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into the built environment and might see nothing I want to photograph. Bar faces. But a pathway through the crops of a Ridgeway field draws my eye. What comes stomping towards us out the infinite?

So many mistakes…

But what’s around that turn? It might be a beach, was here, or it could be an ice cream, the best in Devon?, or even some fried gurnard and a jug of Otter. Guilty, guilty of everything. Addled and jaded and beat as I am it might always be worth running up that lane. Even with a stick or a mobility wagon.

All those treasures just around corners. And Riverman looking on, the curl of a smile.

(First two lines, with apologies to Esenin)

they lay them out themselves. Maybe it’s the same with words. I don’t believe many of the books I love grew out of a deadline, they were written for other desperate – if holy – reasons. I’ve started writing something new. And the words will fall into place and strike something true for people or they won’t, but I’ll keep tapping it. This was the light climbing out of Boggle Hole.

when I write I know that the best I can do is acting, guessing what words might be right, mask-wearing in myself and pretending to feel, pretending the words are true. Are all books deceptions, all writers cheats? I’d like to write words with no filter, no gap to jump between the spark in my head and the way it reads on the page. Words that are better than games and acting. Words that are as real and honest as the light.

and I missed old doors and worn, stone steps and all the dust and debris of the centuries passing. Like I missed pubs and London curry. A pang. These days flow like a river and I grew up in the shadow of their traces. I’m no fresh-minted coin, bear all the scrapes, dings and polishings of the cheap-seat pockets. Footsteps in footsteps in the ruts of the village path. Doors still swinging open from the last to cross the threshold, as I go to follow.

have nightmares, says Guy Sajer in his The Forgotten Soldier. Sleep is a refuge for the wretched and the miserable, somewhere to hide. Nightmares are a luxury? I guess they are if you’re always awake in one, pressing your face into the dirt at the bottom of a trench outside Kharkov. I’ve been digging trenches this week, trying to keep the water out of my house in the sticks. But nothing to compare with Sajer’s excavations. I don’t have Old Popov shooting at me, for one thing. And the house is just about dry and I only moved a few shovelfuls of sodden, chalky gunk before strolling off to chat with the neighbours. Even a few minutes of digging was enough to remind me of Celine and his bitching about having to show enthusiasm in his army days, staying chipper. I’ve never been much good at chipper. But, driving over the ridge from the village I saw the sky clear over the two trees that flank the high, lonely road and above that the blue haze that thins out to the stars and I glanced into the rear-view and caught myself smiling like a loon.

it’s a bane you’re born with. Out on the deck late at night and two gazers see the cabin light flicker of a faraway ship. One thinks, ‘there’s an uncovered window’ and turns to shipbound thoughts while the other begins to dream and stumble through all the chances and headings on the ocean, about the person that lit the lamp and where they’re due and the past and future tangle of who they might be. Are they like me, asks the watcher, drifting with the same jumbled fears and hopes or set on some great purpose? Do they carry the same longings, the same idleness, and what do they see when they look out at lights from distant ships? And how can I be sure of the truth of any of it, when the ship I’ve seen is still and static on the horizon as a wood block on a blue tabletop but I know it must be bucking and rolling on the waves like my own? That’s a trick of the eyes I know about, where are the tricks out of my reckoning? So, dreams of the other figure hunched over the cabin lamp are just as solid and real as the things you see with your own eyes. That’s how they come to be written down and still ring true.

Every light in a passing ship is a story. And the glimpse of a city bedroom from a train on the elevated track, that face flashing by in the back of a cab, the tunnel of green I step into on my weekend strolls.

God knows I’ve missed those cobbles and arches. Hello old friend, they’ve spruced you up. But Raleigh’s ghost still tiptoes past a few wedged beer bottles and fag ends.

and I ride the muddy canalways, gaping at the atom weave washed clean by the rains.

I thought, here’s somewhere to run to. I don’t long for London’s cobbles, arches and corner pubs the way I once did, to be a wanderer in the mechanism. I’m crowd-shy and I don’t walk tall as I used to. In Devon, I liked the beer and the sea and the overwatching moor all silent and untenanted. We stayed in a stone-block farmhouse and you could hill-stumble down to the estuary, no sight of another, no sound but the lap and the leaf. And for a day or two I dreamed of running. But it’s the running he craves, you’re thinking, it’s the break and motion. Always another place that must be different, the endless swerving of here and now. But that’s why people fly away, change jobs, partners, brand of toothpaste, why they read and why they write, to keep running. I’m with the Greeks on this one, it’s all in motion from the first howl to the final, rasping suck when you’re out of puff and you’ve seen enough estuaries and rectories and ale and you’re ready to stop running. And I don’t get out enough these days.