds of them but silent, and I swear I could feel the downdraft from their wings on my upgazer face. There was no terror in that, more a flicker of the sublime. I didn’t often go to clubs unless I was playing and you don’t feel in the crowd if you’re behind a monitor, watching the hi-hats. I always preferred a pub or bar, a group around a table, the pathways of a conversation. So I caved on cinema a while back. The huge screens and rich colours of the London arthouse glory days are gone anyway, the digital palette looks washed out to me. I’m a bluray recluse, just me and the dozing cat and a whistle from the wind.